Common Dreams Highlights Tuesday, February 10, 2015

February 10, 2015 by ohnwentsya Leave a comment

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Featured…

Plan B? What Happened to Plan A?
by Pat Mooney
Precisely at the moment when climate denial is losing steam, it’s crucial to prevent it from being replaced with unicorn-like fantasies of magical technologies that allow the status quo to continue.

News…

	Big Backers of Clinton Foundation Found in Leaked Swiss Bank Files: Report by Jon Queally With Hillary Clinton now considered the Democratic Party frontrunner for 2016, the revelations may once again cast a special shadow over such dealings.
	Federal Campaign to Save Monarch Fails to Address Root Cause of Decline by Deirdre Fulton The butterfly’s decline has been linked to the proliferation of glyphosate, a primary ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and one of the very few herbicides that kills milkweed. The monarch exclusively lays its eggs on plants in the milkweed family.
	‘Deeply Unsettling’: Allegation of Translator Link to CIA Torture Site Halts 9/11 Hearing by Andrea Germanos Amnesty International said the incident marked “just the latest in a string of serious incidents that have marked the inherently unfair military commission process at Guantánamo Bay.”
	13-Year-Old Boy Who Lived In Fear of US Drones, Killed by CIA Strike in Yemen by Jon Queally “In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world,” said the victim ahead of his ultimate death, “and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.”
	New Report on Lynching Reveals Sinister Legacy of ‘Racial Terrorism’ in America by Lauren McCauley The report further suggests that the decline of lynching was tied to the rise of capital punishment—”a more palatable form of violence.”
	Lawsuits Launched to Target Missouri ‘Debtors’ Prisons’ Scheme by Nadia Prupis Filed Sunday, the lawsuits charge that Ferguson and Jennings routinely jail people for being unable to pay traffic tickets, court fees, and other fines, housing them in “deplorable conditions” and locking them into a cycle of “increased fees, debts, extortion, and cruel jailings.”
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Views…

	Saying No to Torture: A Gallery of American Heroes by Rebecca Gordon Some of those who rejected torture, like CIA official John Kiriakou and an as-yet-unnamed Navy nurse, directly refused to practice it. Some risked reputations and careers to let the people of this country know what their government was doing. Sometimes an entire agency, like the FBI, refused to be involved in torture.
	The Shift: A Note from Lexington Federal Prison by Kathy Kelly Our society barely recognizes the futility of imprisoning people for onerously long sentences. I think of Mukherjee and wonder whether U.S. people invested as much money in cancer research as they did in Super Bowl celebrations this year.
	Wretched US Journalism on Ukraine by Robert Parry With very few exceptions, the mainstream U.S. media has simply regurgitated the propaganda from the U.S. State Department and other entities favoring western Ukrainians. There has been little effort to view the worsening crisis through the eyes of ethnic Russian Ukrainians living in the east or the Russians witnessing a political and humanitarian crisis on their border.
	Why Public Banks Outperform Private Banks: Unfair Competition or a Better Mousetrap? by Ellen Brown To truly eliminate unfair competition, the giant monopolistic multinational corporations should be broken up, since they have an obvious unfair trade advantage over small farmers and small businesses. But that outcome is liable to be long in coming.
	The Debt Slavery Must End to Prevent Environmental Catastrophes: Will Greece Kick Start a Paradigm Shift? by Stefano Balbi A not-so-subtle fil rouge, contingent upon both resource consumption and waste production, exists between economic and ecological debts. Society, blinded by the paradigm of growth, has long lost this connection. This may be the time when a wider public can reconnect the dots.
	An Arms Race Won’t Help Ukraine by Katrina vanden Heuvel In every respect, sending more weapons to Ukraine would be recklessly counterproductive. It defies common sense that the United States is considering such a move, especially when the principal victims of continued violence in the region will be innocent civilians in eastern Ukraine.
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