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The APC Blog
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger

Now that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner isn’t going to impose pay restrictions on bailed out Wall Street executives, it’s critical to remember that severe economic inequality was a major factor in the financial meltdown. Our tax code funnels money into the hands of our wealthiest citizens, which means that our financial system protects the interests of the affluent—not the the average citizen. The broad divergence between our core democratic values and the existing U.S. economic structure must become part of the public debate over financial reform.

As Les Leopold notes in a roundtable discussion with GritTV’s Laura Flanders, much of the Wall Street meltdown can be traced to a steady redistribution of wealth to the wealthy dating back to the Reagan years. Poor people, after all, do not have money to invest in the Wall Street speculation machine. By 2007, the financial world accounted for over 40% of U.S. corporate profits, an astounding percentage for a business intended to facilitate the operation of other industries. According to Leopold, we need to find constructive ways to shrink the financial sector, like taxing Wall Street transactions to move money into the real economy or imposing meaningful pay caps on financial jobs.

Pay for citizens who live outside the executive class has been steadily falling for decades. As Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati note for AlterNet, weekly wages for average Americans are now below 1970s levels after adjusting for inflation, while CEO payouts have exploded. So far, President Barack Obama has been hesitant to fight economic inequality at either end of the spectrum. Remember the promises he made to curb extravagant CEO pay on Wall Street back when the AIG bonuses were generating outrage back in February? Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has already made them irrelevant, eliminating a $500,000/year salary cap.

Altpress for more

By Stephen Lendman – Chicago

Besides waging perpetual wars, nothing better reveals America’s imperial agenda than its hundreds of global bases – for offense, not defense at a time the US hasn’t had an enemy since the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.

So when they don’t exist, they’re invented as former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles W. Freeman, Jr., suggested in a May 24, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs:
“When our descendants look back on the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, they will be puzzled. The end of the Cold War relieved Americans of almost all international anxieties.” As the world’s sole remaining superpower, “We did not rise to the occasion.”
“We are engaged in a war, a global war on terror, a long war, we are told….How can a war with no defined ends beyond the avoidance of retreat ever reach a convenient stopping point? How can we win (any war let alone the hearts and minds of millions) with an enemy so ill-understood that we must invent a nonexistent ideology” for justification.

In his 2006 book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” Chalmers Johnson discussed the known number of foreign US bases by size and branch of service. According to the Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report (BSR) through 2005, it totaled 737 but likely exceeds 1000 today with so many new ones built since then – some known, others secret and always others planned.

Johnson also highlighted the fallout – unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, and abusive soldiers committing crimes that include rape and murder that often go unpunished under provisions in US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
An excerpt from his book reads:
“Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies.

Palestine Chronicle for more
(Submitted by Ingrid Mork)

(Submitted by reader)

July 2009 Scientific American Magazine
By Peter F. MacNeilage, Lesley J. Rogers and Giorgio Vallortigara

The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates

Key Concepts:
• The authors have proposed that the specialization of the brain’s two hemispheres was already in place when vertebrates arose 500 million years ago.
• The left hemisphere originally seems to have focused in general on controlling well-established patterns of behavior; the right specialized in detecting and responding to unexpected stimuli.
• Both speech and right-handedness may have evolved from a specialization for the control of routine behavior.
• Face recognition and the processing of spatial relations may trace their heritage to a need to sense predators quickly.

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind.

Those beliefs fit well with the view that people have a special evolutionary status. Biologists and behavioral scientists generally agreed that right-handedness evolved in our hominid ancestors as they learned to build and use tools, about 2.5 million years ago. Right-handedness was also thought to underlie speech. Perhaps, as the story went, the left hemisphere simply added sign language to its repertoire of skilled manual actions and then converted it to speech. Or perhaps the left brain’s capacity for controlling manual action extended to controlling the vocal apparatus for speech. In either case, speech and language evolved from a relatively recent manual talent for toolmaking. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, was thought to have evolved by default into a center for processing spatial relations, after the left hemisphere became specialized for handedness.
Scientific American for more

A.G. NOORANI

The party faces two distinct but related crises, organisational and existential.

“When the members drop off, the main body cannot be insensible of its approaching dissolution. Even the violence of their proceedings is a signal of despair. Like broken tenants, who have had warning to quit the premises, they curse their landlord, destroy the fixtures, throw everything into confusion, and care not what mischief they do to the estate.”
EVERY word of Junius’ censure on the abrupt resignation from the Cabinet of the Duke of Grafton, delivered on February 14, 1770, applies to the political pornography that is the public feuding in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Not one of the performers has cared a jot for the party while staging the obscene drama in public, least of all the erstwhile Prime Minister-in-waiting Lal Krishna Advani and his ambitious protege Arun Jaitley whom he has tried to anoint as his successor. Advani, the ace manipulator and survivor, stands stripped of moral authority. So are his opponents.
In this fight for power, the honours between them are evenly divided. None of the excuses either side cites for the electoral defeat make sense. Criticism of a shrill style and advocacy of moderation come strangely from the shrillest of the lot, Arun Jaitley, who rasps bitter comments with oracular pauses and was the staunchest supporter of Narendra Modi in 2002 and since.

Frontline for more

ISTANBUL – Lawyers in many main court districts in Istanbul are halting their free bar-appointed defense attorney services in response to an order from the Finance Ministry to pay taxes on the money they receive for case-related expenditures such as transportation and photocopies. Lawyers say the order prevents them from defending the rights of the poor

Until 10 days ago, a penniless criminal suspect arrested in Istanbul could turn to one of 4,000 bar-appointed lawyers for legal aid, with the fees paid for by the state. But now, indigent suspects are on their own.

The disappearance of free legal services comes amid a dispute between lawyers and various government agencies, including the Finance Ministry, which has sought to retroactively tax the money paid to lawyers by the state. In the shell-game-like dispute over the money trail from government to lawyers, payments began drying up some months ago in various court districts, and not for the first time. When the Finance Ministry moved two weeks ago to tax last year’s payments, it was the last straw for lawyers, leading them to stop providing the free services.

“It was first in 1992 that the poor had the right to benefit from free attorneys; after that, the greatest reason for the end of torture in prisons, and especially at police stations, was our colleagues. I am afraid we will experience a return to the past,” said Turgay Demirci, an administrative board member of the Istanbul Bar, which is responsible for bar-appointed attorneys.

“The bar-appointed-attorney system is a legal structure to defend the rights of the poor against the state. Where a lawyer cannot enter, rights are violated inevitably,” said Halil ?brahim Erdo?an, the lawyer responsible for the Bak?rköy district. Attorneys who spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review said the current system prevents the full implementation of this right.

The issue is not a new one. Two years ago lawyers in Istanbul stopped providing services when they were unable to get their fees from the state. The issue seems more complicated this time.

Hurriyet for more

By Anwar Iqbal

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama, in an exclusive interview to Dawn, has said that he believes the Pakistani state is strong enough to win the military offensive against the extremists.

In this first-ever one-on-one interview by any US president to the Pakistani media, Mr Obama assured the Pakistani nation that he has no desire to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or send US troops inside the country.

The US president also emphasised the need for resuming the dialogue process between India and Pakistan, which was stalled after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November last year.

The interview covered a wide-range of subjects — from the controversy involving the Iranian presidential election to Mr Obama’s speech in Cairo earlier this month in which he called for a new beginning between the Muslim and the Western worlds.

The venue, the White House diplomatic room with murals of early settlers, brought out the importance of Mr Obama’s historic victory in last year’s general election.

Close to the murals — under the watchful eyes of George Washington — sat a man who overcame gigantic hurdles to become America’s first non-White president.

Here was a man tasked with finding a graceful end to two unpopular wars — in Iraq and Afghanistan — and to steer America, and the rest of the world, out of an unprecedented economic crisis.
Dawn for more

By Ian Pannell
BBC News, Kabul

Former detainee: ‘They put medicine in our drink to prevent us sleeping’
Allegations of abuse and neglect at a US detention facility in Afghanistan have been uncovered by the BBC.
Former detainees have alleged they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs at the Bagram military base.
The BBC interviewed 27 former inmates of Bagram around the country over a period of two months.
The Pentagon has denied the charges and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.
All the men were asked the same questions and they were all interviewed in isolation.
Ill-treatment
They were held at times between 2002 and 2008 and they were all accused of belonging to or helping al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
None were charged with any offence or put on trial; some even received apologies when they were released.
Just two of the detainees said they had been treated well.
Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the interviews: physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers.
BBC for more

More factors should be considered than depression among moms, experts say.

HealthDay Reporter by Steven Reinberg

TUESDAY, June 30 — Don’t automatically blame mom: A crying, colicky baby can be just as much the result of dad’s state of mind, Dutch researchers report.
Other studies have found that depression among mothers can be related to excessive crying or colic, a common problem with newborns, but the researchers said that little was known about whether fathers’ emotions and behavior also have an effect.
“Up to now, almost all attention went to the prenatal effects of maternal depression on child development, leading to the development of detection and treatment programs that focused on mental well-being of mothers,” said lead researcher Dr. Mijke P. van den Berg, a psychiatrist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
“This study showed the importance of taking paternal factors and well-being during pregnancy into account, next to maternal,” she said.
The report is published in the July issue of Pediatrics.
To see how parental depression was related to excessive crying, van den Berg’s team gathered data on symptoms of depression among parents of 4,426 infants who were 2 months old. Excessive crying was defined as crying for more than three hours a day on more than three days in the past week.
Overall, just 2.5 percent of the infants in the study fit the excessive crying criteria. But, the researchers found a 30 percent higher risk for depression among parents whose infant cried excessively.
“This finding could not be attributed to co-existing depressive symptoms of the mother, which is already known to be a risk factor for excessive infant crying,” van den Berg said. It could be related to genetics, a depressed father or, indirectly, through factors such as marital, family or economic stress, she said.
In fact, a dad with symptoms of depression was twice as likely to have an infant who cried excessively as was a dad who was not depressed, the study found.
“Fathers do matter, so take care for the mental well-being of fathers during pregnancy,” van den Berg said.
ABC news for more