Did You
Hear!
"Energy profoundly impacts the environment,
the economy, and foreign policy".......Energy Giveaway: Senate
pulled the plug on the energy bill - obvious the only entity being made
secure was Big Oil.
Russia, China, combining to outflank US in
Central Asia
Worried about American intentions, Moscow woos former Soviet republics
and restores military bases on their territories.
Things seem to be unraveling rather badly these days: Iraq and Saddam
Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction, Arab-Israeli peace efforts,
North Korea’s nuclear posturing, the economy, credibility and authority
of the U.S. administration itself....... And far away Central Asia,
an energy-rich region once ruled by the Soviet Union where the Americans
are now extending their imperial footprint, is starting to emerge as
Russia starts to flex its muscles there once again.
Back to Doomsday clock: The Nuclear Arms Race
is re-ignited. Published on Sunday, November 30, 2003
by the Observer/UK by Paul Harris in New York
U.S. Plans New Nuclear Weapons
'Bunker-buster' bombs set to end 10-year research ban
The United States is embarking on a multimillion-dollar expansion of
its nuclear arsenal, prompting fears it may lead the world into a new
arms race.
Response:
The Empty Heartland
Across the rural Great Plains, towns are running out of people — and
hope. Among teenagers, there is now a higher level of illicit drug use
in rural areas than in cities or suburbs, recent surveys indicate. The
middle class is dwindling, leaving pockets of hard poverty amid large
agribusinesses supported by taxpayers..................................
Polls show a quiet crisis in confidence, the one thing that had seemed
a part of rural American DNA. More than ever, people feel powerless
to control their lives and pessimistic about the future, according to
the annual University of Nebraska poll of rural attitudes.....................
Government attention has only consolidated
the trends, people in the small towns of the plains say, by subsidizing
mega-farms that rarely create local jobs or contribute to merchants
in the region. Arguments about the miracle of the American breadbasket
— harnessing market efficiency and technology to produce cheap food
in stunning abundance — may resound globally, but they ring hollow locally.
The rueful view here is that subsidies, however sensible in the macroeconomic
sense, are gutting the plains ever more.
The Hungry Cities:
There’s a new kind of homelessness in the in U.S. cities, and a new
kind of hunger, and a new kind of need and humiliation. America is a
country that now sits atop the precarious latticework of myth. It is
the myth that work provides rewards, that working people can support
their families. It’s a myth that has become so divorced from reality
that it might as well begin with the words “Once upon a time.” In New
York City alone, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1.6
million New Yorkers, or the equivalent of the population of Philadelphia,
suffer from “food insecurity,” which is a fancy way of saying they don’t
have enough to eat.
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