From In These Times
By James H. Ewert Jr.

Kelly Lynch, a former Columbia College Chicago film and video major, is paying educational loan lender Sallie Mae $600 a month, about 1 percent of his total student loan debt of $60,000. Though Lynch, 21, never received his degree from Columbia and barely survives with freelance film and video work, he considers himself lucky.

Lynch consolidated his loans through Sallie Mae a few months before the nation’s largest student loan lender suspended its student loan consolidation program in April. The policy shift left many other young borrowers with inflated interest rates.

“To leave college and enter the real world with such grave debt is a setup for failure,” says Lynch. “What good are well-educated kids who, right out of the cradle, have major financial obligations before most own a house, a car or know where the nearest grocery store is?”

Sallie Mae’s decision came in the midst of what many in the student loan industry call a crisis. From August 2007 to May 2008, at least 103 lenders stopped or suspended writing student loans, according to Finaid.org, a student-loan resource website. The companies that have stopped include Nelnet, the College Loan Corporation and CIT Group — among the nation’s largest lenders.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the private student loan market grew by as much as 25 percent a year for a decade. That momentum has evaporated. For the first time in 40 years, no bonds backed by student loans were purchased in the first quarter of 2008, according to Forbes.

Read more Hard Times

From TruthOut
By Dean Baker

By far the most important domestic policy issue facing the next president will be fixing the health care system. The United States stands out among wealthy countries in not guaranteeing health insurance to its citizens.

Yet, even though many people cannot get access to care, we still pay more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries. And we have the worst outcomes. Only a severely over-medicated politician would claim we have the best health care system in the world.

As bad as the current system is, it keeps getting worse. The number of people who are uninsured year round is at 47 million and rising. The costs also keep rising. Companies are increasingly dropping insurance for their workers, or forcing workers to pick up a larger share of the bill. The explosion of health care costs is the basis for all the scare stories that budget hawks use to cut “entitlements.” Since half of the country’s health care costs are paid by the government, if we don’t fix the health care system, it will eventually destroy the economy - and also lead to very scary budget deficits.

So, what do the candidates offer? Following in the Republican tradition of referring to health care plans by the first name of their principle backer, let’s see what the candidates propose.

John-Care is a plan to get rid of the employer-based insurance that most of us rely on presently. Senator McCain would eliminate the tax deductibility of employer-provided insurance, in effect requiring employers who offer insurance to take money out of workers’ paychecks for their tax liability on their health insurance.

Needless to say, this will make dealing with insurers even less attractive to businesses. Most employers will soon get out of the health insurance business and leave it to workers to buy their own plan. Toward this end, John-Care would give every worker a $2,500 tax credit, or $5,000 for a family.

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From The Existentialist Cowboy
By Len Hart

Calling a Republican a liar is redundant. It’s known by definition. As Will Rogers said of a New Deal plan to ‘teach hogs birth control’, it’s become a habit with them. McCain’s pathology is different. He’s thin-skinned, hot-tempered and out of control. McCain cannot be trusted with nukes. In an infantile temper-tantrum, McCain can be trusted to inflame the world at the end of a macho show of penis power!

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From Think Progress
By Matt

Nearly two weeks ago, the New York Times’ Andrew Kramer reported that four Western oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP — were in the final stages of “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.” The Times wrote at the time that it was “not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts,” but noted that “there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.”

Last week, after Senate Democrats wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requesting that she try to block the oil deals, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino claimed the U.S. had no involvement in the deals:

“Iraq is a sovereign country, and it can make decisions based on how it feels that it wants to move forward in its development of its oil resources,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

“And if that means that our companies here in the United States can compete and win business, then that’s for them and the Iraqis to decide,” Perino added. “But I don’t think the federal government of the United States needs to get involved.”

Read more No-Bid Contracts

From The Dissident Voice
By Ira Glunts

When the United States invaded Iraq in order to destroy a nonexistent nuclear threat there were national and world protests. Opposition to that war was loudly voiced by American politicians and world leaders, as well as in mass demonstrations across the globe. Despite the protests, the war proceeded as planned. Today it seems that it is generally agreed that the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation were catastrophic mistakes.

Now the same people that gave us Iraq, and remain just about the only supporters of their own failed policy there, are signaling that it is necessary to destroy the Iranian nuclear threat. And again, one problem is that this threat may not exist.

This time, however, the opponents of the threatened attack are surprisingly few, even as the signs of a coming air assault on Iran continue to increase. This lack of articulated opposition to military action against Iran, especially by members of the Democratic Party and their supporters, increase the chances that the Bush/Cheney administration will widen the war in the Middle East either directly or by using Israel as a proxy.

“Israelis are mounting a full court press to get the Bush administration to strike Iran’s nuclear complex,” according to David Martin of CBS News. Martin quotes Michael Oren, a CBS analyst, who is an American-born Israeli and well-connected to his government’s reliable sources, as stating, “[t]he Israelis have been assured by the Bush administration that the Bush administration will not allow Iran to nuclearize [sic].”

Read more Iran

From Global Research
By Muriel Mirak-Weissbach

If there were any substance to Condi Rice’s repeated assertions, that the strife over Iran’s nuclear program could, and preferably should, be solved through diplomatic means, then one would expect the U.S. Secretary of State to seize on recent offers made by Iranian figures, designed to facilitate the start of talks. Although widely ignored in the international press, highly significant statements were made at an international conference in Berlin June 24-25, by two authoritative Iranian spokesmen, one an academic, the other a political leader and brother of the new Majlis (Parliament) speaker Ali Larijani. Both said explicitly that Tehran would be willing to freeze its uranium enrichment, and to provide for concrete mechanisms to guarantee that its enrichment program would not, and could not, be geared to weapons production.

Instead of acknowledging these ostentatious gestures of good will, the U.S. surged ahead with new legislation to introduce yet more sanctions against Iran, which are clearly designed to prepare a military aggression, and the European Union kicked in with its own new punitive sanctions.(1) At the same time, military consultations between Washington and Tel Aviv about Iran have gained in frequency and intensity, and the rhetoric from U.S. and Israeli leaders threatening war has reached such a fever pitch as to send oil prices into the stratosphere.(2)

Can war be averted, even at this late hour? Hopefully, it can. Clearly, if the Anglo-American war party in Washington and Tel Aviv has already decided to proceed with their “final solution” to the Iran problem, before the Cheney-Bush junta is forced to leave the White House, there is little hope that these new overtures made by Iran will have any effect. But at the same time, this gives all the more reason for those of us committed to prevent a new catastrophe in the Persian Gulf/Middle East to mobilize political forces to call the bluff on the war party, and demand that Tehran’s newly articulated ideas about how the conflict may be peacefully resolved, be taken up in political fora and in the international press. On that basis, serious, unprejudiced discussions must begin right away. Among the key political forces to be mobilized are Russia and China, veto-holding powers in the U.N. Security Council, who know that aggression against Iran is to be seen as merely the stepping-stone to future aggression against both sovereign nations. The issue should also be prominently thrust into the forefront of the ongoing election campaigns in the United States. Where do Barack Obama and John McCain stand on these new Iranian offers?

Read more Iranian Offer

From The Khaleej Times
By MJ Akbar

George Bush went to war in Iraq in order to create a new Middle East. Six years later, much to the shock of his allies and the horror of perceptive Americans, he has. The shock and horror arise from the fact that the Middle East has been changed by the Bush intervention in a direction sharply divergent from America’s fundamental interests as perceived by the Bush doctrine.

The Middle East was a term coined in 1903 by an American naval historian and strategic thinker, at the very height of British power across the world, when the Boers had been defeated in South Africa, the Ottomans had been virtually displaced from their most important colony Egypt, the Arabian Sea confirmed as a British lake and India itself was preparing to celebrate the glory of the Raj with a glittering durbar summoned by the Viceroy of Viceroys, Lord Curzon. India was a bulwark of this concept called the Middle East, a fortress of trade and imperial might that had neo-colonised China, and supplied the bulk of the troops for British expansion. The rupee was king from Singapore to Jeddah.

When Bush’s team visualised their new map of the world they included India in what they termed the ‘Greater Middle East’. India was not an intrinsic part of the new power flows, but it was integrated once again as the fortress of the East. Since India was run by Indians rather than British allies, Indians had to be co-opted into the engineering of the new design. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the man for the job.

Six years later Project Greater Middle East is tottering all across this strategic map. In Delhi, the Manmohan Singh government has been unable to bear the burden of an alliance with Bush. The Congress encouraged the illusion, with the help of a cabal of analysts, publicists and lobbyists, that the Left was a lapdog rather than a watchdog, and could be either appeased by a bone or silenced with a stick. When the moment came to choose, the Congress stood with Bush instead of Prakash Karat.

The official excuse for this decision is energy. But this is deception. Dr Manmohan Singh deliberately sabotaged a much cheaper and more immediate source of energy for the country when he deliberately undermined the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, raising one false spectre after another to mislead the country, so that it would seem that there was no option but to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal. We have forgotten now that the first objection he raised, three years ago, was that financing would be a problem.

Read more Consequences

From The Khaleej Times

The commander of the US navy’s Fifth Fleet warned on Monday that the United States will not allow Iran to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf sea lane through which much of the world’s oil is supplied.

“They will not close it… They will not be allowed to close it,” Vice-Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff told a press conference in Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is based.

His remarks followed comments by the chief of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, who issued a new warning last week against any attack against his country over its controversial nuclear drive.

“It is natural that when a country is attacked it uses all of its capabilities against the enemy, and definitely our control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be one of our actions,” Jafari said.

The strait between Iran and Oman is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with as much as 40 percent of the world’s crude passing through the waterway from Gulf suppliers.

“Certainly if there is fighting… the scope will be extended to oil, meaning its price will increase drastically. This will deter our enemies from taking action against Iran,” Jafari said.

Cosgriff said: “The latest Iranian statements are not helpful.”

Read more Gulf Oil Route

From The Guardian UK
By Shirley Williams

I share Jonathan Freedland’s concern about the danger of an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the catastrophic consequences likely to follow. A military attack on Iran could not be a copy of the “surgical strike” against the Osirik reactor in Iraq in 1981. Natanz is close to a large new oil refinery and to Isfahan, Iran’s magnificent world heritage city. The “collateral damage” from a military strike, to use the dry language of the military that describes the destruction of human beings and of history, would be terrible.

It is not yet clear that Iran wants a nuclear weapon. It is certainly quite a long way from achieving one on its own. It stubbornly affirms its right, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to enrich uranium for civil energy purposes. What is absolutely clear, as Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the IAEA, has repeatedly said, is that it wants the recognition and respect its long, proud history and its role in the region deserve. That has to mean, sooner or later, recognition by the US. The absence of any diplomatic relations for 28 years between these two countries has contributed hugely to mutual misunderstanding.

Freedland’s recommendation for preventing Iran developing nuclear weapons is “sharper sticks and juicier carrots”. The present sharp sticks are not very sharp. On a recent week-long visit to Iran, I could find few consequences of sanctions except difficulty in using credit cards – and even that was got around by the more enterprising traders, who had set up an effective bypass via the ever helpful Dubai. Financial sanctions on trade and investment would be more effective but open to even more evasion by those disinclined to cooperate.

As for juicier carrots, the offer of US engagement in negotiations in return for a freeze on (rather than a suspension of) nuclear enrichment might just work. Even then, time would be needed to establish a dialogue with Iran’s complex layers of leadership. The US should ask the shaky government of Israel, in return for years of loyal American support, to stay its hand.

From The Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article describes an expansion of covert operations inside Iran and provides more evidence of Vice President Cheney’s zeal to address the Iranian nuclear threat — possibly by force — before he and President Bush leave office.

Hersh writes: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

“Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded. . . .

“‘The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,’ a person familiar with its contents said, and involved ‘working with opposition groups and passing money.’”

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