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Missouri ignores US Supreme Court ruling requiring resentencing of prisoners given life without parole as juveniles

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How can a ruling by the highest court in the land be ignored and disregarded?

Moorbey'z Blog

by Cedric ‘G-Boy’ Clerk

I am currently serving life without parole in the Missouri Department of Corrections. I have been incarcerated since the age of 15.

I’m being held under an unconstitutional sentence along with 80-plus others who were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles (JLWOP). In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile to life without parole, according to Miller v. State of Alabama (2012). We must be taken back in front of our respective courts and be resentenced.

I’m being held under an unconstitutional sentence along with 80-plus others who were sentenced to life without parole as juveniles (JLWOP).

In August 2016, Missouri passed Senate Bill 590, which states that those who fall under Miller v. Alabama can “petition” for parole after 25 years of incarceration. Still we are being held with life without parole sentences. How can we possibly make…

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US corporations lobby against anti-Russia sanctions

A wide range of American conglomerates, including oil, energy, banking, aerospace, auto and heavy manufacturing enterprises have jointly started a lobbying campaign against the new round of sanctions against Russia passed by the US Senate, CNN reports.

BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Boeing and Citigroup, MasterCard and Visa are reportedly among the companies raising concerns the punitive measures will ultimately harm their businesses, rather than the Kremlin.

Ford, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, International Paper, Caterpillar, and Cummins have reportedly warned the measure could impact their businesses as well. . .

 

Source: US corporations lobby against anti-Russia sanctions

The End of Globalization

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From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation

by Finbarr Livesey

Profile Books Ltd (2016)

Book Review

In From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation, Finbarr Livesey challenges the common neoliberal claim that globalization is the be-all and end-all of global prosperity.

Livesey’s premise, which he supports with an impressive array of data, is that globalization peaked shortly after 2008 and the world economy is in a period of deglobalization. World trade is slowly declining as a percentage of GDP, and many companies who moved factories to the third world are improving their bottom line by reshoring them to the US and Europe.

Livesey contends that, to a large extent, last year’s vote for Britain to leave the EU and for a US president who promised to withdraw from the TPP and bring back American jobs, merely reflect an economic trend that began nearly a decade ago.

The present deglobalization was triggered by the 2008 financial crash that sucked trillions of dollars out of the global economy. However, Livesey identifies a number of other factors that influence this trend – chief among them the volatility of oil prices and shipping costs (containers must be booked months in advance) and the growing cost of labor in China and neighboring countries. At the same time, technological advances, including 3D printing and “additive manufacturing,” have led to an upsurge in “on demand” industries and consumer frustration with being limited to millions of identical mass produced items.

At present many companies find it more profitable to shorten their supply chain by producing most or all component parts locally or regionally. Between 2010 and 2015, over 1300 companies brought production back to the US. Even Apple and Google have started to reshore significant manufacturing operations.

At present three-fourths of everything bought in the US is made in the US.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

Americans Hate Health Care Industry Even More than Wall Street

Sick of it. (AP Photo/John Locher)



Preeti Varathan
 

Wall Street banks are among America’s least-loved institutions. According to a new national poll by Bloomberg (pdf), far more people have an unfavorable view of banks than a favorable one—the difference is 21 percentage points (31% favorable versus 52% unfavorable). Americans also view the media and White House unfavorably, on balance, but not by nearly as much as banks.

Although this is bad for banks, it’s been worse. In December 2009, when the extent of the financial damage wrought by the subprime mortgage meltdown became clear, the net favorability of banks among Bloomberg’s survey respondents was -48 percentage points (18% favorable versus 66% unfavorable).

As banks have clawed back some respectability, relatively speaking, they have risen up the rankings of institutions that Americans loathe. In Bloomberg’s latest survey, the banks outrank Congress, insurers, and drug manufacturers at the bottom of the favorability rankings.

What do members of Congress, insurance companies, and pharma firms have in common? Look no further than the angst about reforming the country’s health care system for clues. The bitter partisan battle over repealing, replacing, or—as now seems to be the case—letting Obamacare “implode” through neglect reflects the prevailing mood about how health care is delivered in the US. Few are happy about the cost and coverage of health plans, but there is little consensus on how to improve it, not least in Congress.

On top of all that, this week a multi-state lawsuit was filed against six drug manufacturers for alleged price-fixing of antibiotics and oral diabetes medicines. That won’t help improve the image of America’s least-liked industry any time soon.

Source: Survey: Americans Hate Health Care Industry Even More than Wall Street

Russia And China Declare All Out War On US Petrodollar — Prepare For Exclusive Trade In Gold

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The formation of a BRICS gold marketplace, which could bypass the U.S. Petrodollar in bilateral trade, continues to take shape as Russia’s largest bank, state-owned Sberbank, announced this week that its Swiss subsidiary had begun trading in gold on the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Nwo Report

(Activist Post) The formation of a BRICS gold marketplace, which could bypass the U.S. Petrodollar in bilateral trade, continues to take shape as Russia’s largest bank, state-owned Sberbank, announced this week that its Swiss subsidiary had begun trading in gold on the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Russian officials have repeatedly signaled that they plan to conduct transactions with China using gold as a means of marginalizing the power of the dollar in bilateral trade between the geopolitically powerful nations. This latest movement is quite simply the manifestation of a larger geopolitical game afoot between great powers.

According to a report published by Reuters:

Sberbank was granted international membership of the Shanghai exchange in September last year and in July completed a pilot transaction with 200 kg of gold kilobars sold to local financial institutions, the bank said.

Sberbank plans to expand its presence on the Chinese precious metals…

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Japan Plans to Expose Its People and 2020 Tokyo Olympians to Fukushima Radiation

By Dahr Jamail
Global Research, July 20, 2017
Truthout 17 July 2017

 

[image error] Featured image: Contaminated earth storage area within the Iitate Village evacuated zone, December 2014. Photo: Eric Schultz / EELV Fukushima via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA).

Former nuclear industry senior vice president Arnie Gundersen, who managed and coordinated projects at 70 US atomic power plants, is appalled at how the Japanese government is handling the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

“The inhumanity of the Japanese government toward the Fukushima disaster refugees is appalling,” Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 45 years of nuclear power engineering experience and the author of a bestselling book in Japan about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, told Truthout.

He explains that both the Japanese government and the atomic power industry are trying to force almost all of the people who evacuated their homes in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to return “home” before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

This March Japan’s federal government announced the subsidies that have, up until now, been provided to Fukushima evacuees who were mandated to leave their homes are being withdrawn, which will force many of them to return to their contaminated prefecture out of financial necessity.

And it’s not just the Japanese government. The International Olympic Commission is working overtime to normalize the situation as well, even though conditions at Fukushima are anything but normal. The commission even has plans for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to have baseball and softball games played at Fukushima.

Gundersen believes these developments are happening so that the pro-nuclear Japanese government can claim the Fukushima disaster is “over.” However, he note,

“The disaster is not ‘over’ and ‘home’ no longer is habitable.”

His analysis of what is happening is simple.

“Big banks and large electric utilities and energy companies are putting profit before public health,” Gundersen added. “Luckily, my two young grandsons live in the US; if their parents lived instead in Fukushima Prefecture [a prefecture is similar to a state in the US], I would tell them to leave and never go back.”

Reports of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which began when a tsunami generated by Japan’s deadly earthquake in 2011 struck the nuclear plant, have been ongoing.

Seven more people who used to live in Fukushima, Japan were diagnosed with thyroid cancer, the government announced in June. This brings the number of cases of thyroid cancer of those living in the prefecture at the time the disaster began to at least 152.

While the Japanese government continues to deny any correlation between these cases and the Fukushima disaster, thyroid cancer has long since been known to be caused by radioactive iodine released during nuclear accidents like the one at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. A World Health Organization report released after the disaster started listed cancer as a possible result of the meltdown, and a 2015 study in the journal Epidemiology suggested that children exposed to Fukushima radiation were likely to develop thyroid cancer more frequently.

The 2011 disaster left 310 square miles around the plant uninhabitable, and the area’s 160,000 residents were evacuated. This April, officials began welcoming some of them back to their homes, but more than half of the evacuees in a nearby town have already said they would not return to their homes even if evacuation orders were lifted, according to a 2016 government survey.

Officials from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company responsible for cleaning up the disaster, announced this February they were having difficulty locating nuclear fuel debris inside one of the reactors. Radiation inside the plant continues to skyrocket to the point of causing even robots to malfunction.

Cancer cases continue to crop up among children living in towns near Fukushima.

And it’s not as if the danger is decreasing. In fact, it is quite the contrary. Earlier this year, radiation levels at the Fukushima plant were at their highest levels since the disaster began.

TEPCO said atmospheric readings of 530 sieverts an hour had been recorded in one of the reactors. The previous highest reading was 73 sieverts an hour back in 2012. A single dose of just one Sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea. Five sieverts would kill half of those exposed within one month, and a dose of 10 sieverts would be fatal to those exposed within weeks. . .

Source: Japan Plans to Expose Its People and 2020 Tokyo Olympians to Fukushima Radiation

Pentagon Furious After Turkey Leaks US Base Locations In Syria

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In a move that has angered the U.S. for obvious reasons, Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu Agency has leaked the precise locations of U.S. bases in northern Syria.

peoples trust toronto

So much for NATO-alliance members working for the common good.

In a move that has angered the U.S. for obvious reason, Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu Agency has leaked the precise locations of U.S. bases in northern Syria. The move – which exposes the exact locations of American soldiers on the front lines in the war-torn nation – has sent the ongoing feud between the two NATO allies to new lows. As Bloomberg details, in reports published in both Turkish and English on Tuesday, Anadolu provided detailed information about 10 U.S. bases in northern Syria, including troop counts and a map of the U.S. force presence in the Turkish version.

#AA‘n?n ‘PKK/PYD’ye ABD deste?i’ haberi uluslararas? bas?nda yank? uyand?rd? https://t.co/8IJbm9w16Dhttp://pic.twitter.com/svt4u9v5CD

— ANADOLU AJANSI (@anadoluajansi) July 19, 2017

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Without citing specific sources, the state-run news agency unveiled the ten US outposts located in areas controlled by “terrorist”…

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Trump ends CIA arms to Jihadists in Syria

By Adam Garrie | The Duran | July 19, 2017

Today, two reports emerged within minutes of each other which indicate that under Donald Trump, the United States has fully shifted its policies in Syria away from arming and aiding Salafist/jihadist terrorist fighters and is now allying exclusively with Kurdish.

To a less extent, America is also politically allied with Russia in a limited capacity in south western Syria, something which is more significant due to the shift it represents rather than in terms of size or scope.

Here are the key events:

1. US media reports that Trump ends CIA arming of terrorists

The deeply anti-Trump Washington Post has reported the following,

“President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgement of Washington’s limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power”.

The report adds,

“Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin”.

While the Washington Post calls this a win for Russia, in reality this will not directly effect Russia one way or another. It is however, a win for Syria.

By most reasonable accounts, the conflict in Syria could have ended far earlier if not for the CIA and other US actors arming, funding and training Salafist jihadist fighters in Syria (often referred to as moderate rebels by the western mainstream media).

As even the Washington Post admits, almost in a gloating fashion, arming such jihadists was a flagship policy of the United States under Barack Obama.

This will take a substantial deal of pressure off the Syrian Arab Army and their fight against remaining terrorists in Syria.

Ever since Trump took office, the general trajectory of US meddling in Syria shifted from arming jihadists to arming, funding and working in close military coordination with Kurdish forces.

Today’s revelation simply affirms what was long the apparent on the ground policy of the United States since February of 2017.

It is key to remember that even after this announcement, the US presence in Syria is still illegal according to international law. . .

 

Source: Trump ends CIA arms to Salafists in Syria

A Global Project to Regreen Our Deserts

 

Regreening the Planet

VPRO (2013)

Film Review

This documentary is about a global social enterprise called Commonland stared by Chinese American environmentalist John D Liu and Dutch ecologist Willem Ferwerda. The primary purpose of Commonland is to attract business investment for regreening landscapes that have been desertified due to destructive industrial farming practices.

Liu first got his start regreening the Loess Plateau in China, using organic and biodynamic principles that focus on restoring healthy soil microorganisms and smart water use.

The documentary features amazing footage of four regreening projects in China, India, Egypt and Spain. Each emphasizes the economic and job creation potential of regreening. Large scale projects that shift communities from imported to locally produced food are one of the best ways to create jobs for unemployed youth.

More information at the Commonland website>

 

Why $5 Billion Of Student Loans May Be Wiped Out

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About $5 billion of student loan debt owned by the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts – one of the nation’s largest owners of student loans – could be erased by judges due to alleged improper documentation and missing ownership records.

Kopitiam Bot

(Source: www.forbes.com)

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Could at least $5 billion of student loans be erased?

As reported by the New York Times, about $5 billion of student loan debt owned by the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts – one of the nation’s largest owners of student loans – could be erased by judges due to alleged improper documentation and missing ownership records.

What Happened?

The National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts holds 800,000 private student loans through 15 different trusts, which collectively own approximately $12 billion of student loan debt, according to the New York Times.

Of that amount, about 160,000 private student loans are in default. These student loans were originally issued by banks, and then subsequently sold through securitization to investors, including the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. Ownership records may have been lost in the process.

The New York Times reports that given the incomplete ownership records, it…

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