At the G8 Summit held two weeks ago at Camp David, President Obama met with private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.

And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.

It's phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the "Grow Africa Partnership," under Obama's "Global Agricultural Development" plan.

Guess which institution had the following to say about Israel's human rights record in 2011:

• "Arab citizens of the country faced institutional and societal discrimination."
• "Resources devoted to Arabic education were inferior to those devoted to Hebrew education in the public education system."
• "Human rights organizations reported that 'physical interrogation methods' permitted by Israeli law and used by Israeli security personnel could amount in practice to torture."
• "In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Israeli Civil Administration, part of Israel's Ministry of Defense, continued to demolish homes, cisterns, and other buildings and property constructed by Palestinians in areas under Israeli civil control on the basis that these buildings lacked Israeli planning licenses. Compensation was generally not offered in these cases."
• "In East Jerusalem, under Israeli authority, displays of Palestinian political symbols were punishable by fines or imprisonment."
• "The [Israeli military] IDF continued its use of a 1967 military order that effectively prohibited Palestinian demonstrations and limited freedom of speech in the West Bank. The order stipulates that a 'political' gathering of 10 or more persons requires a permit from the regional commander of military forces. The penalty for a breach of the order is 10 years' imprisonment or a heavy fine."
• "The Israeli government obstructed refugee access to [United Nations agency for Palestine refugees] UNRWA-provided humanitarian assistance in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."
• "Some Israeli settlers reportedly used violence against Palestinians as a means of harassment and to keep them away from land that settlers sought to expropriate ... Settlers also exploited religious tensions to harass Palestinian villages by vandalizing, breaking into, or burning 10 mosques.

If you were the typical member of Congress who believes that Israel is a shining beacon of light to humanity and the greatest thing since sliced bread, then you would probably answer one of the following: some anti-Semitic agency of the United Nations, an obviously biased Palestinian organization, or one of those self-hating Israeli organizations.

Of course, you would be wrong.

Warren Buffett once said that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction", and that statement is more true today than it ever has been before. Recently, JP Morgan made national headlines when it announced that it was going to take a 2 billion dollar loss from derivatives trades gone bad. Well, it turns out that JP Morgan did not tell us the whole truth.

As you will see later in this article, most analysts are estimating that the losses will eventually be far larger than 2 billion dollars. But no matter how bad things get for JP Morgan, it will not be allowed to fail. JP Morgan is the largest bank in the United States, so it is essentially the "granddaddy" of the too big to fail banks. If JP Morgan gets to the point where it is about to collapse, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve will rush in to save it. Because of this "security blanket", banks such as JP Morgan feel free to take outrageous risks.

Today, JP Morgan has more exposure to derivatives than anyone else in the world. If they win, they win big. If they lose, U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook. Not only that, but thanks to Dodd-Frank, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for bailing out the major derivatives clearinghouses if there is ever a major derivatives crisis. So when the derivatives market crashes (and it will) you and I will be left holding a gigantic bill.

Derivatives almost caused the complete collapse of insurance giant AIG back in 2008. But instead of learning our lessons, the derivatives bubble has gotten even larger since that time.

A Bloomberg article that was published last year contained a great quote from Mark Mobius about derivatives....

Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management's emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven't been resolved.

"There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven't solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis," Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo today in response to a question about price swings. "Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes."

Never in the history of the world have we ever seen anything like this derivatives bubble.

But instead of getting it under control, we just allowed it to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now JP Morgan is in quite a bit of trouble. A recent Daily Finance article summarized how JP Morgan got into this mess....

Bruno Iksil, a trader working in the bank's London office, placed a massive bet in the derivatives market. Derivatives "derive" their value from the value of an underlying asset, like stocks, bonds, currencies, or a market index. The specific type of derivative used in Iksil's bet was a credit default swap index, known as "CDX.NA.IG.9."

CDX.NA.IG.9 tracks a basket of corporate bonds. Iksil's positions on the index were so big (one report put it at $100 billion) that they were moving the market and interfering with other traders' positions. These annoyed traders -- hedge-fund managers -- dubbed Iksil "the London Whale" for his outsize bets.

So if the real number isn't 2 billion dollars, how much will JP Morgan eventually lose?

A new NYT article sheds considerable light on the character of the Democratic Commander-in-Chief

"I am not going to play in this dirty game. This is not democracy. These elections are a joke" - Abdel Fattah, Egyptian subway worker, explaining why he cannot support either Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, or Ahmed Shafik, President Hosni Mubarak's final prime minister, in the two-candidate election runoff to determine Egypt's next President (NYT, "Some Disdain Both Options in Egypt's Narrowed Race," May 26, 2012).

Last week, the journal Foreign Policy published an extraordinary article - not extraordinary because of what it says, but because of who said it. It was written by Aaron David Miller, a lifelong D.C. foreign policy bureaucrat who served as a Middle East adviser to six different Secetaries of State in Democratic and GOP administrations. Miller's article, which compared Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on foreign policy, was entitled "Barack O'Romney," and the sub-headline said it all: "Ignore what the candidates say they'll do differently on foreign policy. They're basically the same man." It began this way: "If Barack Obama is reelected, he ought to consider making Mitt Romney his new secretary of state" because "despite his campaign rhetoric, Romney would be quite comfortable carrying out President Obama's foreign policy because it accords so closely with his own."

It was only a matter of time before NATO's hired killers were tasked with carrying out a massacre in Syria that NATO stooges at the UN could then attempt to blame on the Syrian government. This time however, the con job isn't going quite according to plan.

On Monday 28th May 2012 ('Memorial Day' in the US, for those who enjoy irony) the world's public received a full frontal propaganda attack by the Western and other duplicitous media outlets parroting NATO and UN Security Council condemnations of a "massacre by Syrian troops" in the Syrian village of Houla on Friday 25th May.

Although the Houla victims were Assad supporters, the media has been primed to unleash a torrent of abuse against the Syrian government in the hope that it will carry enough weight to justify precision-strike democratization in the very near future.

The livid white-haired Syrian's question to the U.N. blue helmet was rhetorical. He didn't expect a real answer, not to that question.

"Did the infant carry an RPG?" he asked angrily, gesturing wildly, his hands clad in red rubber gloves.

He had washed the bodies of nine slain children already, one of whom was not even a year old, he told the U.N. observer. He wanted to know why. That question he actually wanted answered. The observer appeared overwhelmed.

"Why are they treating us like animals?" the man demanded.

It was an understatement. Across Houla, an anti-regime suburb of Homs, images emerged indicating people there had been treated like something less than animals. The bodies of 108 people killed, most of them women and children, filled rooms, rugs and the backs of trucks.

From disorganised slackers to terrorists - the Occupy movement has seen its media image go from bad to worse over its nine months of existence. Protesters now even face accusations that they pose a threat not just to Corporate America, but to the country as a whole. But activists say it's all just scaremongering to stifle the movement.

A video footage released by different Arab and western media showed that terrorists, and not the Syrian army, launched an attack and killed over a hundred civilians in Houla area in Central Syria on Friday.

The amateur-looking footage which was sent to the western embassies in Damascus to be distributed among people and Arab media concurrent with its broadcast by numerous anti-Assad media in the western and Arab countries was taken off air and websites as soon as its gaffes came to be noticed by media and military analysts.

The footage shows a number of armed men, some of them in Jalbab (local clothes) carrying RPGs. It shows one of the armed men firing an RPG rocket and then standing next to a wall very calmly. The undamaged and actually intact wall seen in the footage reveals that Houla has never been cannonaded by the Syrian Army as alleged in the western media reports in the last two days.

I must, at last, admit defeat. I simply have no words, no rhetorical ammunition, no conceptual frameworks that could adequately address the total moral nullity exposed in Monday's New York Times article on the death squad that Barack Obama is personally directing from the White House. ("Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will.")

It is not so much a newspaper story as a love letter -- a love letter to death, to the awe-inspiring and fear-inducing power of death, as personified by Barack Obama in his temporary role as the manager of a ruthless, lawless imperial state. In the cringing obsequiousness of the multitude of insiders and sycophants who march in goose-step through the story, we can see the awe and fear -- indeed, the worship -- of death-dealing power. This enthrallment permeates the story, both in the words of the cringers and in the giddy thrill the writers display in gaining such delicious access to the inner sanctum.

This Monday is Memorial Day in the US, a holiday observed in the US every year since the Civil War to remember American soldiers who died in the line of duty. Today, however, US servicemen continue to suffer as a result of incompetence and lawlessness on the part of the authorities. A raft of high-profile incidents of late demonstrates that the country's military elite, while ever ready to use the memory of the dead for their own time-serving purposes, tend to forget about the living.

The unprofessionalism and incompetence of the US military leadership and state-run organizations responsible for the maintenance of US soldiers has led to many a scandal recently. The report that triggered a particularly wide-ranging outcry said that the US army had been saving for years on servicemen who suffered from psychic disorders.

A journalistic inquiry revealed that military doctors intentionally refused to diagnose soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in order to avoid paying compensation and pensions. Information leaked to the press that the medical leadership urged doctors to ignore the disorder in order to "save taxpayer money".

This budgetary money saving policy led to a tragedy. A US army soldier, Robert Bales, who was suffering from post-traumatic stress, killed 17 civilians in southern Afghanistan. The incident exacerbated the US' relations with Afghanistan, a key NATO ally in the struggle against global terrorism. Bales had repeatedly complained of health problems caused by a head injury in Iraq. Nevertheless, he was dispatched to Afghanistan and as it happens, was not the only victim of the money saving program. It turned out that doctors at the Lewis-McChord base to which Bales was assigned had canceled the diagnosis of a psychic disorder for 40 percent of servicemen thereby contributing to the dispatch of mentally ill people to conflict zones.