Signs of the Times News for Sat, 21 Nov 2009

SOTT Focus / Best of the Web

Best of the Web: Hell Comes Home: Killing is the ultimate traumatic experience

Robert C. Koehler
Common Wonders
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:11 EST

There's no armor, it turns out, for conscience.

So our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in their heads, used up, greeted only by the military's own meat grinder of inadequate health care and intolerance for "weakness."

"Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I've never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness." This is what whistleblower psychiatrist Kernan Manion wrote recently to President Obama about his experience counseling Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, as reported by Salon.

In September, Manion, having been told to "cease and desist all further correspondence with the government," was fired by the Navy for his urgent, outspoken communiqués about the mental-health minefield the military has on its hands. Two months later, of course, the issue of PTSD was blown into the national headlines by the massacre at Fort Hood. And a day after that, according to Salon, the body of a Marine was found at Camp Lejeune and a fellow Marine was arrested for the murder.

The wars we fight keep getting worse, or seem at any rate to back up on us with an ever-intensifying fury. Our war on terror is tightening the psychological vise on our collective insecurity, beginning with the soldiers who are fighting it. Salon, citing official figures, reported that 42 Marines committed suicide in 2008 and 146 attempted to do so.

Best of the Web: Internet Under Siege

Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:07 EST

It is ironic that President Barack Obama would travel to China and speak against government control over the internet. If the American Department of Homeland Security has its way new cybersecurity laws will enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be respectful of the Bill of Rights.

Many countries already monitor and censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be subversive. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers. Combined with switching off of cell phone transmitters, the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen here? Undoubtedly. Once the laws are in place a terrorist incident or something that could be plausibly described in those terms would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the order to bring the internet to a halt.

Best of the Web: US home foreclosures at record high as jobs crisis deepens

Andre Damon
World Socialist Website
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:21 EST

The number of home loans in the US that are either in foreclosure or at least one payment past due reached one in seven last month, a record high, according to a survey released Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The survey found that nearly 10 percent of mortgage holders were at least one payment behind on their mortgages, while 4.47 percent of them were in foreclosure. Both of these are the highest figures on records dating back to 1972. About 7 million households are behind on payments or in foreclosure.

These figures present just one indicator of the worsening conditions facing US workers caught up in the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The number of people behind on their mortgage payments has doubled since last year, as has the percentage in foreclosure, according to the survey.

The foreclosures were spread throughout all borrower categories, with high-quality, fixed-rate mortgages showing the fastest growth in delinquencies, not the sub-prime mortgages that initiated the foreclosure crisis.

Nick Turse
AlterNet.org
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:31 EST

Despite ever rosier economic predictions and a surging stock market, the body count from the economic crisis is destined only to grow in the weeks and months ahead.

In 2007, Jason Rodriguez was fired from his position at an Orlando, Florida engineering firm and ended up taking a job as a "sandwich artist" at a Subway restaurant. His salary was cut nearly in half and his debts mounted until, last May, he filed for bankruptcy, listing his assets at just over $4,600 and his liabilities at nearly $90,000. Although he lived only 30 minutes away, according to his former mother-in-law, America Holloway, Rodriguez barely saw his son. When the boy asked why his father didn't visit, Holloway said Rodriguez told him: "'Because I don't have any money. I don't have a job. I don't have anything to eat. When things get better, I'll come see you.'"

Things never got better. On November 6th, the 40-year-old Rodriguez went back to the downtown high-rise office building where he had worked and reportedly opened fire, killing one person and wounding five others at his old firm. Asked to comment following the shooting, a local lawyer who represented Rodriguez in his bankruptcy proceedings, said "That's how it is right now. He's a very typical client. Of people that are suffering through the economy right now, there's nothing extraordinary about him... except that."

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"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

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"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

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