From outside our borders, the climate crisis doesn't look anything like the meteors or space invaders that Todd Stern imagined hurtling toward Earth. It looks, instead, like a long and silent war waged by the rich against the poor. And for that, regardless of what happens in Copenhagen, the poor will continue to demand their rightful reparations. "This is about the rich world taking responsibility for the damage done," says Ilana Solomon, policy analyst for ActionAid USA, one of the groups recently converted to the cause. "This money belongs to poor communities affected by climate change. It is their compensation."

Historians sometimes debate over whether history makes the man or the man makes history. Leaving aside the sexist construction of the question, I think, manifestly, it has to be both. Almost all the great presidents served during time of great crisis, usually war. But that doesn't guarantee their place in the historical pantheon. You have to also meet those challenges of your time. Lincoln is widely considered America's greatest president. His predecessor, James Buchanan, is generally thought to be the country's worst. Both faced the same crisis of Southern secession, but they responded to it very differently, earning their respective places in history. On the other hand, had the civil war come twenty years earlier or later, we'd hardly even know their names, except as the answer to trivia questions. "Who was the first president from Illinois?!" "Who was our tallest president?" And so on. Obama could be Lincoln - or better still, FDR - if he wanted to be. He has chosen instead to be Buchanan. Faced with crisis scenario after crisis scenario, the candidate of 'change' repeatedly and instinctively homes in on the weakest, most centrist, most useless response possible. His stimulus bill probably stopped the economy from continuing its free fall, but it leaves the country stuck in months or even years of unyielding recession at worst, and jobless recovery at best.

Following a statement on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement: "Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war? "The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer's money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive. "People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street. "Unlimited money to blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relatively little money to build things in the US. "The Administration may soon bring to Congress a request for an additional $50 billion for war. I can tell you that a Democratic version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is no more acceptable than a Republican version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Trillions for war and Wall Street, billions for insurance companies... When we were promised change, we weren't thinking that we give a dollar and get back two cents."

"Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them."

In her first outreach event to the Millennial Generation, former Kansas Governor now Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will answer questions by young voters on upcoming health care reform legislation, how the HHS is doing outreach to young people, and what options for young people who continued to be uninsured. Sebelius was unable to the 80 Million Strong for Youth Jobs summit in July which discussed at length the staggering unemployment rate for Millennials and the over 1/3 of uninsured youth. But former US Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle spoke at length about health care reform. Daschle identified 3 main problems with today's system

More than a year after its implementation, the $700 billion bailout program has proven to be a mixed bag of successes and failures, helping Wall Street but infuriating Main Street, a government watchdog says in a new report. In his new quarterly report to Congress released today, watchdog Neil Barofsky says the controversial bailout has helped lead to "significant signs of improvement in the stability of the financial system," but it has not yet stopped rising unemployment and home foreclosures.

Although not yet representative of the entire nation, the case of Chuao is not an isolated example. It reflects a transformation of Venezuela's food and agriculture system, as part of the country's broader national process of social change, the Bolivarian Revolution. While many other countries are just beginning to turn their attention to issues of national food security, as necessitated by the most recent global food crisis, the people of Venezuela and their government have been actively tackling these issues for the past decade. They have been working to ensure not only the human right to food, but also the ability of the country to feed itself.

"What began as a coup aimed at deposing a millionaire landowner president, whose “crime” had been to gradually shift Honduras away from US control and implement mild pro-people reforms, has spurned on a mass resistance movement with the potential to revolutionise the country. Roberto Micheletti, installed as president after the military overthrew the elected government of President Manuel Zelaya, told the September 30 Argentine daily Clarin: “We removed Zelaya because he was a leftist … This worried us.” However, more than 100 days since Zeyala was kidnapped at gunpoint and exiled to Coast Rica, Micheletti has even more to worry about. Zelaya is back in the country, in the confines of the Brazilian embassy, and there is a mobilised population demanding more than just their president restored. The ongoing peaceful protests, strikes and blockades have continued in the face of increasingly severe repression. ... It has developed into a powerful social force for change, involving an estimated 100,000 activists. "

Iraq's blacks are complaining of discrimination and political alienation in their homeland, especially in the southern city of Basra, where their community is mainly concentrated. "Black Iraqis are still seen as slaves although engaged in different sectors of the society and there isn't a law that guarantee our rights as citizens," Salah Hashimi, 38, told IslamOnline.net. "The government says that they don't discriminate and that we are all Iraqis, however, those of us who face daily discriminations know otherwise." Hashimi, who complains of discrimination at his job environment, recently paid a visit to his son's school after a teacher ordered the child to sit at the back of the classroom and called him "a little slave." "When my son told me what happened I got angry and went to the school asking for his rights," the father recalled bitterly. "When I saw that nothing was going to be done I looked for a lawyer but he refused to take the case saying there was nothing in the law criminalizing such incidents."

I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as national healthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-toting angry mobs. I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which the same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for being a fascist. I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which angry mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressional representatives to "keep your government hands off my Medicare". I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which claims that the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously by tens of millions of people. I really don't know what to say anymore, about a country in which people are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bush administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signing statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

The USA resorted to a number of political provocations in its history before. In 1898, the Americans imitated a Spanish attack on the United States in Havana to deprive Spain of its control over Cuba. In 1911, Hurst, a media mogul and newspaper tycoon, who could lose his land in Mexico, launched a propaganda campaign to make the USA declare war on Mexico. Many of his newspapers wrote that hundreds of thousands of Mexican soldiers were approaching the US borders. The US administration was informed about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, but did not take any measures to prevent it. The people were strongly against the USA’s participation in WWII, whereas the government was eager to play the game of war to enjoy the redivision of the world afterwards. All aircraft-carriers had left Pearl Harbor shortly before the attack, but left outdated battleships there. Another provocation was made a year later with a view to have Canada involved in the war. It was said that a Japanese submarine supposedly attacked a lighthouse near Vancouver on June 20, 1942. There is every reason to believe that Japan would not have taken such a great risk because of such an insignificant object. It was later said that the type of shells that were used to attack the lighthouse could not be fired from Japanese submarines.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) suggested Friday that the House was capable of passing a health reform bill that contains some variant of the public option. "We'll have to see how that legislative process goes. The public option is a priority for us, it's our objective, and we think that in some form, a public option will be available," he said during an interview on CNN. [Note: I like the words a public option is available "in some form." Gawd, it's the "little words" that getcha. Almost makes you feel like they are just throwing bread crumbs to keep the people quiet. This is truly an embarrassment for other nations to have to see this. How the American government is to their own people.]

"Here is an example of the subjunctive: Had we known that Republicans were so paranoid about public health, we would have packaged healthcare reform differently and come up with better slogans. Perhaps there should be a public pet option. There was real sympathy for the parent of the bassets with the adrenal deficiency, whereas the 48 million uninsured Americans (of whom two-thirds come from a family with at least one full-time worker) are merely a big fat statistic and so far Democrats have failed to produce a poster child. We can sort of imagine the misery of walking into an emergency room with no money, no plastic, no Blue Cross card, and trying to obtain treatment for some ailment that doesn't involve bone fragments protruding from the skin, but it doesn't speak to the heart the way an injured dog does.

Stagnation is a bad thing. Keep your employees engaged with these ideas.

While expecting employees to perform at a high level is definitely not an unreasonable expectation, it still is not always going to be the case in most businesses.

Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall. The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums. "It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc. "The insurers are going to do quite well," said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "They are going to have this very stable pool, they're going to have people getting subsidies to help them buy coverage and...they will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide -- plus their administrative costs."

New development of Alberta and Saskatchewan's tar sands should be halted and existing projects gradually scaled back because of the negative impact the extraction of petroleum products is having on the environment, said a group of environmental activists who met in Windsor Saturday. Participants in a symposium held at the University of Windsor were told that Canada's tar sands generate three to five times more greenhouse gas pollution than the production of conventional oil, while overall tar sands operations also have environmental and social costs which have yet to be fully measured.

An international coalition of environmental and Native American groups strongly opposed Thursday's U.S. State Department decision to issue a permit for a pipeline to carry the dirtiest oil on earth from Canada to the U.S. and vowed to challenge it in court. "The State Department has rubber-stamped a project that will mean more air, water and global warming pollution, particularly in the communities near refineries that will process this dirty oil," said Earthjustice attorney Sarah Burt. "The project's environmental review fails to show how construction of the Alberta Clipper is in the national interest. We will go to court to make sure that all the impacts of this pipeline are considered."

This rhetorical concern for the disabled is fascinating coming from the right, which has routinely worked against extending accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, saying that it would cost businesses too much to retrofit their environments.

The best way you can help to save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic is to forward this article to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before politicians can pass the legislation protecting those who are poisoning us. The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on nicotine? If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine at www.pubmed.com . Type in the words "MSG Obese" and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear. We the public do not want to be rats in one giant experiment, and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, feeding the food industry's bottom line while waiting for the heart transplant, the diabetic-induced amputation, blindness, or other obesity-induced, life-threatening disorders. With your help we can put an end to this poison. [Note: Month-old article that needs to be seen often as a reminder of why we may be suffering from a myriad of diseases, some life-threatening.]