Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1297

Russia Accuses Obama of Supporting Al Qaeda in Syria

Counter Information

By Eric Zuesse


Global Research, May 06, 2016

On May 4th, Russia’s Sputnik news agency headlined:

“Lavrov: US Tried to Include Al-Nusra Front Positions in ’Silent’ Period”, and reported that Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Moscow about the lengthy negotiations between himself and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to agree on conditions for a Syrian ceasefire and peace talks to take place between Syria’s government and Syria’s rebels, said, “During the negotiations, our US partners actually tried to draw the borders of this ‘zone of silence’ to include a significant number of positions occupied by al-Nusra [Front]. We managed to exclude this as it is absolutely unacceptable.”

Al Qaeda in Syria calls itself “Al Nusra.”

The “zone of silence” or “silent period” (and there are other phrases for it) refers to the areas in Syria that would be excluded from the ceasefire.

In other words: Lavrov was saying that whereas Russia’s President Putin refuses to stop military…

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562,000 Workers Drop Out Of The Labor Force As Participation Rate Resumes Drop

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Welcome to the jobless society.

Socio-Economics History Blog

562,000 Workers Drop Out Of The Labor Force As Participation Rate Resumes Drop
by Tyler Durden, http://www.zerohedge.com 
In addition to the poor headline Establishment survey print which rose only 160,000 in April, coupled with a deplorable Household survey employment number which plunged by 316,000 for the month and below levels seen in February, an even more concerning development was the resumption in the deteriorating trend in the US labor force participation rate, which in recent months had been on a steady increase as far fewer workers were dropping out of the workforce (contrary to convention wisdom, this was not driven by new entrants into the labor force).
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All that changed today, when the number of Americans not in the labor force soared by a whopping 562,000 in April, pushing the grand total of people not in the labor force back over 94 million and fast approaching the all…

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Doctors Call for Single Payer Health Care, Cite Need to Move Beyond ACA

The American Journal of Public Health publishes physicians’ call for sweeping single-payer reform with detailed proposal signed by over 2,200 doctors nationwide

Unveiling of proposal coincides with heightened debate on ‘Medicare for All’ in presidential primaries

In a dramatic show of physician support for deeper health reform – and for making a decisive break with the private insurance model of financing medical care – 2,231 physicians called today [Thursday, May 5] for the creation of a publicly financed, single-payer national health program that would cover all Americans for all medically necessary care.

Single-payer health reform, often called “Medicare for All,” has been a hotly debated topic in the presidential primaries, thanks in part to it being a prominent plank in the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders. The new physicians’ proposal is strictly nonpartisan, however.

The proposal, which was drafted by a blue-ribbon panel of 39 leading physicians, is announced today in an editorial titled “Moving Forward from the Affordable Care Act to a Single-Payer System” published in the American Journal of Public Health. The editorial links to the full proposal titled “Beyond the Affordable Care Act: A Physicians’ Proposal for Single-Payer Health Care Reform” and the names of all the signers, and it appeals for additional physicians to add their names as endorsers. The proposal currently has signers from 48 states and the District of Columbia.

“Our nation is at a crossroads,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, a Boston-based pulmonary disease and critical care specialist, lead author of the editorial and co-chair of the Working Group that produced the proposal.

“Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act six years ago, 30 million Americans remain uninsured, an even greater number are underinsured, financial barriers to care like co-pays and deductibles are rising, bureaucracy is growing, provider networks are narrowing, and medical costs are continuing to climb.

“Caring relationships are increasingly taking a back seat to the financial prerogatives of insurance firms, corporate providers, and Big Pharma,” Gaffney said. “Our patients are suffering and our profession is being degraded and disfigured by these mercenary interests.”

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the editorial and proposal who is a professor of public health at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, commented: “We can continue down this harmful path – or even worse, take an alternative, ‘free-market’ route that would compound our problems – or we can embrace the long-overdue remedy that we know will work: the creation of a publicly financed, nonprofit, single-payer system that covers everybody. Today we’re saying we must quickly make that shift. Lives are literally at stake.”

Dr. Marcia Angell, a co-author of the editorial and proposal, co-chair of the working group, member of the faculty of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said: “We can no longer afford to waste the vast resources we do on the administrative costs, executive salaries, and profiteering of the private insurance system. We get too little for our money. It’s time to put those resources into real health care for everyone.”

Under the national health program (NHP) outlined by the physicians:

* Patients could choose to go to any doctor and hospital. Most hospitals and clinics would remain privately owned and operated, receiving a budget from the NHP to cover all operating costs. Physicians could continue to practice on a fee-for-service basis, or receive salaries from group practices, hospitals or clinics.

* The program would be paid for by combining current sources of government health spending into a single fund with modest new taxes that would be fully offset by reductions in premiums and out-of-pocket spending. Co-pays and deductibles would be eliminated.

* The single-payer program would save about $500 billion annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of insurance firms, and the massive paperwork they inflict on hospitals and doctors.

* The administrative savings of the streamlined system would fully offset the costs of covering the uninsured and upgraded coverage for everyone else, e.g. full coverage of prescription drugs, dental care and long-term care. Savings would also be redirected to currently underfunded health priorities, particularly public health.

* The “single payer” would be in a strong position to negotiate lower prices for medications and other medical supplies, yielding additional savings and reining in costs.

Surveys show strong, rising support for single-payer national health insurance among physicians. A 2008 survey of physicians found that 59 percent supported “legislation to establish national health insurance,” up from 49 percent five years earlier.

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“Moving Forward From the Affordable Care Act to a Single-Payer System,” by Adam Gaffney, M.D.; Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H.; David U. Himmelstein, M.D.; Marcia Angell, M.D. American Journal of Public Health, June 2016, Vol. 106, No. 6, online first May 5, 2016, 1 p.m. Eastern. Includes link to full Physicians’ Proposal. Article available at this link.

The full, six-page Physicians’ Proposal with reference citations and 2,231 signatures (titled “Beyond the Affordable Care Act: A Physicians’ Proposal for Single-Payer Health Care Reform,” written by a 39-member Working Group on Single-Payer Program Design) is also accessible at the following link

PNHP’s summary of the Physicians’ Proposal is available here: summary

PNHP’s fact sheet on U.S. health care is here



Physicians for a National Health Program is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and education organization founded in 1987. It includes physicians in every state and medical specialty. For local physician contacts or other information, contact PNHP’s headquarters in Chicago at (312) 782-6006. PNHP had no role in funding the articles described above.

Source

 

Fighting Monsanto in India

Bullshit!

Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Kardalian (2005)

Film Review

Bullshit! is about Indian environmental activist Vendana Shiva. It takes its title from the “Bullshit Award” she received from a pro-Monsanto lobby group in 2004. Despite the intended insult (they sent the cow dung through the mail), Vendana was thrilled. Cow dung is revered in rural India, where it’s used as fuel and mixed with mud to construct water tight walls and flooring.

The film traces how Vendana abandoned nuclear physics in 1985 to start the Novdanya Institute, dedicated to reclaiming native plants and seeds as a commons for people to enjoy collectively – instead of a private commodity to increase the profits of multinational seed companies like Monsanto.

Novdanya runs a seed bank called The School of Nine Seeds. Its primary purpose is to preserve rare and heritage seeds that have been large replaced by a handful of hybrid monoculture crops. With growing water scarcity, Novdanya places special emphasis on drought resistant millets with a high protein content.

Another high priority for Vendana is her battle against Monsanto’s campaign to flood India, an early target starting in the late nineties, with GMO crops. Many Indian farmers have bankrupted themselves purchasing GMO seeds, particularly Roundup-ready varieties. When the high yields they were promised failed to eventuate, thousands committed suicide.*

Bullshit! also profiles Vendana’s role in the antiglobalization movement, particularly the anti-WTO protest in Cancun Mexico in September 2003. The public suicide of Korean farmer Lee Kyung-Hae was instrumental in galvanizing opposition from third world farmers against WTO provisions enabling the US to destroy local markets by dumping cheap agricultural products in third world countries.

In 2000 Vendana collaborated with Greenpeace to force the EU to revoke a patent they had granted Monsanto on the neem tree and an ancient variety of Indian wheat.

The film  ends by highlighting Shiva’s involvement, along with other high profile antiglobalization activists (including Canadian water activist Maude Barlow and French farmer Jose Bove) in a 640-day sit down strike to shut down a Coca Cola bottling plant that was illegal depleting a fresh water aquifer.

*According to New Dehli TV, close to 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995.

** The final breakdown of the so-called “Doha Round” of WTO negotiations in 2008 would eventually lead the US to promote the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and Transatlantic Trade and Partnership Initiative (TTPI) in its place.

The great cholesterol con finally unravels: Researchers find lowering cholesterol has NO EFFECT on risk of heart disease or death

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This research confirms a number of studies journalist Nina Teichert describes in The Big Fat Surprise

YOUR PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY

(NaturalNews) Common dietary advice is to avoid saturated fats and instead consume polyunsaturated fats, like those found in vegetable oils. But this dietary consensus is starting to crack in the face of study after study showing no health benefit to avoiding saturated fat.

The most recent study was conducted by researchers from the universities of North Carolina and Illinois, in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, and published in the British Medical Journal. It found that while a diet that replaced saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat did cause blood cholesterol to drop, this led to no change in the risk of heart disease or death.

Except among the people who had the greatest drop in blood cholesterol. Those became more likely to die.

Cholesterol? Saturated fat? Probably fine

The researchers re-analyzed data gathered from the 1970s Minnesota Coronary Experiment, in which 9,423 residents of state mental hospitals and…

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The Inside Story on Bill Gates and Microsoft

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside

By Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller

Henry Holt (1998)

Book Review

Can be downloaded from from Open Library

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, co-authored by former Microsoft programmer Marlin Eller, is mainly about Gates’ mercurial and inconsistent management style. While highly unflattering to Gates, Barbarians simultaneously refutes Justice Depart claims that Microsoft deliberately tried to squash competitors by stealing their innovations. The authors make out it was all just a coincidence – that Gates was too disorganized to carry out such a conspiracy. I don’t buy it.

Eller was one of the original programmers at Microsoft in 1982 when the company had only two hundred employers. They had more than 20,000 when he left. The programmer was principally involved in the development of Windows, the graphic interface Microsoft copied from VisiOn and the Apple Macintosh. The launch of Windows ultimately enabled Microsoft to monopolize the software market (competitors’ software wouldn’t run on Windows).

As Ellers describes it, the birth of Windows was a long painful saga, plagued by Gates’ mismanagement and numerous blind alleys costing the company hundreds of million. Microsoft had no systematic quality control over Windows. They seem to have mainly relied on customers to inform them of bugs and security flaws post release.

Eller repeatedly depicts Gates ordering his programmers to reverse engineer software created by other companies. Thus I find it hard to believe it was pure coincidence that Microsoft put Netscape out of business by creating Internet Explorer (which they copied from Netscape) – especially when Internet Explorer team left a giant “E” on Netscape’s front lawn the night before they launched Internet Explorer 4.0. Attached was a card that read

“Good people should feel so BAD! Best wishes – the Internet Explorer team.”

The book also details Microsoft’s longstanding legal problems, including numbers copyright infringement lawsuits and a longstanding battle with the Department of Justice over unfair competition and violation of anti-monopoly laws.***

The reader comes away with the sense that Microsoft’s only unique innovation was MS-DOS* and the BASIC programming language Gates created enabling computers to talk to one another. I’m inclined to agree with Justice Department claims that he used his wealth and monopoly power to pressure manufacturers to load Windows onto new computers. This, in turn, squeezed out competitors who designed software for other operating systems.

*Shortly before their 1999 acquisition by AOL in 1999, Netscape created the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The foundation, in turn, rewrote the source code for Netscape Navigator. The latter would be used to power Mozilla’s open source Firefox browser. Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and as chairman of the board in 2014.

**DOS (short for disk operating system) is an acronym for several computer operating systems that are operated by using the command line. MS-DOS dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 including the partially MS-DOS-based Microsoft Windows.

***Microsoft’s battle with the Department of Justice is ongoing.

Aleppo Doctor Attacks Western Media for Bias, Censorship and Lies*

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All the media never talk about the loss of life in the east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by Al Nusra, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.

They never mention the continuous bombardment in western Aleppo, where every single sector has been targeted.

What makes these omissions even more despicable is that these areas represent 75% of Aleppo and there are 1.5 million people living in them. Compare this to the 300,000 living in the eastern zone which is occupied by terrorist groups.

Hwaairfan's Blog

Aleppo Doctor Attacks Western Media for Bias, Censorship and Lies*

By Vanessa Beeley

When the US and NATO war of aggression was launched against Syria,  Dr Nabil Antaki could have abandoned Aleppo to ensure his own safety. Instead he decided to remain and to serve the besieged people of his City, working with various local charities.  Above all, he wanted to bear witness to the destruction caused by Western support for the foreign armed groups who have been systematically destroying Syria and terrorising its people for the last 5 years.

Yesterday Silvia Cattori recorded this report from Dr Antaki on the recent amplification of propaganda surrounding events in Aleppo.  It has been translated from the French by Vanessa Beeley.

By Nabil Antaki
30th April 2016

Victim of Al Nusra terrorist mortar fire in western Aleppo. Photo: Samer Hussein

“With regards to recent events in Aleppo, I state very clearly that…

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Government Insider Reveals Hillary’s Murderous Past

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So many suspicious deaths, in cases where a person’s death directly benefited the Clintons. There are far too many for them all to be coincidental. At minimum the public needs to demand these cases be re-opened as potential homicides.

YOUR PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY

Published on Apr 30, 2016

Dr. Cynthia McKinney reveals hillary’s murderous past with benghazi, and how the globalists will attempt to fuel race wars to further divide americans.

THE CLINTON BODY-COUNT

NEW! Updated for Hillary’s 2016 run!

My thanks to everyone who took the time to write and suggest corrections. Many changes have been made to this list based on the info sent in and more will be added in the very near future.

In compiling this list I have tried to find as much photographic evidence as I can, but surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) these people in many cases seem to have been erased from the internet!

The following is a partial list of a large number of persons who have recently met their demise in suspicious circumstances who appear to have some connection to the Clintons. I stress partial because new additions are coming in faster…

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The Tea Party: Brought to You by Wall Street

Pity the Billionaire: the Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

By Thomas Frank

Havill Secker (2012)

Book Review

Pity the Poor Billionaire describes how the right wing corporate elite used the 2008 economic crash to build a pseudo-populist movement (aka the Tea Party) to build blue collar support for harsh free market austerity policies that benefited Wall Street at the expense of working people.

According to Frank,  the Tea Party was the fourth conservative uprising in the last half century. The first was the backlash against the anti-Vietnam war movement that resulted in Nixon’s election in 1968 and 1972. The second was the Reagan revolution in 1980; the third the Contract with America revolution that won Republican control of Congress (in 1994) during Clinton’s first term.

The Demise of Unions and the Left

With each of these movements, US political and economic life became increasingly conservative, with all public institutions – churches, hospitals, universities, museums, the US Post Office and even the Army and CIA – succumbing to pressure to operate according to free market principles.

The same period saw the virtual demise of both labor unions and any organized US left. Nevertheless, according to Frank, right wing strategists managed to flood the media with rhetoric ramping up popular fear the left was “on the march.” It mainly  focused on a fictitious behind-the-scenes conspiracy to provoke a crisis – through overspending that would collapse the US economy.

Swaying Popular Anger from Wall Street to the Government

This messaging, crafted by right wing think tanks funded by right wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and delivered by Glenn Beck, Russ Limbaugh and similar right wing celebrities, was spectacularly effective in convincing a majority of Americans that the neoliberal corporatist Obama is really a socialist.

Oil billionaire Charles Koch warned back in 2008 that the global economic downturn could lead to the same “loss of liberty and prosperity” (for billionaires) as the Great Depression did. He and his brother David went on to deliberately manufacture an “astroturf”* movement (ie the Tea Party) to thwart Obama from enacting the same type of public spending projects Roosevelt used to reverse the 1929 depression.**

They did this by using Tea Party protests and right wing media to sway public anger away from Wall Street and onto the government. Via sophisticated psychological propaganda, working people were systematically conned into believing their interests coincide with those of Wall Street corporations.

*Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from grassroots participants.

**Frank challenges (with data) the common Tea Party assertion that Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms failed to halt the 1929 depression (ie that it took the World War II mobilization to lift the US out of depression). Between 1929 and 1933 (when Roosevelt took office), the US GDP dropped by more than 50 percent. Following the enactment of the New Deal, it increased by 11% in 1934, 9% in 1935, 14% in 1936 and 13% in 1937. Overall GDP growth 1933-37 was the highest the US has seen outside of war time.

Mainstream media finally admits sugar’s role in causing breast cancer

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The corporate media finally tells the truth about refined sugar and breast cancer.

YOUR PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY

Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of health recognizes that consuming excessive amounts of sugar wreaks havoc on the human body. In addition to obesity, high blood pressure and the like, those with a sweet tooth now have to include breast cancer to their list of potential maladies, according to a new study from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

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Researchers have noted sugar’s impact in a specific enzymatic signaling pathway dubbed 12-LOX (12-lipoxygenase). However, the fact that high sugar intake increases the risk of breast cancer isn’t exactly news. The Women’s Health Study found women with a diet that raises blood sugar levels had a 135 percent increased risk of getting breast cancer during a seven-year-long study. The recent study differs from its predecessors in that it centers on how sugar affects mammary gland tumor development in mouse models.(1,2)

The…

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