It’s Important to Remember the Lies
Click here for a stark remider of the lies Bush, Blair and Howard told us to justify their slaughter of Iraqis.
Category: Archive
Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
States called on to act on water recycling
The Federal Government has used the latest climate figures to reiterate calls for state governments to act on water recycling.
Preliminary figures from the Bureau of Meteorology’s national climate report show 2006 was Australia’s 9th warmest year on record.
The parliamentary secretary for the environment, Greg Hunt, says the figures also show there was above average rainfall overall, but not in the biggest cities.
"It’s been the third driest year in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane – the south-east catchments," he said.
"So that’s quite significant. It’s consistent with the bureau’s long-term trend that there will be more rain in the north, but less rain in the south and south-east."
Mr Hunt says that has implications for state governments.
"There’s no longer any acceptance of dumping recyclable water off our coast," he said.
"National recycling schemes, major recycling schemes in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are a priority for industry and agriculture, there’s just no question about that."
The full report is due for release tomorrow.
© 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
A grass-roots push for a ‘low carbon diet’
David Gershon’s book guides readers through a series of behavioral changes to reduce their ‘carbon footprint.’
Last June, David Gershon saw Al Gore’s global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The time was ripe, he realized, to finish an old project.
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| CARBON CUTTER: David Gershon has written a step-by-step program to lower one’s carbon footprint. COURTESY OF DAVID GERSHON |
In 2000, Mr. Gershon created a step-by-step program, à la Weight Watchers, designed to reduce a person’s carbon footprint. The idea received positive reviews after a pilot program was run in Portland, Ore., but it eventually fell by the wayside for lack of interest. "The world wasn’t ready," says Gershon, who heads the Empowerment Institute in Woodstock, N.Y., a consulting organization that specializes in changing group behavior.
But since then, Americans witnessed the catastrophic fury of hurricane Katrina, which, if nothing else, showed them what a major city looks like underwater. A substantial body of evidence supporting the idea of human-induced global warming accumulated. And, of course, Mr. Gore made his movie.
Attitudes toward global warming had shifted considerably. (Indeed, a recent poll by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that nearly half of Americans cited global warming as the No. 1 environmental concern; in 2003, only one-fifth considered it that critical.)
Gershon put his nose to the grindstone, and a slim workbook titled "Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds" was the result. Replete with checklists and illustrations, the user-friendly guide is a serious attempt at changing American energy-consumption behavior.
Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein
The old monster swung from the gallows this morning at 6 am Baghdad time. His Shiite executioners danced around his body.
Saddam Hussain was one of the 20th century’s most notorious tyrants, though the death toll he racked up is probably exaggerated by his critics. The reality was bad enough.
The tendency to treat Saddam and Iraq in a historical vacuum, and in isolation from the superpowers, however, has hidden from Americans their own culpability in the horror show that has been Iraq for the past few decades. Initially, the US used the Baath Party as a nationalist foil to the Communists. Then Washington used it against Iran. The welfare of Iraqis themselves appears to have been on no one’s mind, either in Washington or in Baghdad.
The British-installed monarchy was overthrown by an officer’s coup in 1958, led by Abdul Karim Qasim. The US was extremely upset, and worried that the new regime would not be a reliable oil exporter and that it might leave the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which the US had put together against the Soviet Union (grouping Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Britain and the US). (Qasim did leave the pact in 1959, which according to a US official of that time, deeply alarmed Washington.)
Iraq in the 1940s and 1950s had become an extremely unequal society, with a few thousand (mostly Sunni Arab) families owning half of the good land. On their vast haciendas, poor rural Shiites worked for a pittance. In the 1950s, two new mass parties grew like wildfire, the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab Baath Socialist Party. They attracted first-generation intellectuals, graduates of the rapidly expanding school system, as well as workers and peasants. The crushing inequalities of Iraq under the monarchy produced widespread anger.
Qasim undertook land reform and founded a new section of Baghdad, in the northeast, which he called Revolution Township, where rural Shiites congregated as they came to the capital seeking work as day laborers (it is now Sadr City, where a majority of Baghdadis live). The US power elite of the time wrongly perceived Qasim as a dangerous radical who coddled the Communists.
In Somalia, a reckless U.S. proxy war
Salim Lone
Tribune Media Services
Undeterred by the horrors and setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, the Bush administration has opened another battlefront in the Muslim world. With full U.S. backing and military training, at least 15,000 Ethiopian troops have entered Somalia in an illegal war of aggression against the Union of Islamic Courts, which controls almost the entire south of the country.
As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there. The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea. General John Abizaid, the current U.S. military chief of the Iraq war, was in Ethiopia this month, and President Hu Jintao of China visited Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia earlier this year to pursue oil and trade agreements.
The U.S. instigation of war between Ethiopia and Somalia, two of world’s poorest countries already struggling with massive humanitarian disasters, is reckless in the extreme. Unlike in the run-up to Iraq, independent experts, including from the European Union, were united in warning that this war could destabilize the whole region even if America succeeds in its goal of toppling the Islamic Courts.
An insurgency by Somalis, millions of whom live in Kenya and Ethiopia, will surely ensue, and attract thousands of new anti-U.S. militants and terrorists.
U.S. Embassy Is Warning Beijing on Iran Gas Deal
http://www.nysun.com/article/45816
WASHINGTON The Bush administration and Congress are warning that a proposed $16 billion deal between a Chinese company and Iran could trigger economic penalties under an American law aimed at starving Iran of funding for terrorism and nuclear weapons.
Officials at the American embassy in China delivered a demarche Saturday in Beijing. They demanded an explanation of the deal from Chinese government officials and warned them that it could trigger a 1996 law, the Iran Libya Sanctions Act. The law prohibits foreign firms that invest more than $10 million in Iran’s energy sector from raising capital in American financial markets.
The Democrat from California who will take over next week as chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Tom Lantos, said his panel will "closely examine" the deal next week to see if the sanctions would apply. The ranking Republican on that committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, said she will also be looking closely at the deal.
The Chinese company involved in the deal, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC, is state controlled but has some independent directors, including a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company attracted American press attention in 2005, when it launched a $18.5 billion bid for the American oil company Unocal that it eventually withdrew amid congressional opposition.