Check It Out for Tuesday, April 28th
Chan Akya at AsiaTimes comments about the swine flu and its eerie comparison to the media's missing all the signs of the financial crisis.
"...what the CDC and the WHO are saying above is that the potential pandemic is more deadly than what was seen previously with the bird flu virus; as it is a new strain, there are few if any people with the immunity to handle the outbreak, and by hitting the strongest members of the population the virus has a latent tendency to spread faster, and it is already manifest in many regions of the world.
"As per its update at 21:38 GMT on April 27, the WHO raised its pandemic alert to four from three, which is still two short of the six required to signify an actual pandemic.
"The reason for my angst is not so much the actual reporting of the above news, as it is clear that while some people including me are classifying this as a pandemic, others including the responsible officers at the CDC/WHO aren't yet there. That is a matter of opinion: when I see a disease with 2,000 recorded cases in one country over the course of a few days with a mortality rate of close to 7.5% and the same disease presents itself in numerous other countries, it is cause for alarm. For doctors and government officials, different standards apply, so one can live with that.
"However, the media have once again missed the beat here. Over the past few weeks, the gravity-defying performance of the stock markets was led by the doubling of financial stocks - the broad KBW index of US financial stocks almost doubled from its mid-March lows - even as overall economic news, including confidence, industrial production, consumption and most importantly, employment, all took a nosedive.
"Every ounce of bad news has been greeted by a response from government and market figures suggesting that the "worst is over", that is, that economic growth appears negative now but will soon resume a positive trajectory, perhaps as early as 2010.
"Given the importance of these optimistic assumptions to the overall market story, wouldn't you expect more folks in the financial media to focus a bit on the kind of developments that could derail these projections? After all, the bird flu, while a less virulent strain of the species-jumping virus than appears to be involved in the present swine flu outbreak, did take a rather large bite out of the economic growth of Asian countries in 2004.
"Viewed from a different perspective, the pandemic is but a natural manifestation of what is being seen in the global financial markets, where some investors have railed against the excesses of Western countries borrowing well beyond their means to fund a lifestyle that proved unsustainable."
Jeremy Scahill at Rebel Reports via CommonDreams writes about Obama's Iraq resembling "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
"Remember when Barack Obama made that big announcement at Camp Lejeune about how all US combat troops were going to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30? Liberals jumped around with joy, praising Obama for ending the war so that they could focus on their "good war" in Afghanistan.
"Of course, the celebrations were and remain unwarranted. Obama's Iraq plan is virtually identical to the one on Bush's table on January 19, 2009. Obama has just rebranded the occupation, sold it to liberals and dropped the term "Global War on Terror" while, for all practical purposes, continuing the Bush era policy (that's why leading Republicans praised Obama's plan). In the real world, US military commanders have said they are preparing for an Iraq presence for another 15-20 years, the US embassy is the size of Vatican City, there is no official plan for the withdrawal of contractors and new corporate mercenary contracts are being awarded. The SoFA Agreement between the US and Iraq gives the US the right to extend the occupation indefinitely and to continue intervening militarily in Iraq ad infinitum. All it takes is for the puppets in Baghdad to ask nicely...
"In the latest episode of the "Occupation Rebranded" mini-series, President Obama is preparing to scrap the June 30 withdrawal timeline.
"As The New York Times reports: 'The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials. Some parts of Baghdad also will still have combat troops.'
"Camp Victory is of tremendous strategic importance to the US occupation. In addition to the military's share of Baghdad International Airport, it includes four bases-Victory, Liberty, Striker and Slayer-as well as the US-run prison "Camp Cropper." That's where the US keeps its "high value" prisoners. While the US officially handed control of Forward Operating Base Freedom to "Iraqi control," the US military is keeping the swimming pool.
"Meanwhile, future plans are being laid for other US bases. Camp Prosperity is going to house US contractors and other personnel, while at Camp Union III housing is being built for several thousand soldiers, trainers and advisers.
Jason Leopold at Public Record writes that an FBI email says Bush authorized abuse of Iraqis.
"Senior FBI agents stationed in Iraq in 2004 alleged in an e-mail that President George W. Bush signed an executive order approving the use of dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.
"The FBI e-mail -- dated May 22, 2004 -- followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential executive order.
""The May 2004 FBI e-mail stated that the FBI interrogation team in Iraq understood that despite revisions in the executive order that occurred after the furor over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the presidential sanctioning of harsh interrogation tactics had not been rescinded.
"Questions about the alleged executive order signed by Bush first surfaced in December 2004. But the White House emphatically denied that any such presidential executive order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”
"Gonzales told reporters that the abuses, which included sexual humiliation of Iraqi men, were isolated to some rogue U.S. soldiers who acted on their own and not as result of orders being handed down from high-level officials inside the Bush administration.
“ 'The president has not directed the use of specific interrogation techniques,'Gonzales said on June 22, 2004. 'There has been no presidential determination necessity or self-defense that would allow conduct that constitutes torture.'
"But the FBI e-mail’s reference to an executive order describing specific harsh interrogation techniques, allegedly approved by President Bush, appeared to contradict Gonzales’s assertions."
And Liliana Segura at AlterNet writes about the soaring rate of pet abandonment a sign of the deepening economic crisis.
"Beginning last year and well into 2009, a disturbing media trend emerged, as local news outlets across the country began reporting different versions of the same sad tale: Dogs, cats and other animals were being found abandoned inside and outside of shuttered homes, the "silent victims," apparently, of the foreclosure crisis.
"As more and more Americans have lost their homes to the wave of foreclosures that has swept the nation, a shocking portion of them, whether due to an inability or an unwillingess to find homes for their animals after being rendered homeless themselves, have simply left their pets behind.
" 'This has really become an epidemic,' Allie Phillips, director of Public Policy at the American Humane Association told the Detroit News earlier this month. According to her estimates, with some 8,000 houses going into foreclosure every day, from 15,000 to 26,000 more animals are in danger of losing their homes daily.
"Not all pets have been left to fend for themselves, of course. After all, most states consider it a crime abandon animals (although such anti-cruelty laws are not strictly enforced). But an untold number have been given up because the owners had no other choice.
"The Detroit News tells the story of a woman who came in with her son to give up a 9-year-old purebred Yorkshire terrier after losing their home. 'They were just bawling, but they had no place to live,' said Kayla Allen, director of the Michigan Animal Rescue League in Pontiac.
'If an owner turns (a pet) in to a shelter, they are often put down immediately.'
"What we've always known is that when times are hard for people, they're hard for their pets,' Stephen Zawistowski, vice president at the ASPCA told the Associated Press last January. But with the unprecedented foreclosure crisis now compounded by a broader economic catastrophe, the landscape is looking particularly bleak. 'According to national financial estimates, approximately 1 in 171 homes in the United States is in danger of foreclosure due to the subprime mortgage crisis,' Zawistowski said in a statement released by the ASPCA in February. And considering that approximately 63 percent of U.S. households have at least one pet-plus, hundreds of thousands of pets are in danger of being abandoned or relinquished to animal shelters across the country."
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