Pluto in Cap, the USA, the future of the world

[Rad]

Brazil’s Rousseff tells Obama of ‘currency war’ worries

By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 2:53 EDT

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has voiced concern to US President Barack Obama that the easy money policies of developed countries threaten the growth of emerging economies like Brazil.

The comments from the leader of Brazil, the world’s sixth largest economy, came Monday on her first visit to the White House — for talks that yielded little in the way of concrete announcements.

“Such expansionist monetary policies… ultimately lead to a depreciation in the value of the currencies of developed countries, thus impairing growth outlooks in emerging countries,” Rousseff said.

Brazil is suffering from an appreciation of its currency, the real, against the dollar, which the government blames on a “currency war” that has flooded the country with cheap dollars generated by easy credit.

Rousseff welcomed the improving economic picture in the United States and told Obama that Washington had a key role to play “not only in containing the effects of the crisis but also in ensuring proper resumption of prosperity.”

“The BRICS countries currently account for a very substantial share of economic growth worldwide,” she said, referring to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

“But it is important to realize and bear in mind that the resumption of growth in the medium term future certainly involves a substantial resumption of growth in the US economy,” she added.

She later drove home the point in a speech before the US Chamber of Commerce, saying: “Brazil rejects all forms of protectionism, including… exchange rate protectionism.”

Rousseff and Obama praised each other on the solid state of US-Brazilian ties, even if they said there was more to be done.

“The good news is that the relationship between Brazil and the United States has never been stronger. But we always have even greater improvements that can be made,” Obama said.

“I feel very fortunate to have such a capable and far-sighted partner as President Rousseff, so that not only Brazil and the United States but the world can benefit from our deeper cooperation,” he said.

The two leaders said their talks were a good opportunity to exchange views ahead of a summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia this weekend, which they will both attend.

Rousseff’s visit comes more than a year after Obama’s trip to the South American giant, in which he tried to reset relations ruffled by differences with former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, particularly over Iran’s disputed nuclear activities.

Although Rousseff is regarded as less ideological than Lula, her government has resisted US-backed sanctions against Iran and Syria, which could be a sore point in the talks.

Another irritant is the US Air Force’s abrupt cancelation one month ago of a contract to buy 20 Super Tucano aircraft from Brazil’s Embraer, angering the South American nation, which is in turn weighing US, French and Swedish offers for the sale of 36 fighter aircraft.

Earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota spoke at a day-long binational meeting of business leaders at the US Chamber of Commerce.

Clinton announced plans to open two new US consulates in Brazil — in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre — and said she would visit the country next week. The United States currently has consulates in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Recife.

“There is tremendous untapped potential in both of our countries. We have only begun to explore how we can work and prosper together,” Clinton said.

Clinton and Patriota signed a US-Brazil Aviation Partnership Memorandum, designed “to promote more and safer air travel between two countries,” as well as promote the aviation industries and tourism.

Obama, who is on a campaign to double US exports, is especially interested in Brazil, where Washington has been pushed aside by China as the country’s biggest trade partner.

Rousseff, who arrived in Washington on Sunday and held a meeting with Brazilian business leaders, will travel Tuesday to Boston to promote a program to train Brazilians abroad, at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

[Rad]

U.S. wants ‘concrete steps’ from Iran over nuclear program
U.S. wants ‘concrete steps’ from Iran over nuclear program

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, April 9, 2012 20:08 EDT

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday said Iran needed to take “concrete steps” to assure the United States and the international community that it was not pursuing nuclear weapons.

“We’re looking forward to these talks creating a conducive environment for concrete progress,” Jay Carney, spokesman for President Barack Obama, told reporters ahead of key meetings this week between Tehran and world powers.

“We are very clear-eyed about what Iran needs to do in order to fulfill its international obligations and be able to reassure the international community that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons.

“We need concrete steps taken by the Iranians to assure that they will forsake their nuclear weapons ambitions,” said Carney, as he welcomed talks set to take place in Istanbul later this week.

President Obama, added Carney, has already “made clear that the window is closing on Iran, that they need to treat these talks seriously because there is great concern around the world about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Iran last held talks with the so-called P5+1 powers — permanent UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany — in January 2011, with no results.

Obama has, however, appeared to accept Tehran’s civilian nuclear ambitions, telling Iran that Washington would accept a civilian nuclear program but only if it can prove it is not seeking atomic weapons, according to a recent Washington Post report.

“It is vital to measure Iranian intentions by actions, as opposed to words, and we will do that. But it is also important that these talks are getting up and going again after a long delay,” Carney said Monday.

The United States and other Western countries fear Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, but Tehran insists that its atomic program is for exclusively peaceful purposes.

[Rad]

U.S. hails constitutional transfer of power in Malawi

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, April 9, 2012 17:32 EDT

WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday congratulated Joyce Banda on becoming Malawi’s new president following what it hailed as a peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.

In Lilongwe, Banda on Saturday told supporters there was no room for revenge as she was sworn in as Africa’s second female head of state in modern times after the death of the divisive Bingu wa Mutharika.

Banda offered the conciliatory words following two days of political intrigue in which Mutharika’s inner circle tried to block her assuming the post, which fell to her as vice president under the terms of the constitution.

In congratulating Banda, the United States “looks forward to continued partnership with the government and people of Malawi,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke with Banda earlier Monday about the “importance of adhering to rule of law, and to working across parties as the government of Malawi moves forward,” Nuland said.

“We congratulate Malawi for ensuring that the transfer of power was both peaceful and reflected the letter and spirit of their constitution,” Nuland said.

“The people of Malawi have demonstrated once again their commitment to democratic values as the foundation of the rule of law,” she added.

The United States also extended its condolences to Mutharika’s family.

[Rad]

U.K. feminists hail explosion in new grassroots groups

By Alexandra Topping, The Guardian
Monday, April 9, 2012 20:38 EDT

Dozens of new organisations are springing up around the UK, campaigning on issues from lads’ mags to benefit cuts

It was the lads’ mags – with semi-naked women in suggestive poses on their covers – being sold at eye level at her corner shop that did it.

“I just don’t think I should have to look at that – it’s degrading,” said 17-year-old Isabella Woolford Diaz. “If people want to buy it, fine, but I don’t think 11-year-old pupils should have to look at it.”

Deciding to take the matter into her own hands, the student formed a feminist group at Camden school for girls, and before long a core group of 15 teenagers – boys and girls – were attending. “I was getting so frustrated at how women were portrayed and I wondered if I was just being pernickety,” she said. “But I soon realised it wasn’t just me.”

The group is one of dozens of new feminist organisations springing up around the UK, according to the campaign group UK Feminista. Research carried out to mark the group’s second birthday has revealed that the number of active grassroots feminist organisations has doubled in the past two years.

These are feminists who do not fit easily into stereotypical moulds: young and old, men and women, urbanites and country dwellers. A new breed of feminists is starting to rise up.

“It’s a really exciting time. We are seeing a real resurgence in feminist activism that is moving from the margins to the mainstream,” said Kat Banyard, founder of UK Feminista and author of The Equality Illusion. “People are willing to put up their hand and say they are a feminist without the fear of being ridiculed. Particularly in the past 12 months, we are seeing people standing up and willing to be counted.” Like the Camden group’s members, many of them are young, passionate and unafraid to take direct action.

Anna van Heeswijk, from the campaign group Object, told of a group of year 10 students from an inner-city school she had spoken to about the sexual objectification of women. The students went to their local supermarket to protest against the sale of lads’ mags at eye level. They were armed with banners, horns and slogans, and before the end of the day the manager had agreed to order “modesty” covers to obscure the sexualised images of women.

“A new generation of young women across the country are sick and tired of being sexualised, objectified and trivialised,” she said. “There is real power in the voices of these young women. This is a good moment for feminist activism. The tide is turning.” For decades, activists have questioned whether men can be feminists, but according to campaigners men are now swelling the ranks.

Matt McCormack Evans, who founded the Anti Porn Men Project while a student at Hull University, believes more men want to become involved in the fight for gender equality and more women are willing to accept them.

“Things have really changed over the past few years, and it is becoming much more acceptable for men to challenge traditional ideas about masculinity,” he said. “Lots of younger feminists want men to be involved and aren’t so wary of them taking over – no one wants to see a feminist movement run by men. This is a movement with aims and goals, not a club with gatekeepers.”

New groups are popping up in the most remote places. Campaigners can be found in practically every area of Britain – even the Orkney Feminist Network has 40 followers on Twitter. Michael Moore, the regional organiser for UK Feminista in Northern Ireland, said sites such as Twitter and Facebook had enabled people in even the most remote parts of the UK to tap into the debate. “Now it’s as easy as sending an email to mobilise people. There’s no apologies, no minutes – people can engage and thrash out issues in an online space immediately. It’s really sped up the power to communicate.”

Recent debate over issues such as Nadine Dorries’s proposed bill for compulsory lessons on sexual abstinence for teenage girls and fears about a growing anti-abortion climate in the UK have put feminism right back on the news agenda.

And recent high-profile events, such as a series of “SlutWalks” to protest about the treatment of rape victims, have seen feminists back on the street.

As 17-year-old Nina Mega from Edinburgh put it: “Sometimes you get the idea that the world is a pretty misogynistic place and feminists are few and far between, but when you see all those like-minded people together – men and women – you just think: ‘Wow.’”

Every one of their number will be needed, according to campaigners who argue that women face a barrage of challenges not seen for a generation.

With twice as many women as men expected to lose their jobs in the public sector, women hit hardest by services and benefits cuts and concerns that as state services shrink women will have to fill in the gaps, women may find hard-won gains in sexual equality are rolled back, according to the Fawcett Society.

“We are at a watershed moment for women’s rights,” said Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the Fawcett Society. “Women are feeling the brunt of cuts and job losses. Instead of seeing progress in women’s rights we could see the pay gap between women and men widening. We can’t be complacent and I think a growing number of women are aware of that.”

Q&A with Kat Banyard, founder of UK Feminista

Why is feminism an ‘unfinished revolution’?

While there have been enormous advances for women, many legal rights – like equal pay – are yet to become reality. Women are outnumbered four to one in parliament, women working full-time are paid on average 15% less than men, and two-thirds of low-paid workers are women. Hard-won gains – like the right to a safe, legal abortion – are under attack. And new manifestations of sexism – like the global sex industry – have put progress into reverse.

How are protests today different from the first wave of feminism?

Clearly some aspects have changed. Take technology: advances in communications technology mean social networking sites are now key mobilising tools and feminists can instantly report and broadcast footage from their own protests. Or take economics: three decades of neoliberalism have led protest targets to follow the shift of power from government to private hands. But the fundamentals of feminist activism remain the same: a struggle against privilege and profit, stretching from the bedroom to the boardroom. And, as ever, the promise of feminism is a world that will be better for all.

How can budding feminists start their own ‘revolution’?

Whether it’s Hugh Hefner’s toxic brand of sexism, cosmetic surgery supremo Mel Braham’s phoney solution to women’s lack of body confidence, or the coalition’s cuts to women’s financial independence, you have the power to take them on. Whoever you are, wherever you are, there is something you can do. So choose your target, get organised, and get taking action.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2012

[Rad]

SPIEGEL ONLINE
04/10/2012 12:44 PM

The Mideast's Awakening Energy Giant: Iraq Progresses toward a Future Built on Oil Wealth

By Bernhard Zand

When the US toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, few people imagined that it would take another decade before the Iraqi oil industry was rebuilt. Now, progress is finally being made, and the country's massive reserves could bring untold wealth. But before that happens, Baghdad needs to improve security and get corruption under control.

There's a fine line between being snubbed and humiliated -- and no one in Iraq knows this better than Hussein al-Shahristani.

Two executives from the world's largest private energy company, ExxonMobil, are sitting and waiting in the outer office of Baghdad's most powerful government oil official. For the first 10 minutes, they sit at attention, ready to jump up as soon as Shahristani asks them in. But Shahristani doesn't ask. They sink down further into their deep armchairs and start playing with their smartphones.

After half an hour, they ask their Iraqi escort if something is wrong. The secretary takes pity on them and calls a staff member to sit with the visitors. They tell him about their flight in from Dubai, about the Qatar professional soccer league -- and they eventually venture a cautious question: Is it perhaps conceivable that an oil company could one day sponsor a football club in Iraq? FC Exxon Samarra? Mobil Basra United? It's a bold idea.

Then, nearly an hour after their 12 o'clock appointment at Adnan Palace in Baghdad's maximum-security zone, the phone finally rings and the secretary asks the two Americans to follow her. Doctor Shahristani now has time for them, she says.

Empty Promises

For the past nine years, the world has been waiting for Iraq's oil. Ever since Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in 2003, politicians in Baghdad and Washington have been announcing that the country would soon double, triple or perhaps even quintuple its oil exports. After all, former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, had promised that the country would finance its reconstruction on its own.

They were empty promises. For years, neither the Iraqis nor the occupying forces succeeded in developing the country's neglected oil fields, plugging the holes in the pipelines, or repairing the pumping stations and storage tanks. Twelve years of sanctions, the invasion, the sectarian fighting that followed, and the terror attacks on workers, engineers and facilities have set back the reconstruction of the oil industry by years. Even today, Iraq produces barely more than the nearly 2.5 million barrels per day that it was already exporting before the Iraq war.

And, even now, the country has still failed to introduce binding legislation for the oil and gas sector. Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites are wrangling just as bitterly over the distribution of future resources as they did five years ago, when the parliament debated the law for the first time.

Three months ago, the last US soldier left Iraq, putting an end to the certainty that, if push came to shove, an army stood at the ready to prevent the country from becoming mired in sectarian violence again.

Bright Future

Why, then, are two American oil executives from ExxonMobil headquarters in Irving, Texas waiting so patiently for their appointment with Shahristani?

Following Iraq's depressing past, it likely has to do with this country's potentially bright future -- with its still breathtaking economic prospects: Global demand for oil will increase by at least 10 percent over the next 20 years. Ninety percent of this demand will most likely be met by sources in the Middle East and North Africa. Most countries in this region, however, are already producing oil at the limit of their capacities, some are in the midst of revolts and revolutions, while others may face violent upheaval in the future.

Iraq is currently the only country in the region that has the resources to meet the demand for oil in the coming years virtually by itself: Deep underground lie 115 billion barrels of proven reserves and as many as 200 billion barrels of estimated reserves, which have remained largely untouched over the past two decades.

Shahristani, 69, who was the oil minister for four years and was promoted to deputy prime minister in late 2010, has been charged with bringing this enormous treasure to the surface and selling it on global markets. He knows that time is running out and that he is reliant on the help of the major international oil companies. But he also appears to know what he can demand from them in return.

Strong Nerves

In 1979, the nuclear physicist, a devout Shiite, defied Saddam Hussein's personal order to establish a military nuclear program. He was subsequently imprisoned for 11 years in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where he was tortured. Shahristani is known for his obstinacy and strong nerves.

In the spring of 2009, he opened a first round of bidding for service contracts for Iraq's largest oil fields. These agreements stipulate that the oil corporations receive a certain amount of money per barrel, but that the oil remains the property of the host country until it is sold. The invitation for bids failed, however, because the oil companies were either dissatisfied with the sums offered or they wanted other concessions -- contracts that would reward them with a share of the output, which they could then use as collateral for their stock market transactions. Shahristani only managed to negotiate one contract.

But he stood his ground and, during the second round, the first big oil companies caved in. In a third round, the others then followed suit. Today, almost all the large international companies are drilling for Iraqi oil, including Britain's BP, the British-Dutch group Shell, Lukoil and Gazprom from Russia, Italy's Eni, Malaysia's Petronas and China's CNPC. They have committed to investing over $100 billion (€76 billion) and expanding Iraq's oil production capacity to 13 million barrels a day by 2017.

Thirteen million barrels is a magic number. It's 1 million barrels more than the maximum production quota of Saudi Arabia, the only OPEC country that has a so-called swing capacity -- in other words, the ability to balance out any shortfall by another member state.

Just how much the country will actually produce depends on the demand and the price of oil, says Shahristani. If Baghdad were to produce merely 8 million barrels a day, it would still amount to gross daily revenues of nearly $1 billion at today's crude oil prices -- more money than the war-torn country would even be able to absorb in its current state.

'An Absolute Hit'

Although such figures had hardly been worth the paper they were printed on in the years following 2003, now there are signs that work is actually progressing on Iraq's oil fields. In the palm groves a few kilometers east of Baghdad, an area where for years foreigners would only venture in heavily armed convoys, Raymond Mallia from Malta is now drilling for the heavy oil of the East Baghdad field, with its stench of sulfur.

With over 8 billion barrels of extractable oil, East Baghdad is what's known as a super-giant oil field. There are only a few dozen oil fields of this size in the world, and even in this exclusive club East Baghdad is an exception: Part of the field lies under the city of Baghdad, with its 7 million residents -- specifically, under the Shiite district of Sadr City, which was the scene of particularly brutal sectarian fighting.

Mallia, 54, has worked in Libya, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh -- and on oil rigs off the coast of Kuwait and Iran. It was there, he says, that he saw the first cruise missiles that were fired by US destroyers at Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the spring of 2003: "At the time, I couldn't have imagined that it would take nearly 10 years before we also seriously started to dig here."

Despite all the cynicism that a career in the oil fields of this world breeds in a man, Mallia is upbeat and optimistic about what he's doing here. "Iraq is an absolute hit in the oil world," he says. "The Chinese and the Indians need this stuff, and the Iraqis have it. They'd have to do just about everything wrong to keep this country from booming in a few years."

Day and night, Mallia uses his drilling rig to drive one rod after the other into the loamy soil. He has drilled two wells: the first one is already producing 2,000 barrels a day, and the second one has just struck oil at a depth of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet). Two young Canadian logging engineers use sensors to calculate the expected yield. It will take hundreds of such wells before the East Baghdad oil field can be exploited at anything close to capacity. Since it lies in a densely populated area, the work is proceeding much slower than in the desert regions of southern Iraq.

When Oil Alone Isn't Enough
Mallia's boss, Majid Abdullah, 61, has also worked abroad for 30 years. One year ago, he decided to finally return to his native country. If he was only 30, he wouldn't have done it, Abdullah says, but now he's willing to risk spending the rest of his career in his volatile homeland in the hope of a few stabile years. "East Baghdad is for me the most convenient oil field of my life," he says, "I can drive home after every shift and sleep in my own bed."

Abdullah's confidence doesn't have much of a political spin -- it's purely an oil man's view. As he knows, especially after having to flee the turmoil of revolutionary Libya, producing oil is not enough to build a sustainable economy and establish a stable state. It requires a modicum of security, and legal and political predictability. And it necessitates pipelines, pumps, oil depots and secure ports to export the crude oil.

At least the Iraqis have started expanding their port facilities. In early March, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab River, the first of four new mooring stations went into operation. They are colossal installations, attached to deep-sea buoys, where oil tankers can be filled. Until now, Iraq has had only one functioning oil terminal, which was crucial to the economic survival of the entire country: Ninety-five percent of the national budget is financed by oil exports -- and 80 percent of this oil was pumped into the tankers via the eight filling stations at the Basra terminal.

A Degree of Security

Another condition for the long-term expansion of the oil industry now also appears to have been nearly fulfilled: the security of engineers, facilities and supplies. Granted, the experts from the oil companies and their suppliers still live and work today in heavily guarded camps, and avoid making trips that take them away from the safety of their compounds. There are still bomb attacks, political assassinations and kidnappings every day in Iraq, claiming the lives of over 4,000 civilians in 2011 alone -- far more than the number who died during the upheaval of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia. Yet compared to the height of the sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007, when it was even dangerous to work behind blast-proof walls, today the oil companies see the risk as calculable at least. No one can say how long this will last, though.

Indeed, two other conditions which are necessary for Iraq to join the ranks of the world's major oil producers have by no means been fulfilled. As long as Baghdad and the government of the autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq fail to agree on national legislation on petroleum exploitation, the state remains divided. The central government insists that all contracts with international oil companies may only be negotiated by Baghdad. But the government of the Kurdish autonomous zone began bypassing Baghdad back in 2005, and has been negotiating its own contracts ever since. There are currently 48, mainly smaller, companies working in Iraqi Kurdistan.

In November, it was announced that ExxonMobil has become the first major international oil company to sign a contract with the Kurds. Shahristani's voice becomes cold and hard when he talks about the two ExxonMobil representatives who he left in his waiting room for the better part of an hour. "Companies who conclude contracts like this have no right working on Iraqi territory." He has nothing more to say about Exxon. This is not the tone that entrepreneurs like to hear, especially if they are investing billions in a country that has recently emerged from a period of violence bordering on civil war.

Incredibly Corrupt

But these legal uncertainties are an abstract issue compared with a daily problem that stands in the way of establishing a modern oil industry: Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. The demands made by officials from Iraqi ministries and provincial councils during negotiations are often so brazen and outrageous that they astonish even experienced business people. "I encountered a minister who straight out asked for 12 coaches for his private bus company," says a European oil executive who preferred not to be identified.

Iraq's rise as a major oil producer probably depends more on progress on the domestic front than on big geopolitical upheavals in the Middle East. Issues such as whether the power finally remains on all day in Baghdad, clean drinking water flows from the tap and a halfway reliable civil service starts administering the country, weigh more heavily than the question of whether Israel will attack Iran and the Strait of Hormuz will be closed.

If Iraq succeeds in doubling its oil production over the coming two years and reaching a critical mass of some 5 million barrels a day, it will nevertheless raise a geopolitical question. After being excluded from the OPEC quota system in the wake of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, where does Iraq now stand among the world's leading oil-producing countries? Does it side with the hardliners, such as Iran, Venezuela and formerly Libya, which are pushing for the highest possible oil price -- or does it side with the moderates, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are interested in seeing the price remain as stable as possible?

"I can reassure you," says a former oil minister, Ahmed Chalabi, when asked this question. One of the most influential politicians in Iraq, Chalabi once fought alongside the Americans against Saddam Hussein and is now said to be loyal to Tehran. "Tempermentally, Iraq has never been moderate," he says.

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

[Rad]

meanwhile in the USA........

How Political Corruption Is Responsible for 80% Of Your Cell Phone Bill

By Susie Madrak
April 10, 2012 06:01 AM

A few years ago, I had this idea. I was pretty sure that we could get a new populist movement sweeping the nation through pro-consumer actions aimed at two groups: cell phone carriers, and cable companies.

Do you know anyone who likes their companies and who's happy with the amount they're paying? Me neither. Now I'm even more convinced it was a good idea after reading this piece by Matt Stoller in the Republic Report:

    Last year, a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon. Lightsquared used a new technology involving satellites and spectrum, and was a textbook example of how markets can benefit the public through competition. The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends. And sure enough, through three Congressmen that AT&T and Verizon had funded (Fred Upton (R-MI), Greg Walden (R-OR), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL)), Congress began demanding an investigation into this new company. Pretty soon, the Federal Communications Commission got into the game, revoking a critical waiver that had allowed it to proceed with its business plan.

Oh yeah. Remember the all-out attack on LightSquared?

    And so Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers. And how much does this cost you? Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%. That’s how much you should be paying. You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service. Americans pay $635.85 a year. That $500 a year difference, from most consumers with a cell phone, goes straight to AT&T and Verizon (and to a much lesser extent Sprint and T-Mobile). It’s the cost of corruption. It’s also, from the perspective of these companies, the return on their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. Every penny they spend in DC and in state capitols ensures that you pay high bills, to them.

    [...] Once AT&T or Verizon has paid for its network and licensed spectrum from the government, the cost of adding an additional customer is very low. That means that the biggest providers with bigger networks and more licensed spectrum make more money. It’s not only that their costs are lower, but also because they can keep other players out through control of the political system. That is, they can move towards monopoly in the industry. And monopoly means higher prices for you, and more profits for them. Here’s the data.

    Verizon and AT&T’s Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) are substantially higher than any other national carrier’s. Verizon’s wireless profit margins (EBITDA) are substantially higher than all other carriers except AT&T. And Verizon and AT&T together control four-fifths of the entire wireless industry profits, the only two major carriers to control double-digit shares of the industry’s total profits. Over the past 3 years Verizon and AT&T’s share of total industry profits has steadily increased while everyone else’s declined.

Stoller goes on to explain that the money didn't go back into the business to improve service, no indeedy. It went into buying up other cell companies so there was no competition. If you don't like your service, it doesn't matter, because all the companies are just as bad. (As someone who switched carriers last week, I'll testify to that.)

    To reduce prices in such a system, you need either competition in the form of more networks (with the same or different technology) or price regulation. The Federal Communications Commission has neither forced more competition, nor has it restricted price gouging. In fact, by doing things like killing Lightsquared, it has ensured high prices for all of us. Furthermore, the FCC has allowed a small number of big players like AT&T and Verizon to buy up much of the public airwaves (or “spectrum”) available for cell phone use, just to keep out competitors. It tends to allow big mega-mergers to go through (with the exception of the recent T-Mobile and AT&T merger). Meanwhile, Congress is trying to tie the hands of the FCC on making more spectrum available for anyone to use, and broadcasters are also throwing their lobbying into the ring, because they want to be able to control more spectrum to transmit television signals.

    Why does the FCC and why does Congress want us to have high cell phone costs? Well, they don’t, not really. It’s more accurate to say they don’t particularly care about our problems, but are responding to an entirely different problem that is completely unrelated to cell phones. The government is responding to the need for campaign contributions for politicians.

    [...] In other words, we are stuck with big bad cell phone companies not because those companies are good at providing cell phone service (which anyone with a dropped cell phone call knows), but because they are good at corrupting markets through political donations. AT&T has the single biggest donor group (known as a “Political Action Committee”) in Washington, DC.

    Again, that’s on average $500 a year, $40 a month, or $1.50 a day, from you, straight into the pockets of Verizon and AT&T.

[Rad]

Arctic oil rush will ruin ecosystem, warns Lloyd’s of London

By Julia Kollewe, The Guardian
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 23:38 EDT

Insurance market joins environmentalists in highlighting risks of drilling in fragile region as $100bn investment is predicted

Lloyd’s of London, the world’s biggest insurance market, has become the first major business organisation to raise its voice about huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic.

The City institution estimates that $100bn (£63bn) of new investment is heading for the far north over the next decade, but believes cleaning up any oil spill in the Arctic, particularly in ice-covered areas, would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk”.

Richard Ward, Lloyd’s chief executive, urged companies not to “rush in [but instead to] step back and think carefully about the consequences of that action” before research was carried out and the right safety measures put in place.

The main concerns, outlined in a report drawn up with the help of the Chatham House thinktank, come as the future of the Arctic is reviewed by a House of Commons select committee and just two years after the devastating BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

The far north has become a centre of commercial attention as global temperatures rise, causing ice to melt in a region that could hold up to a quarter of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon reserves.

Cairn Energy and Shell are among the oil companies that have either started or are planning new wells off the coasts of places such as Greenland and Canada, while Total – currently at the centre of a North Sea gas leak – wants to develop the Shtokman field off Russia.

Shtokman is the largest single potential offshore Arctic project, 350 miles into the Russian-controlled part of the Barents Sea, where investment could reach $50bn.

A BP joint venture is planning to spend up to $10bn on developing onshore oilfields in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous area of Russia, despite its experiences with the Macondo oil spill in the relatively benign waters of the Gulf. A series of onshore mining schemes are also planned, with Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, wanting to develop a new opencast mine 300 miles inside the Arctic circle in a bid to extract up to £14bn of iron ore.

But the new report from Lloyd’s, written by Charles Emmerson and Glada Lahn of Chatham House, says it is “highly likely” that future economic activity in the Arctic will further disturb ecosystems already stressed by the consequences of climate change.

“Migration patterns of caribou and whales in offshore areas may be affected. Other than the direct release of pollutants into the Arctic environment, there are multiple ways in which ecosystems could be disturbed, such as the construction of pipelines and roads, noise pollution from offshore drilling, seismic survey activity or additional maritime traffic as well as through the break-up of sea ice.”

The authors point out that the Arctic is not one but several ecosystems, and is “highly sensitive to damage” that would have a long-term impact. They are calling for “baseline knowledge about the natural environment and consistent environmental monitoring”. Pollution sources include mines, oil and gas installations, industrial sites and, in the Russian Arctic, nuclear waste from civilian and military installations, and from nuclear weapons testing on Novaya Zemlya. The report singles out a potential oil spill as the “greatest risk in terms of environmental damage, potential cost and insurance” – but says there are significant knowledge gaps in this area.

Rates of natural biodegradation of oil in the Arctic could be expected to be lower than in more temperate environments such as the Gulf of Mexico, although there is currently insufficient understanding of how oil will degrade over the long term in the Arctic. Sea ice could assist in some oil-spill response techniques, such as in-situ burning and chemical dispersant application, but this could lead to air pollution and the release of chemicals into the marine environment without knowing where moving ice will eventually carry them.

Unclear legal boundaries posed by a mosaic of regulations and governments in the Arctic are an additional challenge. The Lloyd’s report notes that there is no international liability and compensation regime for oil spills. An EU proposal under discussion would apply to offshore oil projects in the Arctic territories of Norway and Denmark, and possibly to all EU companies anywhere they operate.

Meanwhile, a taskforce is drawing up recommendations for the intergovernmental Arctic Council on an international instrument on marine oil pollution designed to speed up the process for clean-up and compensation payments, due for release next year. This may include an international liability and compensation instrument. Greenland has argued that “different national systems may lead to ambiguities and unnecessary delays in oil pollution responses and compensation payments” and that any regime must adapt as understanding of the worst-case scenario in the Arctic changes.

The Lloyd’s report says the “inadequacies” of both company and government in the event of a disaster were demonstrated after the Macondo blowout. A smaller company than BP, faced with estimated $40bn clean-up and compensation costs, might have gone bankrupt, leaving the state to foot the bill, it notes.

Lloyd’s says it is essential that there is more investment in science and research to “close knowledge gaps, reduce uncertainties and manage risks”. It calls for sizeable investment in infrastructure and surveillance to enable “safe economic activity” and argues that “full-scale exercises based on worst-case scenarios of environmental disaster should be run by companies”.

The Arctic’s vulnerable environment, unpredictable climate and lack of a precedent on which to base cost assessments have led some environmental NGOs to argue that no compensation would be worth the risk of allowing drilling to take place in pristine offshore areas. Others are campaigning for more stringent regulations and the removal of the liability cap for investors.

[Rad]

Scientists call for global ban on bee-killing pesticides

By Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 10:06 EDT

How valuable are bees? In the UK, about £1.8bn a year, according to new research on the cost of hand-pollinating the many crops bees service for free. If that sounds a far-fetched scenario, consider two facts.

First, bees are in severe decline. Half the UK’s honey bees kept in managed hives have gone, wild honey bees are close to extinction and solitary bees are declining in more than half the place they have been studied.

Second, hand-pollination is already necessary in some places, such as pear orchards in China, and bees are routinely trucked around the US to compensate for the loss of their wild cousins.

The new figure comes from scientists at the Reading University and was released by Friends of the Earth to launch their new campaign, Bee Cause. Paul de Zylva, FoE nature campaigner, said: “Unless we halt the decline in British bees our farmers will have to rely on hand-pollination, sending food prices rocketing.”

So what’s the problem? The losses of flowery meadows that feed wild bees is a factor, as are the parasites and diseases that can kills hives. But a third factor has now moved to the centre of the debate: pesticides called neonicotinoids. The insect nerve-agents are used as seed dressings, which means they end up in every part of the crop they protect, including pollen and nectar.

Two landmark studies, conducted in field conditions, published in Science in March clearly implicated sub-lethal doses of the pesticides with increases in disappeared bees and crashes in the number of queens produced by colonies. Then on 5 April, another study was released, showing the pesticides can cause colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name given to the ghostly hives from which bees have vanished.

“The data, both ours and others, right now merits a global ban,” said Chensheng Lu, in the department of environmental health at Harvard University, and who led the the CCD study. “I would suggest removing all neonicotinoids from use globally for a period of five to six years. If the bee population is going back up during the after the ban, I think we will have the answer.”

Lu told me he was in no doubt about the result of his work, which tested the effect of a very widely used neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, which is registered for use on over 140 crops in 120 countries. “Our study clearly demonstrated that imidacloprid is responsible for causing CCD, and the survival of the control hives that we set up side-by-side to the pesticide-treated hives augments this conclusion.” He said the hives were initially healthy, were placed in a natural foraging environment and that the doses of the pesticide the bees were exposed to were realistic.

After 12-weeks of dosing, all the bees were alive, but after 23 weeks, 15 of the 16 treated hives had died – but none of the untreated control hives. Lu said the dead hives were virtually empty, as is seen with CCD, and in contrast to the impact of parasites or disease, which leave hives littered with dead bees.

The leader of one of the Science studies, Mickaël Henry, at INRA in Avignon, France, agreed with Lu that action is urgently needed on neonicotinoids. “We now have enough data to say authorisation processes must take into account not only the lethal effects, but also the effects of non-lethal doses.” In other words, testing whether the pesticide use kills bees stone dead immediately is no longer good enough, given the hard evidence now available that sub-lethal doses cause serious harm.

So what does the UK government have to say? To date, it has agreed with the neonicotinoid manufacturers that there is no evidence that the pesticides used at normal levels cause harm. A statement on Wednesday from an environment department spokeswoman suggests no change: “The UK has a robust system for assessing risks from pesticides. We keep all the science under review and we will not hesitate to act if we need to.”

What more does it need? The new data makes it impossible to maintain this position, whatever vested interests are at stake. It is 50 years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which documented the devastation wrought by pesticides in the US. What better time to act?

© Guardian News and Media 2012

[Rad]

Britain to boost Syria opposition support if no ceasefire

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 19:21 EDT

WASHINGTON — Britain will boost support for Syria’s opposition and seek tougher sanctions if government forces do not adhere to a ceasefire, Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Wednesday.

Hague spoke at a meeting of the Group of Eight powers in Washington as Syria said that it would cease operations against rebel fighters from Thursday — the date set by peace envoy Kofi Annan to halt more than a year of bloodshed.

“Our pressure on the regime — its campaign of murder, torture and oppression — must be intensified if Kofi Annan has not succeeded,” Hague told reporters.

If Syria respects the ceasefire, Hague called for “very urgent work” including monitoring to ensure that violence does not resume.

“But if there isn’t a ceasefire or if a ceasefire is not upheld over the coming days, then in the view of the United Kingdom, we will want to return to the Security Council in a new attempt to obtain a resolution on Syria, we will intensify our support for the opposition — the Syrian opposition — and we will seek strong sanctions,” Hague said.

The Group of Eight comprises major industrial powers including Russia, which has clashed with Western and Arab nations by supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad both through diplomatic support and arms shipments.

Hague acknowledged “many differences” with Russia but said that Moscow has assured that it has put pressure on Syria in recent days.

“So I think on this point of achieving a ceasefire and launching a political process, there is unity in the G8 and in the UN Security Council,” Hague said.

“It would be harder to achieve a resolution in the event of a ceasefire not being enforced. But in that situation, Syria would have defied the whole of the UN Security Council and the whole of the world,” he said.

[Rad]

Syria declares halt to military operations on Thursday

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 12:25 EDT

The Syrian defence ministry said Wednesday that it will cease military operations against rebel fighters from Thursday, the day set by peace envoy Kofi Annan as a deadline to halt hostilities, state television reported.

“After our armed forces completed successful operations in combating the criminal acts of the armed terrorist groups and enforced the state’s rule over its territory, it has been decided to stop these operations from Thursday morning,” the television quoted a ministry official it did not identify as saying.

The official said the armed forces would “remain on standby to retaliate against any attack by the armed terrorist groups against civilians, the security services, armed forces, or private or public property.”

Annan, who drafted a deal to end 13 months of bloodshed, said in Geneva on Wednesday that he had received a written pledge from the Syrian government to stop fighting at dawn on Thursday.

[Rad]

SPIEGEL ONLINE
04/12/2012 01:33 PM

The Return of the Spanish Flu: Uncertainty about Spain Worries Euro Zone

By David Böcking

The markets appeared to have forgotten about the euro crisis for a few weeks, but now uncertainty is returning, with yields rising again on Spanish and Italian government bonds. The effects of the ECB's massive cash injection are wearing off, and Spain's banks have already reportedly run out of the cheap cash they got from the central bank.

In Rasquera, they reckon marijuana is the solution.

On Wednesday, the authorities in the eastern Spanish village, population 900, announced that the residents had agreed to an unsual plan that the municipality has come up with to fight the crisis. In the future, Rasquera will lease several fields to a Barcelona association that plans to grow hemp there. The revenue is intended to help the municipality reduce its debts of €1.3 million ($1.7 million).

Around 500 kilometers (300 miles) away in Madrid, the national government is also worried about money. This week, Spain found itself in the financial markets' crosshairs again. On Tuesday, the government had to pay significantly higher interest rates of almost 6 percent on its 10-year bonds.

Italy's borrowing costs have also risen. The rate that the country pays for one-year bonds more than doubled to 2.84 percent from last month's rate of 1.40 percent at an auction on Wednesday, while yields on three-year bonds hit 3.89 percent at an auction on Thursday, up from 2.76 percent last month.

It looks like the euro zone is getting sick again -- this time with a case of Spanish flu.

New Uncertainty

For a while, it looked like the patient was recovering. The situation in the euro zone had stabilized at the beginning of the year. The head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, even said that the worst of the crisis had passed. So why is the situation heating up again?

There doesn't appear to be a single, unambiguous reason for the concerns about Spain. But a speech by newly elected Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on March 2 played a key role in fuelling renewed uncertainty about Spain's ability to service its debts.

The conservative prime minister announced that his country would not comply with the planned deficit target of 4.4 percent of gross domestic product for 2012, but would only cut its budget deficit to 5.8 percent. In itself, that was hardly surprising: The original target was somewhat ambitious, particularly given Spain's 2011 deficit of 8.5 percent. But by revising the target, Spain broke a promise to its EU partners without consulting them first. It was only later that Madrid and its fellow euro-zone states retroactively agreed on a target of 5.3 percent.

"That dealt a severe blow to Rajoy's credibility," says economist Jürgen Matthes of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW), which is closely aligned with employer associations. At the same time, however, he says it is incomprehensible why the EU is insisting on severe austerity targets despite the deep recession. "One should not force Spain to fall into the same trap as Greece," Matthes warns.

Deeper and Deeper

It could be this fear of suffering the same fate as Athens that is currently unsettling investors. In his short time in office, Rajoy has already had to revise the country's austerity plans. In addition to previously passed cuts of €27 billion for this year, over the Easter weekend he pushed for an additional €10 billion in cuts in health and education spending. The situation is reminiscent of the government in Athens, who continually announced new cuts but only managed to achieve one thing: pushing Greece deeper into recession.

In contrast, Spain has actually chosen "the right way," says Nicolaus Heinen, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. "The country needs to strike a careful balance between growth and austerity efforts." The issue of the deficit target being revised was mainly a communication problem, he argues. "It should have been announced earlier, ideally right after the boost provided by the ECB's loans."

In December and February, the ECB injected a total of around €1 trillion into the euro-zone banking system, providing banks with cheap three-year loans at 1 percent interest as part of the central bank's so-called long-term refinancing operation (LTRO). The money initially acted as a sedative on the nervous markets, because Italian and Spanish banks invested part of the borrowed cash in domestic sovereign bonds, just as the central bankers had been hoping.

Now, however, the effects of the mega-loans are wearing off in Spain. According to a Deutsche Bank estimate, Italian banks still have reserves of around €60 billion from the cash injection, but Spanish banks have already run out of their share of the funds. That's another reason why interest rates on Spanish bonds could now rise again.

Plan for Joint Spanish Bonds

Another factor is concerns that Madrid's austerity drive will not be sufficient in and of itself. A large part of the Spanish deficit is down to the 17 autonomous regions, which are similar to Germany's federal states. The regions are supposed to cut their budget deficits to 1.5 percent this year, but most of them are a long way from that target. The central region of Castilla-La Mancha, for example, managed to rack up a deficit of over 7 percent in 2011.

"What is happening in Spain is a miniature version of what is happening on a large scale in Europe," says Deutsche Bank analyst Nicolaus Heinen. "Some regions are running up debt, and the government finds it hard to control."

But that could soon change. Firstly, most of the regions now have conservative governments, which are likely to be more willing to cooperate with the central government. Secondly, Spain has adopted a German-style "debt brake" balanced budget legislation which will limit the country's structural deficit to 0.4 percent of GDP as of 2020 and also obliges the regions to cut spending.

Madrid could wield even greater influence using a different instrument. Economics Minister Luis de Guindos wants to draw up a plan for so-called "hispabonos" by the summer. This would allow the autonomous regions to jointly issue bonds with the Spanish government and thereby reduce the interest rates that they have to pay to borrow money. A similar idea has recently been proposed in Germany by some northern German states, and the model is also similar to the proposed euro bonds on the European level, which never got anywhere because of German resistance. "This discussion is far more advanced in Spain than in Germany," says Heinen. "On the national level, it is an effective tool."

Fostering Growth

For Spain, however, generating new growth is at least as important as reducing the budget deficit. The situation on the labor market remains dire, with unemployment at almost 23 percent. As a result, the country is pinning its hopes on exports. "Over the years, Spain has achieved relatively good export growth," says IW economist Jürgen Matthes, who recently published a new study on the subject. According to that report, Spain reduced its trade deficit -- the imbalance between imports and exports -- over the past four years from 5.8 percent of GDP to just 0.5 percent. Greece, by comparison, only managed to get its trade deficit down from 11.1 to 5.5 percent in the same period.

Spain's export success comes despite the fact that Spanish unit labor costs have, unlike in Germany, been rising strongly for many years. Economists such as Hans-Werner Sinn, head of Germany's influential Ifo Institute for Economic Research, have demanded that wages and prices in the euro zone's crisis-stricken countries be reduced by up to 30 percent as a result.

But Matthes disagrees. "We doubt that such harsh cuts are necessary," he says. After all, he points out, Spanish companies are already managing to notch up significant growth. "They are having greater success than the textbooks say they should."

[Rad]

SPIEGEL ONLINE
04/13/2012 01:06 PM

Israel's Other Temple: Research Reveals Ancient Struggle over Holy Land Supremacy

By Matthias Schulz

The Jews had significant competition in antiquity when it came to worshipping Yahweh. Archeologists have discovered a second great temple not far from Jerusalem that predates its better known cousin. It belonged to the Samaritans, and may have been edited out of the Bible once the rivalry had been decided.

Clad in gray coat, Aharon ben Ab-Chisda ben Yaacob, 85, is sitting in the dim light of his house. He strikes up a throaty chant, a litany in ancient Hebrew. He has a full beard and is wearing a red kippah on his head.

The man is a high priest -- and his family tree goes back 132 generations. He says: "I am a direct descendent of Aaron, the brother of the prophet Moses" -- who lived perhaps over 3,000 years ago.

Ab-Chisda is the spiritual leader of the Samaritans, a sect that is so strict that its members are not even allowed to turn on the heat on the Sabbath. They never eat shrimp and only marry among themselves. Their women are said to be so impure during menstruation that they are secluded in special rooms for seven days.

Outside, on the streets of Kiryat Luza, near Nablus, a cold wind is blowing. The village lies just below the summit of Mount Gerizim. There's a school, two shops and a site for sacrifices. This is home to 367 Samaritans. It's a small community.

Everyone here is required to attend religious services in the synagogue on Saturdays. "Every baby boy has to be circumcised precisely on the eighth day," says the high priest -- not beforehand, and not afterwards.

Most important of all: the sect only believes in the written legacy of Moses, the five books of the Pentateuch, also commonly known as the Torah. They reject all other scripture from the Bible.

Once in the Majority

From a historical perspective, the Samaritans and the Jews have a common lineage. The Old Testament recounts that 10 of the 12 tribes in the region of Samaria founded the state of Israel in the year 926 BC. The two other clans lived farther south, in the mountainous region of Judah, with its capital Jerusalem (see map).

In other words, the Samaritans were once in the majority. In ancient times, there were 300,000 of them -- perhaps even over a million. But their strictest law almost led to their downfall. It states: "None of you may settle outside the promised land."

As a result, while the Jews fled across the globe to escape the cruelty of foreign rulers, their relatives persevered in the land of their forefathers and suffered under Byzantine tyrants and merciless sultans. At the end of World War I, there were only 146 of them.

"Today we are doing better," says Ab-Chisda cheerily, as he gazes out the window. Now, together with another group in Holon near Tel Aviv, this religious community consists of 751 individuals.

But this population increase only took place because they broke with age-old traditions and rescinded the ban against mixed marriages. In 2004, five Jewish women from Ukraine and one from Siberia, all of them ready and willing to get married, were accepted into the community.

Nevertheless, due to inbreeding, they have a wide range of genetic defects. Trade journals have published studies on the forgotten children of God. They often suffer from muscle weakness and Usher syndrome, also known as deafblindness.

A Grim Fate

But their religion is alive and well. They all gather for Passover, a holiday where the men wear white robes and perform a great animal sacrifice.

During the ceremony, a priest cuts the throats of 50 lambs. Streams of blood flow through a stone channel into a hole, where they are burnt along with the intestines. The meat, which is cooked in a large earthen oven, must be completely consumed during the night -- otherwise it becomes unkosher.

But where do these archaic people come from?

It is a question that intrigues an increasing number of religious scholars. Recent discoveries show that the Samaritans suffered a grim fate. They were once the guardians of the Ark of the Covenant and the keepers of the Mosaic tradition. But then they became the victims of a smear campaign.

His hair windblown, Stefan Schorch stands in front of the synagogue in Kiryat Luza. An expert on the Old Testament, Schorch hails from the University of Halle-Wittenberg in eastern Germany and comes here often -- usually armed with a tape recorder. He works like an ethnologist would when studying a remote indigenous tribe.

Above all, Schorch is looking for sacred books.

It's 7:30 a.m., and a priest unlocks a small house of worship and disappears into a niche behind a heavy red curtain. Inside stands a safe filled with old volumes of the Pentateuch. "Unbelievable," says the researcher, as he leafs through "a completely preserved edition from the 14th century." He photographs each page of the tome. Then the priest locks it away again.

'One Main Difference'

There was a time when nearly every affluent family possessed such a precious handwritten book. Some of them reached Europe. Now, the professor, who comes from the historic birthplace of Martin Luther's Reformation, studies these texts, checking them line by line, and word by word. And he compares the Samaritan Torah with the Jewish version.

"Actually there's only one main difference," he says. Among the Jews, Jerusalem is the world's religious epicenter, whereas for the Samaritans it's Mount Gerizim.

But which Torah is the original? Until recently, the generally accepted school of thought was as follows: In the fourth century BC, the Samaritans split off as a radical sect. In the Bible, they appear as outsiders and idol worshipers; they are evil. The parable of the "good Samaritan" (Luke 10:25-37) offers a rather atypical portrayal of a member of this sect.

The historian Titus Flavius Josephus, himself a Jew, mentions that the apostates erected a shrine "in all haste" in the year 330 BC, as a rather dilettantish attempt to emulate the Temple in Jerusalem.

Increasingly, though, it looks as though the Bible has handed down a distorted picture of history. Papyrus scrolls recovered from Qumran on the Dead Sea, as well as a fragment of the Bible that recently surfaced on the market for antiquities, necessitate a "complete reassessment," says Schorch.

The Site of the Original Temple
Yet the most exciting indication of how history actually transpired has now been unearthed by Yitzhak Magen. Working behind security fences, the archaeologist has been digging on the windswept summit of Mount Gerizim.

His findings, which have only been partially published, are a virtual sensation: As early as 2,500 years ago, the mountain was already crowned with a huge, dazzling shrine, surrounded by a 96 by 98-meter (315 by 321-foot) enclosure. The wall had six-chamber gates with colossal wooden doors.

At the time, the Temple of Jerusalem was, at most, but a simple structure.

Magen has discovered 400,000 bone remains from sacrificial animals. Inscriptions identify the site as the "House of the Lord." A silver ring is adorned with the tetragrammaton YHWH, which stands for Yahweh.

All of this means that a vast, rival place of worship stood only 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Jerusalem.

It is an astonishing discovery. A religious war was raging among the Israelites, and the nation was divided. The Jews had powerful cousins who were competing with them for religious leadership in the Holy Land. The dispute revolved around a central question: Which location deserved the honor of being the hearth and burnt offering site of God Almighty?

Revising Holy Scripture

Researchers have a long way to go before they uncover all the details of this conflict. It's clear, however, that it was extremely acrimonious. Each side reviled the other. There was murder, mayhem and, ultimately, even the Holy Scripture was revised.

At first -- so much is clear -- the Samaritans had the upper hand. Indeed, compared with Jerusalem, Mount Gerizim enjoyed significantly older rights: In the great tale of the history of the chosen people, the mountain plays a key role.

Abraham, the progenitor of the Israelites -- who, according to legend, roamed through the Orient as a shepherd around 1500 BC -- stopped there because God had appeared to him in a wondrous vision. Later, Jacob the patriarch traveled there to build the original shrine.

In the fifth book of Moses, the mountain summit finally earns a prominent place in biblical history: After the flight from Egypt, the Israelites wandered through the Sinai desert for 40 years. At last, they reached the Jordan River from the east. Their old and weary leader gazed across the river to the promised land, where "milk and honey flow."

Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking of possession of the promised land.

Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine "made of stones" on Mount Gerizim and coat it with "plaster." Indeed, he said, this is "the place that the Lord has chosen."

No Mention of a 'Chosen Place'

That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem's priests probably spent a good deal of time revising, everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a "chosen place."

The word "Gerizim" has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on "Ebal." "By naming the mountain of the curses," says Schorch, "they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy."

Schorch dates the intervention to around 150 BC. The researcher stops short of calling it fraud, though, preferring to label it an "adaptation of the Bible to their own religious view."

But why was this ruse ultimately successful? Why did the minority win out? Didn't the opponent have the more populous country? A palace already stood in their capital city, Samaria, in the year 1000 BC. Ivory has been found there. At the time, Jerusalem was still little more than a village, with barely 1,500 inhabitants.

Researchers have solved this puzzle, and the answer even has a face: It sports a curly beard and wears a bronze helmet. Starting in the year 732 BC, the Assyrians used their chariots to advance to the Mediterranean and subjugate the state of Israel. The inhabitants were either impaled or taken into captivity.

This devastated the country. The land of the Lord had been overrun by violent hordes. Many fled to their cousins in Judah. Jerusalem's population soared to 15,000.

Drinking and Whoring Heathens

Strengthened by this influx, the priests there decided it was time for them to play the leading role in religious matters. Only a few years after the invasion, King Hezekiah persuaded all Israelites -- Jews and Samaritans alike -- to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He said this was the only place that still retained the freedom and purity to worship the Almighty. The neighboring country was, of course, occupied by drinking and whoring heathens.

To underscore their claim, the Jewish people wove an entire biblical tale around their small, southern kingdom. According to this story, around 1000 BC the biblical King David ruled from Jerusalem over a glorious kingdom. His son Solomon allegedly built in the city a temple made of cedar, "completely overlaid with gold." According to the Bible, over 180,000 workers toiled to build it.

Total nonsense: Not a single shred of archaeological evidence has ever been found to confirm the existence of Solomon's Temple.

The goal of the deception was clear, though: Judah's priests sought to magnify the glory of their own city. And they passed up no opportunity to vilify their rivals: In the Bible the Samaritans were nearly always portrayed as unsavory characters. They were also said to be ethnically impure because their blood had supposedly been mixed with that of foreign colonialists.

The book of Ezra even recounts that these "enemies" tried to hinder the reconstruction of the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem -- out of pure envy, because they didn't have one of their own.

In reality, though, at that time, a shining divine fortress had already stood for many years on Mount Gerizim. Magen, the archaeologist, has discovered jewelry, silver, a fine cosmetics set and a small golden bell from the splendid robe of a high priest.

Living in Peace

Around the year 180 BC, the ceremonial building grew to a size of roughly 200 by 200 meters. The Samaritans added a monumental staircase and rooms for "thousands of pilgrims." There were apparently huge crowds of devout visitors. None of this is mentioned in the Bible.

The dispute finally came to a head. In the year 128 BC, John Hyrcanos, a Jewish prince, ascended Mount Gerizim with an army and burned the proud sanctuary to the ground. Archaeologists have found a "burn layer" along with arrow heads, swords, daggers and lead missiles for slings.

The Samaritans never rebuilt their temple. From then on, the victors wrote the (biblical) history books and forced their rivals into oblivion.

And yet the "guardians of the law," as they call themselves, still exist today. When Mark Twain visited the region in 1867, he encountered the "sad, proud remnant of a once mighty community," which he stared at "just as one would stare at a living mastodon."

Today, this astounding religious community is better off. They have a seat in the Palestinian parliament and they maintain contacts with the United Nations. "We want to live in peace with everyone," says the high priest Ab-Chisda.

Despite their tragic history, the spiritual leader has not lost his sense of humor. In response to the question as to what the Samaritan paradise looks like, the old man hesitated briefly. Then, he said mischievously: "It must be a wonderful place. Nobody has ever returned to make a complaint."

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

[Rad]

meanwhile, and only in, the USA...........

Wells Fargo Now A Major Shareholder In For-Profit Prisons

By Susie Madrak

Even though crime rates in American have either stabilized or gone down, the incarceration rate (especially for people who are in this country illegally) has gone up - way up. (As this video points out, more people are being incarcerated on civil charges, not criminal.)

Naturally, as with most changes in this country, this has more to do with profit than anything else - and now we find that Wells Fargo is a major shareholder in for-profit prisons. Hmm. So this is what's taken the place of mortgages as the banking cash cow? From Salon:

    As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted. Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world’s prisoners.

    These developments are not unrelated.

    A driving force behind the push for ever-tougher sentences is the for-profit prison industry, in which Wells Fargo is a major investor. Flush with billions in bailout money and an economic system designed to siphon wealth from the working class to the idle rich, Wells Fargo has been busy expanding its stake in the GEO Group, the second largest private jailer in America.

        At the end of 2011, Wells Fargo was the company’s second-largest investor, holding 4.3 million shares valued at more than $72 million. By March 2012, its stake had grown to more than4.4 million shares worth $86.7 million.

    Unfortunately, it’s a safe investment. While a 50 percent growth in the number of human beings our society cages in rape factories may sound impressive – or perhaps the word is “revolting” – a study released last year by the Justice Policy Institute found that the private prison industry grew by more than 350 percent over the last decade and a half. While other industries of course benefit from state-granted privileges, companies like GEO profit by the state literally kidnapping and handing them clientèle, particularly as of late about-to-be-deported immigrants, of which President Barack Obama has ensured there is a steady, record-breaking supply.

    “All prisons are awful,” says Melanie Pinkert, an activist based in Washington, DC, who along with other members of Occupy DC’s “Criminal Injustice Committee” is helping lead a boycott of Wells Fargo, which just expanded to the nation’s capital. “But private prisons take it to the next level.” Indeed, a recent report from the U.S. Justice Department found that at one GEO-run juvenile facility in Mississippi, sexual abuse was endemic, “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.” According to the report, GEO staff demonstrated:

        Deliberate indifference to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth;
        Use of excessive use of force by [prison] staff on youth;
        Inadequate protection of youth from youth-on-youth violence;
        Deliberate indifference to youth at risk of self-injurious and suicidal behaviors; and
        Deliberate indifference to the medical needs of youth.

    These findings, shocking though they may seem, are not surprising. With an eye on maximizing quarterly profits, privately run facilities are even less inclined than state-run prisons to treat their involuntary customers humanely, skimping on health care and anything else that could hurt their bottom line, particularly programs aimed at reducing recidivism. As the ACLU noted in a report released late last year, “Not only is there little incentive to spend money on rehabilitation, but crime, at least in one sense, is good for private prisons: the more crimes that are committed, and the more individuals who are sent to prison, the more money private prisons stand to make.”

If you haven't closed your Wells Fargo account yet, this would be a good time to do so. But let's not pretend that closing our bank accounts is going to hold back the tide. There's very, very big money involved in sending people to jail for minor infractions (so much so that our political "leaders" won't even entertain the notion of legalizing marijuana) and it's only getting worse. Why, now we even lock up the mentally ill instead of treating them!

From Unholy Alliance: How the Private Prison Industry is Corrupting Our Democracy and Promoting Mass Incarceration, a recent report from Public Campaign and PICO National Network, here are some pertinent points:

    Through involvement in the leadership of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), private prison companies have played a key role in lobbying for and passing harsher sentencing for non-violent offenses including three-strike laws, mandatory sentencing, and truth-in-sentencing. They are also behind the recent spate of anti-immigrant state laws that are putting more and more immigrants behind bars -- the new profit center for the prison industrial complex.

    Private prison companies employ legions of lobbyists to push for policies that support their bottom line. Since 2001, three major prison companies, CCA, GEO Group and Cornell, have spent over $22 million lobbying Congress. Recent lobbying by CCA and GEO Group includes efforts to increase funding to Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE).  Since 2003, CCA has employed 204 of lobbyists in 32 states, and GEO Group has employed by 79 lobbyists in 17 states.

    Private prison companies also influence policymaking by strategically supporting political campaigns. At the federal level, the political action committees and executives of private prison companies have given at least $3.3 million to political parties, candidates, and their political action committees since 2001. The private prison industry has given more than $7.3 million to state candidates and political parties since 2001, including $1.9 million in 2010, the highest amount in the past decade.


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click the below link to view a report on this by Al Jazeera News..............

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAKL3Rl_Ihc

[Rad]

SPIEGEL ONLINE
04/14/2012 01:20 PM

The New Power in the Middle East: Syria's Fate Will Be Determined By Turkey

By Maximilian Popp

Europe and the United States are delaying action in the Syria conflict -- yielding the field to Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan is presenting himself as a crisis manager, organizing aid for refugees and threatening to invoke NATO's mutual defense clause. By doing so, Ankara is cementing its status as a major regional power in the Middle East.

The images emanating from the Syrian-Turkish border in recent months have been horrendous. They show thousands of Syrians fleeing dictator Bashar Assad's henchmen. Many are wounded and they speak of torture, rape and executions.

But there have also been images of humanity. Turkey has erected tent camps for Syrians seeking safety. The country has also set up emergency medical facilities to treat the wounded. And neighboring countries have provided food supplies.

"Can you still remember how the African refugees from Tunisia and Libya were treated in Italy during the Arab Spring?" asks Ertugrul Özkök, the former editor in chief of the Turkish national daily Hürriyet. Back then, human rights groups criticized the thoughtless European Union policy of sealing off the Italian island of Lampedusa like a fortress to keep the refugees from entering Europe. Now Özkök is pointing out how ironic it is that much-maligned Turkey, of all countries, is defending European values in the current crisis.

But the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also pursuing its own interests in the conflict:

    Syria is an important trading partner.

    Kurds live in both Turkey and Syria. The unrest poses a threat to stability in a region in which a latent danger already persists through the confrontations between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers Movement (PKK) terrorist organization.

    Finally, the Syrian refugees create a humanitarian challenge for Turkey that the country is no longer truly capable of shouldering on its own.

Indeed, it isn't altruism alone driving Erdogan to push for Syrian dictator Assad's fall. Nor is it a result of the "solidarity with our Muslim brothers in Syria," as media aligned with the government in Ankara are fond of reporting. Still, even Erdogan's detractors have acknowledged his efforts to tackle the chaos.

But more importantly, because Europe and the United States are ducking away from the issue, the fate of the Syrian people is currently being decided in Ankara.

'Turkey Will be More Important than Britain'

In his column in Britain's Guardian newspaper this week, Oxford University historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote that "Europe has left Syria to a distinctly Ottoman fate." Ash criticized the West, arguing it should have put a stop to the murder in Syria with military intervention weeks ago. But in contrast to the Libya conflict, the political will is lacking this time. United States President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are both facing elections; and Germany, for its part, doesn't lead war deployments for a good reason.

Instead, other powers are now taking the lead in the Middle East. "In the near future, Turkey will be more important than Britain," Ash writes. "Iran than Germany, Saudi Arabia than France, Russia than America." In the Syrian conflict, one starts to see the emergence of a new world order described by US-based journalist Fareed Zakaria as the "Rise of the Rest."

It was telling that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan would choose his trip to China this week as the venue for an astounding public statement. "NATO has responsibilities to protect the Turkish border," he told reporters, threatening to invoke Article 5 of the alliance's treaty, which stipulates that an attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members. The push is an audacious one. It is true that Syria fired on a refugee camp in Turkey, killing two Syrians. But Erdogan knows that would hardly be sufficient grounds for invoking NATO's mutual defense clause, a move last taken following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Turkey Is Establishing Itself as a Global Power

Nor is that what the Turkish prime minister is seeking. Erdogan is not as naïve as some Western reporters like to believe -- even though they should know better by now, following 10 years of rule by his Muslim-conservative AKP party. His threat is well-calculated. He is signalling to those still ruling Syria that they will be held accountable by their opponents -- and he is showing the West that Turkey currently dictates the rules of play in the Middle East.

For some time politicians in Ankara have been discussing the question of how a military strike against Syria could be legitimized under international law. A scenario that would have much better prospects than having German and American NATO troops on Turkish soil appears to be a treaty between Turkey and Syria that was agreed upon at the peak of the Kurdish conflict in 1998. Under the terms of the Adana accord, Syria agreed not to undertake any action that would jeopardize the security and stability of Turkey. Turkish diplomats have repeatedly mentioned this treaty during recent days amid talk of a military deployment in Syria or a military buffer zone along the border.

Turkey, disparaged only a few years ago as the "sick man on the Bosporus," has since established itself as a global power. Erdorgan is pursuing a strategy that observers are describing as "Neo-Ottomanism," making his influence felt far beyond Turkey's own borders.

After his election victory last June, his third in a row, Erdogan announced that it wasn't just a victory for Istanbul and Ankara, but just as much so for Beirut and Damascus. In this crisis-riddled region, Erdogan, like a sultan, is increasingly setting the agenda.

[Rad]

UN approves first observers for Syria

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press

For the first time since the Syrian conflict began more than a year ago, the U.N. Security Council on Saturday united behind a legally binding resolution calling for violence to end immediately and peace talks to begin.

The resolution authorized the deployment of the first wave of U.N. military observers to monitor a fragile cease-fire between the Syrian government and opposition fighters.

It also called for "the urgent, comprehensive, and immediate implementation" of international envoy Kofi Annan's six-point peace plan.

Russia and China vetoed two previous resolutions that would have condemned Syrian President Bashar Assad's government for its bloody crackdown on protesters, calling them unbalanced because they demanded that the government stop attacks, but not the opposition. Russia, Syria's most powerful ally, accused Western nations of seeking regime change.

The cease-fire, which formally took effect Thursday, is at the center of Annan's peace plan, which is aimed at ending more than a year of bloodshed that has killed over 9,000 people, according to the United Nations, and to launch inclusive Syrian-led talks on the country's political future.

But scattered violence continued on Saturday, sparking concern among council members.

"We hope that in the immediate term, this will open the way to a cessation of brutal violence, and we hope that we'll be able to say to the Syrian people that the time of indiscriminate violence is finally behind it," said France's U.N. Ambassador Gerard Araud.

Still, Saturday's attacks on the key city of Homs "lead to some doubts about the reality of the commitment of the Syrian regime," Araud said.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice called the government attacks in Homs a violation of the cease-fire.

The resolution calls on both sides to immediately "cease all armed violence in all its forms" and condemns "the widespread violations of human rights by the Syrian authorities, as well as any human rights abuses by armed groups."

Annan told the council Thursday that Syria failed to keep a commitment to pull troops and heavy weapons out of cities and towns, and the resolution calls on Assad's government to "visibly" implement this pledge.

The resolution calls for the deployment of an advance team of up to 30 unarmed military observers to initiate contacts with both sides and begin to report on whether there has been "a full cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties."

The council said it intends to immediately establish a larger U.N. supervision mission after consultations between Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Syrian government.

Deployment of a larger force will be "subject to a sustained cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties."

Annan's spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, has said that Annan - who is an envoy on behalf of the U.N. and the Arab League - envisions a mission with about 250 observers. Troops already in the region from Asian, African and South American countries acceptable to Assad's regime could be used for the mission, he said.

Annan called for speedy deployment of U.N. monitors and Fawzi told a news conference in Geneva on Friday that an advance team of "around 10 or 12" observers, that could quickly be increased to 30, was "standing by to board planes and to get themselves on the ground as soon as possible" once the Security Council approved their deployment.

The resolution calls on the Syrian government to ensure "full, unimpeded, and immediate freedom of movement and access" for the advance team and the larger mission that will follow, and allow the observers "freely and privately to communicate with individuals throughout Syria without retaliation against any person as a result of interaction with the mission."

In the debate on the resolution adopted Saturday, Russia submitted a rival text to the U.S. and Western-backed draft eliminating those assurances, and raised questions Friday evening about the final draft, which kept them. But Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters before Saturday's vote that Moscow "was satisfied" and would vote "yes."

Churkin told the council after the vote that the original resolution is "now more balanced."

"Now we are at an extremely critical juncture," he said, "All parties must stop" the violence.

"There have been too many casualties, too much suffering ... with too many destructive consequences if it ratchets up," not only for Syria but for the region, Churkin warned.

The original Western draft described the council as determined to consider "further measures" - which could include sanctions that Syria's allies Russia and China have opposed - if Syria does not follow through on its commitments. This language was weakened in the final resolution to say the council would consider "further steps."

The resolution was sponsored by the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Colombia and Morocco, the Arab representative on the 15-member council.

Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told reporters Friday that before any observers can be deployed, there would have to be a technical agreement on how the U.N. force will operate, Annan would have to make an independent report on the situation in Syria, and the Syrian government would have to approve the whole package.