Martians React To The Rover Landing
Posted on August 29, 2012 in Political Cartoons
Luckily, they only have water.
The Bankers Who Broke The World
Posted on August 29, 2012 in Articles
The Article: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Matthew Yglesias in Slate.
The Text: I’ve come to believe that the best book about the global recession of 2008-present is Liaqart Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, a history of central banking in the interwar period. The mistakes being made today are not “the same” as the mistakes of the central bankers of the 1930s but the basic plot is the same. This morning the Bank of England team up with the European Central Bank to issue a steady-as-she-goes policy statement, just as the Federal Reserve did yesterday.
To see how disappointing this is, imagine a very different world. This is a world where the US economy is growing at a modest pace but with an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent. That number is slowly falling and the employment-to-population ratio is slowly rising. The United Kingdom is in similar shape. Across the European continent, joblessness is a bit higher than that in a few countries but only absolute cranks are talking about the idea of the eurozone busting up. It’s a world, in other words, where everything is basically fine.
The Deepwater Horizon Explosion
Posted on August 28, 2012 in Images
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit operated by BP exploded, killing 11 people and resulting in one of the greatest environmental disasters in American history.
A History Of American Assassination
Posted on August 28, 2012 in Articles
The Article: Assassination Nation by Doug Noble in CounterPunch.
The Text:
“A broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced counterinsurgency as the prevailing expression of the American way of war.”
–Andrew Bacevich
This spring the US drone killing program has come out of the closet. Attorney General Eric Holder publicly defended the drone killing of an American citizen, while Obama’s counter terrorism czar John Brennan publicly explained and justified the target killing program. And a New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane chronicled Obama’s personal role in vetting a secret “Kill List.”
This striking new transparency, the official acknowledgment for the first time of a broad-based US assassination and targeted killing program, has resulted from the unprecedented and controversial visibility of drone warfare. Drones now make news every day, and those of us who have been protesting their use for years have heightened their visibility in the public eye, forcing official acknowledgment and fostering worldwide scrutiny. This new scrutiny focuses not only on drone use but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the targeted killing itself – and the “kill lists” that make them possible.
This new exposure has set off a firestorm of reaction around the globe. Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism told Democracy Now! “The kill list got really heavy coverage … newspapers have all expressed significant concern about the existence of the kill list, the idea of this level of executive power.” A Washington Post editorial noted that “No president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Becker and Shane of the Times pronounced Obama’s role “without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war …” [7] And former president Jimmy Carter insisted, in a recent editorial in The New York Times, “We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these [drone] attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.” [8]
PBH Network On Instagram, New Features, And More!
Posted on August 27, 2012 in Articles
We’ve made some big changes at the PBH Network over the past few months. First and foremost, we’ve made it easier to navigate between the PBH Network by adding a network-wide header and footer with the most recent posts from each site. Recent posts are simply listed on the footer; on the header, just hover your mouse over the site you want to explore to see the most recent posts:
We’ve redesigned two of our sites: PBH2 – Video Before It’s Viral and Runt of the Web. PBH2 now has a custom video player while both sites have improved navigation and categorization.
