According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77% of the citizens of the U.S. expressed the belief that the massive power imbalance in place in the nation is a direct result of the vast wealth inequity between the 1% and the 99%.
In addition, according to a poll by Time Magazine, 86% of Americans held the conviction that Wall Street and its lobbyists exert undue influence over the U.S. political class.
Still, both major U.S. political parties remain unmoved by the opinions of their constituents and unresponsive to their needs. To vote for either a Democratic or Republican candidate (i.e., the well vetted stooges of the 1%) is to cast a vote in favor of the only political party allowed in the rigged process–The Big Money, Perpetual War Party.
Believing that replacing one of these candidates with the other…is in any way propitious is analogous to believing that the hanging of new wallpaper within a house with a rotted-out foundation constitutes renovating the structure.
From time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.
Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.
I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Behind the scenes, of course, there are hidden elites — amoral, politically and financially motivated operatives who are embedded in these religious organizations — who, through the strength of their political power, can easily manipulate the followers into clamoring for war, not against their enemies, but rather against the enemies of the ruling elites: the politicians, the financiers and the other exploiters of natural resources.
But I do have to take exception to the blanket condemnation of the entirety of the religion by pointing out one reality — that the original form of Christianity, the church of the first generation after Jesus and even most of the first three centuries was a religion of pacifists, oppressed women, orphans, those forced into prostitution, despised people of all stripes and others of those called “the least.”
Though this history has long since been forgotten or ignored, the earliest followers of Jesus rejected violence, tried to return good for evil, fed the hungry, did acts of mercy and unconditional love and tried to make friends out of their enemies (by caring for them, feeding them, praying for them and certainly refusing to kill them).
Here’s something you probably don’t know: The Fed doesn’t print money.
Yes, that’s right, the Fed is actually not in the business of printing money. The actual, physical printing presses are owned and operated by the Treasury Department…not the Fed.
So the Federal Reserve is actually not in the business of printing money…. the Fed does however control the money supply.
Think of the Fed as a bank — but just for other banks. The Fed lends money to banks, which determines the rate which banks charge the rest of us for everything from car loans to mortgages to credit card rates and pretty much every other loan you can think of (and some fees only a banker can dream up.)
By setting the rate banks can borrow from the Fed, non-ironically called “the discount rate”, the Fed helps determine whether rates are high or low for the rest of us. And those rates help determine whether people want to borrow money or not.
Another way the Fed controls the money supply — again, which is different than the actual amount of dollars in circulation — is via its “open market operations”, through which it buys and sells bonds in the open market. If you’ve read news stories about the Fed buying Treasuries to help boost the economy, that’s an example of ‘open market operations’ in action and is an example of “quantitative easing” or QE. When it buys bonds, the money supply increases because the banks exchange their bonds for cash and then have more money — aka liquidity — to lend to businesses or individuals. The opposite occurs when the Fed sells bonds to the banks, who typically can’t refuse any offer from the Fed.
In addition, the Fed controls the money supply by raising or lowering “reserve requirements,” which is the amount of money banks are required to keep “on reserve” at the Fed, sort of like a rainy-day fund for the banking system. Raise those requirements and banks have less money for other stuff — like lending; the opposite is true when the Fed lowers reserve requirements…or keeps them low as has been its recent practice.
So while the Fed doesn’t technically (or actually) print physical dollars, it has an enormous impact in the amount of money and credit in our economy.
The real scandal is the banks pretty much have to do what the Fed wants, which makes Ben Bernanke the equivalent of a “Godfather” figure in the world of high finance.
And you thought Wall Street was powerful?
[Excerpt of Daily Ticker article by Aaron Task]
We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: “Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff.”
There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.
The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff — arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup.
His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.
Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein and Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.
The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too. His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold on to your deposit slip — Citigroup.
All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn’t it? Hank Paulson, the $700 million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank. As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone, and Paulson’s own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.
President Obama may call bankers “fat cats” and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free.
And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama’s inner circle has been shrinking, his “rare new best friend” is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf, and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president’s campaign.
Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes.
And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it’s impossible to tell one from the other.
[Excerpts of article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Public Affairs Television, Inc.]
An opinion expressed by Charles Sullivan, a Master Naturalist and community activist:
The U.S. is an occupied territory that could more accurately be described as the Corporate States of America. The systems of power do not allow the voice of working people to be heard or their collective will to be acted upon.
Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out.
For instance, government agencies, ostensibly created to protect the public welfare, are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment. Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale.
The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.
Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest. The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits, the Holy Grail of American capitalism, are more precious than life itself.
We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air.
A Marine accused of killing unarmed Iraqi women and children pleaded guilty Monday to dereliction of duty in a deal that will mean a maximum of three months confinement and end the largest and longest-running criminal case against U.S. troops to emerge from the Iraq War.
Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich of Meriden, Conn., led the Marine squad in 2005 that killed 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha after a roadside bomb exploded near a Marine convoy, killing one Marine and wounding two others.
It was a stunning and muted end to a case once described as the Iraq War’s version of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
The incident in Iraq is considered among the war’s defining moments, further tainting America’s reputation when it was already at a low point after the release of photos of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.
Eight Marines were charged with killing the Iraqis, with Wuterich facing the possibility of life behind bars. In the end, seven Marines were acquitted or had charges dropped, and Wuterich pleaded to the single, minor charge.
The killings still fuel anger in Iraq after becoming the primary reason behind demands that U.S. troops not be given immunity from their court system.
In case you missed it:
Ten-year-old Iman Walid witnessed the killing of seven members of her family in an attack by American marines last November.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was detained Monday by the Transportation Security Administration in Nashville, Tenn., after refusing a full body pat-down, POLITICO has confirmed.
Paul spokesperson Moira Bagley said. “The image scan went off; he refused patdown.”
Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), tweeted out news of the incident, saying that there had been an “anomaly” with a body scanner.
After he was first stopped, Paul told The AP in a telephone interview that he asked for another scan after setting the scanner off but refused a pat-down, after which he was “detained” at a small cubicle and missed his flight to Washington.
Paul, a Republican, was traveling to Washington, when he was detained. He noted earlier on his Twitter that he was planning to speak at the March for Life. “Today I’ll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it,” tweeted Rand Paul at 9:49 A.M.
Like his father, Rand Paul has libertarian leanings and has been a fierce critic of TSA’s pat-downs of passengers at airports, which he views as government overreach.
The senator grilled TSA Administrator John Pistole last year after a 6-year-old girl from Paul’s hometown, was patted down by airport security. “I guess this little girl would be part of the random pat-downs, this little girl from Bowling Green, Kentucky, one of my constituents,” Paul said, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“They’re still quite unhappy with you guys as well as myself and a lot of other Americans who think you’ve gone overboard, you’re missing the boat on terrorism because you’re doing these invasive searches on six-year-old girls.”
Russia will offer Washington no explanation for arms deliveries to Syria, and together with China, will prevent the U.N. Security Council from approving any military intervention in the conflict-torn nation, its foreign minister said on Wednesday.
Using his annual news conference to draw lines in the sand on Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said veto-holding Security Council members Russia and China would stand firm against foreign intervention. “We will insist – and we have an understanding with our Chinese colleagues that this is our common position – that these fundamental points be retained in any decision that may be taken by the U.N. Security Council,” Lavrov said.
Russia has been the most vocal supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a 10-month government crackdown.
The United States, France and Britain, along with Russia and China, are permanent Security Council members with the power to block any resolution from passage.
A Russian-operated ship carrying what a Cypriot official said was bullets arrived in Tartus last week from St. Petersburg. The United States said it had raised concerns about the ship with Russia, but Lavrov said there was no need for an explanation. “We don’t consider it necessary to explain ourselves or justify ourselves, because we are not violating any international agreements or any (U.N.) Security Council resolutions,” Lavrov told an annual news conference.
An unnamed military source was quoted as saying in December that Russia had delivered anti-ship Yakhont missiles to Syria.
Internet censorship bills in the Senate and House could change the Internet by making it possible for big entertainment companies, the Chamber of Commerce, and their lobbyists to make our government shut down websites they don’t like!
Read what Jonathan Zittrain of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Society has to say:
According to its advocates, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), HR 3261, 112th Cong. 2011 (SOPA) will strengthen copyright in the United States by establishing a number of public and private tools to hinder infringement by international “rogue” sites previously unreachable by US law.
The act’s most fervent critics state that SOPA has the potential to kill the internet as we know it, placing the fate of interoperability in the hands of technically unsophisticated judges. Only slightly less fervent critics note that this provision would align US federal internet policy with China and like-minded regimes. DNS blocking is one of the techniques that China uses to prevent access to dissident websites, and has serious technical ramifications.
1. Copyright enforcement against websites, foreign and domestic
SOPA would give tools to the US attorney general to combat “foreign infringing sites”. The definition of this term is unusual; a site with a domain name registered outside the US (eg through a non-US domain name registrar) seems to count as “foreign”, even if it’s run by an US company and hosted on US soil.
The law’s real force is focused domestically. Once a foreign infringing site has been made the subject of a court order, the attorney general may apply the court order, not only at the site, but at US companies that occupy the space between the infringing site and the end user’s browser – specifically, service providers, search engines, payment network providers, and advertising networks.
2. “Notorious foreign infringers” and US investors
The US IP Enforcement Coordinator, along with various agency heads, will identify “notorious foreign infringers” who are causing “significant harm to holders of IP rights in the US”, soliciting suggestions from the public and rights holders This information will be made into a report to Congress, which will examine and analyze various methods of combating IP rights violations, including and up to prohibiting such sites from raising capital in the United States.
3. Amendments to existing criminal copyright laws: Criminal penalties for streaming
Most notable among the many changes, SOPA calls for the criminalization of public performance copyright infringement. This provision is specifically targeted at digital streaming and provides criminal penalties for streaming copyrighted material with ten or more views and a retail value of $2,500. This sweeping and vague change could categorize millions of US computer users as criminals. Videos that teenage Justin Bieber posted of himself singing songs by his favorite artists do indeed appear to qualify as felonies under the act. This is a particular irony, since those videos launched Bieber’s career as a musician – exactly the people the act is intended to protect.
4. Protecting IP rights abroad
In what would potentially be a significant increase in the United States diplomatic corps and its activities, SOPA requires the secretaries of state and of commerce to ensure diplomatic missions or embassies have “adequate resources” to pursue “aggressive support of enforcement action against violations of intellectual property”.
SOPA’s vague language and undue granting of law-like powers to private parties without sufficient public protections make it worthy of a firm “no” vote. SOPA is both overly strong and overly broad; overly strong in the collection of remedies provided, and overly broad for the problems it is attempting to take on.
On January 2, a soldier in San Diego linked to Special Forces posted on his Facebook page that he was deploying to Syria. The soldier’s Facebook page has been scrubbed, as well as almost all references to him. Still, this tantalizing piece of information startled readers, leading many to ask: does our country have troops in Syria and if so, why?
The likely presence of U.S. special forces inside Syria, a nation descending into civil war, may come as a surprise to the American public. But it’s no secret to many in Congress. According to U.S. Navy Admiral Eric Olson, outdoing chief of Special Operations Command, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last year said that the U.S. had special operations troops in 20 countries in the Middle East.
The Nation further reported that Colonel Tim Nye estimated in August that by the end of 2011, the U.S. would likely have special forces deployed in 120 countries. That’s a big jump from June 2010, when the Washington Post reported special operations in 70 countries.
Note: Special Operations teams are used for a variety of missions and always work in small teams. They are used for recon, hostage rescue, infiltration, killing targeted terrorists (as in the Osama bin Ladin raid), forward air control in some cases, as well as a force multiplier.
[Excerpts of East County Magazine article by Nadin Abbott]
A War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of war crimes for their roles in the Iraq war.
The five-panel Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against humanity by leading the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.
In their ruling, the tribunal judges also stated that the US, under the leadership of Bush, fabricated documents to make it appear that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The world later learned that the former Iraqi regime did not possess WMDs and that the US and British leaders knew this all along.
Over one million Iraqis were killed during the invasion, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
The judges also said the court findings should be provided to signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and added that the names of Bush and Blair should be listed on a war crimes register.
[Press TV]
As the Italian government struggles to borrow, and Spain considers seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible.
The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way. A senior minister has revealed the extent of the UK Government’s concern, saying that Britain is now planning on the basis that a euro collapse is now just a matter of time.
Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad. Recent Foreign and Commonwealth Office instructions to embassies and consulates request contingency planning for extreme scenarios including rioting and social unrest.
Diplomats have also been told to prepare to help tens of thousands of British citizens in eurozone countries with the consequences of a financial collapse that would leave them unable to access bank accounts or even withdraw cash.
If eurozone governments defaulted on their debts, the European banks that hold many of their bonds would risk collapse. Some analysts say the shock waves of such an event would risk the collapse of the entire financial system, leaving banks unable to return money to retail depositors and destroying companies dependent on bank credit.
Some economists believe that at worst, the outright collapse of the euro could reduce GDP in its member-states by up to half and trigger mass unemployment.
With average life expectancy in the U.S. peaking at 78.1, it means that the typical American will have to work for an additional 2 years after death to pay for not having any retirement savings!
Excerpts from a Bloomberg article:
“Eighty is the new 65,” Joseph Ready, executive vice president of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement & Trust, said in an interview.
About 76 percent of survey respondents said it’s more important to reach a specific dollar amount before retiring, compared with 20 percent who said it’s more important to retire at a given age, regardless of savings, according to the survey of adults with household incomes or assets from about $25,000 to $100,000.
About 74 percent expect to work in retirement, according to the survey, with about 39 percent working because they’ll need to and 35 percent because they want to. And 25 percent of those surveyed said they expect they’ll need to work until at least age 80 because they don’t have sufficient savings.
As for the math: oops. Survey respondents had saved a median of $25,000 towards retirement and estimated they’d need a median of $350,000 to support themselves in retirement.
If you get your news and information from the Main Stream Media, no doubt you have been hearing hosts and pundits asking the question “What is the Occupy Wall Street message?”
The Occupy Wall Street movement has had the same message since it started:
The wealthiest 1% have bought the government, courts, and the media, and use them to rob the 99%
That’s it, pretty simple, not a complicated message.
The reason the Main Stream Media pretends as though the Occupy Wall Street movement has no message, is because the Main Stream Media is owned by the wealthy 1%, and they do not want you to hear or see the message.
Unfortunately, for the main stream media and the wealthy 1% who own them, you just did.
The Fed’s latest actions in cooperating with foreign Central Banks to undertake liquidity swaps of dollars for foreign currencies is another reason why Congress needs enhanced power to oversee and audit the Fed.
Under current law Congress cannot examine these types of agreements. Those who would argue that auditing the Fed or these agreements with Central Banks harms the Fed’s independence should reevaluate the Fed’s supposed independence when the Fed bails out Europe so soon after President Obama promised US assistance in resolving the Euro crisis.
Rather than calming markets, these arrangements should indicate just how frightened governments around the world are about the European financial crisis. Central Banks are grasping at straws, hoping that flooding the world with money created out of thin air will somehow resolve a crisis caused by uncontrolled government spending and irresponsible debt issuance.
Congress should not permit this type of open-ended commitment on the part of the Fed, a commitment which could easily run into the trillions of dollars. These dollar swaps are purely inflationary and will harm American consumers as much as any form of quantitative easing.
The Fed is behaving much as it did during the 2008 financial crisis, only this time instead of bailing out politically well-connected too-big-to-fail firms it is bailing out profligate government spending.
Citizens the world over deserve better than this. They deserve sound money that cannot be manipulated and created out of thin air by central planners who promise printed prosperity. Fiat money caused this European crisis and the financial crisis before it. More fiat money is not the cure.
Major Central Banks around the world have announced a program of coordinated action designed to support the global financial system. The European Central Bank, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Central Banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland are all taking part in the initiative.
The possibility that one or more European governments might default on loan payments has raised fears of a shock to the global financial system that would lead to severe losses for banks, recessions in the US and Europe, and a stranglehold on lending. And a ratings downgrade by Standard & Poors for six major US banks on Tuesday added to fears that Europe’s woes would hurt the global financial system.
Fears of more financial turmoil in Europe have already left some European banks dependent on Central Bank loans to fund their daily operations. Other banks are wary of lending to them for fear of not getting paid back.
The Central Banks agreed to reduce the cost of temporary dollar loans they offer to banks, called liquidity swaps, by a half percentage point. It will be now cheaper for banks to buy US dollars, which will ultimately help businesses and households access finance more easily.
Non-US banks need dollars to fund their US operations and to make dollar loans to companies that need the US currency.
The air strike by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the Pakistani military post at Salala on the Afghan-Pakistan border last Friday night is destined to become a milestone in the chronicle of the Afghan war. There has been a colossal breakdown of diplomacy at the political, military and intelligence level.
Within hours of the incident, Pakistan’s relations with the US began nose-diving and it continues to plunge. What is absolutely stunning is that Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani did not bother to call for an inquiry by the US or NATO into the air strike that resulted in the death of 28 Pakistani soldiers. Pakistan’s Defence Committee of the Cabinet (The DDC) simply proceeded on the basis that this was a calculated air strike – and by no means an accidental occurrence. And the DDC statement implies that in the Pakistan military’s estimation, the NATO attack emanated from a U.S. decision.
The DDC took the following decisions: a) to close NATO’s transit routes through Pakistani territory with immediate effect; b) to ask the US to vacate Shamsi airbase within 15 days; c) to “revisit and undertake a complete review” of all “programs, activities and cooperative arrangements” with US, NATO and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), including in “diplomatic, political and intelligence” areas; d) to announce shortly a whole range of further measures apropos Pakistan’s future cooperation with US, NATO and ISAF.
The response stops short of declaring the termination of Pakistan’s participation in the US-led war in Afghanistan (which, incidentally, is the demand by Pakistani politician Imran Khan who is considered to be close to the Pakistani military circles). In essence, however, Pakistan is within inches of doing that.
This is going to affect the NATO operations in Afghanistan, since around half the supplies for US-NATO troops still go via Pakistan. Equally, the closure of the Shamsi airbase can hurt the US drone operations.
The big issue is how Pakistan proposes to continue with its cooperation with the US-NATO operations. Public opinion is leaning heavily toward dissociating with the US-led war. The government’s announcement on the course of relations with the US/NATO/ISAF can be expected as early as next week. The future of the war hangs by a thread.
[Excerpts of an Asia Times article by Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar, former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service]
The Senate is ready to vote on legislation permitting the U.S. military to capture and indefinitely detain citizens on American soil. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act.
The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing.
Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky has come out against the legislation that will allow the Pentagon to arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without due process or a trial as specified by the Sixth Amendment. Paul told Judge Andrew Napolitano it perplexed him “how anyone could vote to send an American citizen who’s been accused of a crime to a detention center in a foreign land without due process.”
The Obama administration said prior to the vote that the proposed legislation is “inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets.”
If Obama’s threatened veto is overridden and National Defense Authorization Act becomes law, it will allow the state to disappear its domestic political enemies the same way the dictator Pinochet in Chile eliminated his political opposition. Military kidnappings, torture and secret execution are the tactics of thugs in places like Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, not the United States.
The ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.
However, the controversy over whether or not the text of the bill suggests the legislation applies to U.S. citizens is largely inconsequential given the fact that every piece of anti-terror legislation passed since 9/11 has been used against Americans, both at home and abroad.
The Patriot Act was passed in the name of giving federal authorities the tools to catch terrorists, but it has been used in hundreds of cases against American citizens, often in cases that have no relation whatsoever to terrorism.
Furthermore, as Ron Paul has pointed out, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who has never been charged with any crime, was the victim of extrajudicial killing because of the same unconstitutional legalese that defines the entire globe as a “battlefield,” where the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens are declared null and void if they are designated as terrorists by the federal government.
Indeed, national intelligence director Dennis Blair openly stated last year that, “Being a U.S. citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives.”
Recall that José Padilla, an American citizen, was held without charge for 3 and a half years as an “enemy combatant” and denied a trial in civilian court, after being accused of planning to detonate a “dirty bomb,” an accusation that was enough to keep Padilla in a military brig for over three years yet was never proven.
As far back as December 2002, the Washington Post reported that a “parallel legal system” had been put in place under the auspices of the war on terror, in which terrorism suspects — U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike — may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system.”
[Excerpt of Prison Planet article by Paul Joseph Watson]
Moscow has known for years where the Pentagon wants to tread: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania. And NATO’s dream is … to turn the Mediterranean into a NATO lake.
Few may have noticed when a US State Department spokeswoman cryptically announced that Washington “would cease carrying out certain obligations under the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty with regard to Russia”.
Translation: Washington will not inform Russia from now on about the redeployment of its global armada. The Pentagon’s worldwide “repositioning” strategy is now supposed to be a secret.
Some essential background is in order: CFE part one was signed way back in 1990 – when the Warsaw Pact was still in effect. Enter Vladimir Putin in 2007, when he decided to suspend Russia’s role in the CFE until the US and NATO ratified part two. Washington did absolutely nothing, and has spent four years mulling what to do. Now, even “talking” is on hold.
EU diplomats in Brussels confirm, off the record, that NATO will discuss in a key meeting in early December how to establish a beachhead very close to Russia’s southern border to turbo-charge the destabilization of Syria. But for Russia, a Western intervention in Syria is an absolute no-no.
[And in] last week’s Moscow meeting of the deputy foreign ministers of the emerging BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the BRICS couldn’t be more explicit: Forget about foreign intervention in Syria, as in “any external interference in Syria’s affairs, not in accordance with the UN Charter, should be excluded”. (The BRICS also condemn the extra sanctions on Iran as “counterproductive”, and any possibility of a strike.)
This is a geopolitical earthquake. Russian diplomacy has coordinated with the other BRICS members a major pounding on the table; “we will fight new US interventions – ‘humanitarian’ or otherwise – in the Middle East.”
So now it’s Pentagon/NATO versus the BRICS.
[Excerpts of an article by Pepe Escobar]
One of the original founders of the Tea Party movement said he believes Occupy Wall Street is not only comparable to the earliest states of the movement he helped launch but can learn from its mistakes.
“The problem with protests and the political process is that it is very easy, no matter how big the protest is, for the politicians to simply wait until the people go home,” financial blogger Karl Denninger observed. “And then they can ignore you.”
“Well, Occupy Wall Street was a little different,” he continued. “And back in 2008, I wrote that when we will actually see change is when the people come, they set up camp, and they refuse to go home. That appears to be happening now.”
Denninger has been complaining for some time that the Tea Party was hijacked by the Republican establishment and used to protect the very people it had originally opposed. A year ago, he wrote, “Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!”
Now he advises Occupy Wall Street, “Don’t let it happen.”
“One of the things that the Occupy movement seems to have going for it is it has not turned around and issued a set of formal demands,” he explains. “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone is looking for a set of demands. The problem is that as soon as you pipe up with a list of four or five things — and you’ve got to keep it simple and short — then somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, we gave you 70 percent of it, now go home.’ And the fact is, that’s exactly the sort of thing that happened with the Tea Party.”
“Stay on message, which is that the corruption is not a singular event,” Denninger urged. “You can’t focus in one place. You have to get the money out of politics, which is very difficult to do, but at the same time you can’t silence people’s voice.”
Armed U.S. police officers will for the first time be allowed to operate in Canada along with the RCMP as part of far-reaching changes in Canadian-American border operations to be unveiled next week by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama.
The joint action plan will also break new ground by introducing exit-entry records that will track the movements of everyone who leaves the United States or Canada, with the information available to authorities in both countries.
In the months and years ahead, the deal between Ottawa and Washington will reshape security, travel and commercial arrangements at the border in a variety of profound ways — some of which have already raised alarms among Canadians. This secretly devised shake-up of border operations has sparked widespread concerns.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder revealed last fall that the deal will authorize Canada and the U.S. to designate officers who can take part in police investigations on both sides of the border.
“It’s contemptuous of Canadian citizenry to unveil a program in which we’ve had essentially no input,” said Micheal Vonn, policy director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.
“This process has really been conducted behind closed doors. We’ve had no white papers, no reports — nothing that we could point to to say, ‘Here are the pros and cons, here are the drawbacks, here are the things we are considering,’ ” she said.
In response to the economic downturn that began in 2007 and the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the U.S. federal government and the Federal Reserve resorted to a radically inflationary policy intended to save banks and to shepherd the U.S. economy through a recession. Instead, radically inflationary policies greatly increased the concentration of wealth.
When the Federal Reserve or the federal government supports banks and financial markets through liquidity injections, bailouts, asset purchases, quantitative easing, etc., the lion’s share of financial support, i.e., newly created money, is captured by the largest financial institutions and by the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Money printing skews the distribution of money over the economy while the value of money, i.e., the purchasing power of wages and savings, is reduced. The overall effect is a wealth transfer from proverbial Main Street to literal Wall Street.
The U.S. federal government’s fast growing debt is $14.94 trillion, approximately 100% of GDP. Additionally, future liabilities total $66.6 trillion based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP accounting) and using official data from the Medicare and Social Security annual reports and from the audited financial report of the federal government.
1. Medicare: $24.8 trillion
2. Social Security: $21.4 trillion
3. Federal debt: $10.2 trillion (not including intra-governmental obligations)
4. State, local government obligations: $5.2 trillion
5. Military retirement/disability benefits: $3.6 trillion
6. Federal employee retirement benefits: $2 trillion
The United States increasingly resembles a 3rd world country in terms of unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, falling wages, growing poverty and concentration of wealth, government debt, corporate influence over government and weakening rule of law. Federal Reserve monetary policies and federal government economic, regulatory and tax policies seem to favor the largest banks and corporations over the interests of small businesses or of the general population. The potential elimination of the middle class could reshape the socioeconomic strata of American society in the image of a 3rd world country. It seems only a matter of time before the devolution of the United States becomes more visible.
All other things being equal, the U.S. will become a post industrial neo-3rd-world country by 2032.
The evidence suggests that, without fundamental reforms, the United States will become a post industrial neo-3rd-world country by 2032.
Fundamental characteristics that define a 3rd world country include high unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, low wages, widespread poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, unsustainable government debt, control of the government by international banks and multinational corporations, weak rule of law and counterproductive government policies. All of these characteristics are evident in the U.S. today.
Other factors include poor public health, nutrition and education, as well as lack of infrastructure. Public health and nutrition in the U.S., while below European standards, stand well above those of 3rd world countries. American public education now ranks behind poorer countries, like Estonia, but remains superior to that of 3rd world countries. While crumbling infrastructure can be seen in cities across America, the vast infrastructure of the United States cannot be compared to a 3rd world country. However, all of these factors will rapidly deteriorate in a declining economy.
Officially, long-term unemployment is 16.5%. However, using the more accurate pre-Clinton criteria, unemployment exceeds 22%, only 3% below the worst point (24.9%) of the Great Depression.
As the U.S. economy continues its decline, public health, nutrition and education, as well as the country’s infrastructure, will visibly deteriorate and the 3rd world status of the United States will become apparent.
Iran’s military on Sunday claimed it shot down a U.S. drone into eastern Iran.
State media cited a military official who identified the aircraft as an RQ-170 Sentinel.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft was flying a mission over western Afghanistan — which borders Iran — last week when operators lost control. A U.S. official with knowledge of the incident said the crew operating the unmanned drone reported a loss of flight control just before the drone went down.
The RQ-170 Sentinel is a stealth drone developed for the Air Force to help provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Iranian media reported that the RQ-170 was slightly damaged and in the hands of Iranian forces. “Armed forces with a dominant control over the country’s borders managed to identify and down the invading plane,” the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
The unnamed Iranian military official called it a “clear example of aggression” and added that Iran is “fully ready to counter any aggression,” the report said.
The U.S. has long had Iran virtually encircled: The American occupation of Afghanistan on Iran’s Eastern border, its invasion of Iraq on its Western border, its NATO ally Turkey hovering on Iran’s Northwestern border, some degree of military relationship with Turkmenistan on Iran’s Northeastern border, and multiple U.S. client states sitting right across the Persian Gulf (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, where the massive U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed).
And in the past decade, the U.S. and/or Israel have invaded, air attacked, and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (to say nothing of the creation of a worldwide torture regime, a system of “black site” prisons around the world to which people were disappeared, and a due-process-free detention camp in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean where many people remain encaged for almost a full decade without charges).
During this same time period, Iran has not invaded, occupied or air attacked anyone. Iran, to be sure, is domestically oppressive, but no more so — and in many cases less — than the multiple regimes funded, armed and otherwise propped up by the U.S. during this period. Those are all just facts.
But — despite all of these facts — all serious people in the U.S. know that Iran is the Aggressor, the Modern Nazis, a True Menace, while the U.S. and Israel are its innocent peace-loving victims.
Given the extensive violence and aggression the U.S. has perpetrated, and continues to perpetrate, on numerous countries in that region, one might think that not even our political culture could sustain the propagandistic myth that it is Iran that is the aggressor state and the U.S. that is its peace-loving victim.
But none of that should be at all surprising or confusing, given that 66 years ago, George Orwell — in his 1945 Notes on Nationalism — explained exactly the warped form of thinking that creates this mindset:
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. … Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
In the past few days, the WikiLeaks saga has taken two sharp turns.
On Thursday, 287 documents appeared on the WikiLeaks site about the global surveillance and arms industry. The dump provided many documents to mine, and it’s still unclear what they might all mean. The Washington Post and other outlets called it a comeback for the site and for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
And on Monday, Assange won the right to fight his extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden on sexual assault allegations. Assange has not been charged with a crime. Sweden is seeking him for questioning.
Assange has repeatedly said that he believes the Swedish case is a ruse, and that if he is extradited to Sweden he’ll be more vulnerable to extradition to the U.S., where he could be prosecuted in relation to WikiLeaks’ release of classified U.S. information. (U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-New York, has said that the U.S. should classify WikiLeaks as a terrorist group so that “we can freeze their assets.” King has called Assange an enemy combatant.)
In less than two weeks, starting on December 16, the U.S. military will begin its case against Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier suspected to have leaked classified information that appeared on the WikiLeaks site. Manning will face a military trial in Maryland on a range of charges that could send him to prison for life.
Since Assange’s Swedish case began, WikiLeaks has struggled. The website, launched in 2006, has had financial problems. In October, Assange said that it would stop publishing until the group could raise more money. Several articles have wondered whether Assange’s legal problems and WikiLeaks’ internal strife would kill the site.
Perhaps reports of WikiLeaks’ demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Tweets, emails and other electronic communications can be considered “government documents” and must be preserved. The National Archives handles official government materials, while the Library of Congress’ mandate is to deal with anything that may have long-term historical interest.
But how much digital information are we talking about? How about all of the tweets from Twitter’s archives?
“We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,” Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager at the Library of Congress national digital information infrastructure and preservation program said. The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.”
Using new technical processes it has developed, Twitter is moving a large quantity of electronic data from one electronic source to another. “They’ve had to do some pretty nifty experimentation and invention to develop the tools and a process to be able to move all of that data over to us,” Lefurgy said.
Researchers would be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.
Lefurgy said, “We firmly … anticipate that we’ll be bringing in large data sets again into the future. We don’t know specifically what, but certainly there’s no sign of data getting smaller or less complicated or less interesting.”
Left: The Library of Congress
Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland over fears he could have been arrested on torture charges.
Mr. Bush was due to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala in Geneva on February 12. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the country. Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials said.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said the cancellation was linked to growing moves told Bush accountable for the use of torture, including waterboarding. He had admitted in his memoirs and TV interviews to ordering the use of the interrogation technique which simulates drowning.
The action in Switzerland showed Mr Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he traveled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch said.
In the almost 40 years since President Nixon declared a war on drugs, tens of millions of Americans have been arrested and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. Yet drugs are just as available now as they were then.
It is hard to find even an elected official who hasn’t used marijuana or other illegal drugs. President Obama used drugs. Former President George W. Bush made taped comments that many interpreted as indicating he did too. Then there’s Bill Clinton, who famously said he smoked pot but didn’t inhale. Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin admit they used drugs.
Drug use is so widespread the FBI changed its policy of not hiring people with a history of illegal drug use because the policy disqualified so many people that it could not fill its law enforcement positions.
It is long past time to abandon the silly notion that America can be a drug-free nation. The inconvenient truth in drug policy is that Americans love drugs — alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, cocaine, and prescription drugs for everything from anxiety to fatigue.
Prohibition doesn’t stop drug use; it makes drug use more dangerous while filling prisons with nonviolent offenders and making crime lords rich.
Money launderers for ruthless Mexican drug gangs have long had a formidable ally: international banks.
Last year, banking powerhouse Wachovia Corp. agreed to pay $160 million in forfeitures and fines after U.S. federal prosecutors accused it of “willfully” overlooking the suspicious character of more than $420 billion in transactions between the bank and Mexican currency-exchange houses — much of it probably drug money, investigators say.
Wachovia was moving money on behalf of the exchange houses through wire transfers, traveler’s checks, even large hauls of bulk cash, investigators said. Some of the money was eventually traced to the purchase of small airplanes used to smuggle cocaine from South America to Mexico, they said.
Wachovia paid the $160 million in what is called a deferred-prosecution agreement; no one went to prison, and the fines represented a tiny fraction of the money the bank had filtered.
In a similar case, another banking giant, HSBC Bank, is being monitored by U.S. regulators after a probe last year focused on bulk cash that the bank’s U.S. branch received from Mexican exchange houses, money suspected to be drug proceeds.
Complicity by banks has a deep history that still resonates in Mexico. Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, used a maze of accounts in New York-based Citibank and other U.S. banks to secretly transfer millions of dollars to Switzerland in the 1980s and ’90s. No criminal charges of money-laundering or illicit enrichment were filed against Salinas. He is a free and wealthy man today.
Occupy protesters across the US are reclaiming foreclosed homes and boarded-up properties, signaling a tactical shift for the movement against wealth inequality. On Tuesday, groups in more than 25 cities held protests on behalf of homeowners facing evictions.
“It’s pretty clear that the fight is against the banks, and the Occupy movement is about occupying spaces,” Jeff Ordower, one of the organizers of Occupy Homes, said. “So occupying a space that should belong to homeowners but belongs to the banks seems like the logical next step for the Occupy movement.”
The events reflect the protesters’ lingering frustration over the housing crisis that has sent millions of homes into foreclosure after the burst of the housing bubble that helped cripple the country’s economy.
Protesters say banks and financial firms own abandoned foreclosed houses that could be housing people.
In an announcement, protesters in Seattle said they planned to make the warehouse into a community center, and hosted a party the night they opened the building. Police moved in soon after, arresting 16 people in the process of clearing it out.
We need to focus on electing champions who’ll fight for the 99%.
Why are the 1% funneling big money to Karl Rove’s attack ads against Elizabeth Warren? Because she scares them. Listen to her words and just imagine her in the Senate:
“For years I worked to expose how Wall Street and the Big Banks are crushing middle class families. It just isn’t right. I stood up to the Big Banks and their army of Washington lobbyists. I worked to hold them accountable. I led the fight for a new agency to protect consumers—and we got it. But Washington is still rigged for the big guys, and that’s got to change.”
A new poll shows Warren with a clear lead for the first time, but the big threat now is Rove’s attacks—in fact Rove just launched a new $524,000 attack ad against Warren this morning.
[MoveOn]
The stock market is rigged. Under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, confidential government information was regularly leaked to select people on Wall Street.
The Post got hold of Paulson’s telephone records back in 2009. And the phone logs show that Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, regularly spoke with influential people on Wall Street with whom he shouldn’t have been communicating.
Among his regular phone buds was Lloyd Blankfein, who, for example, spoke six times with Paulson on Sept. 18, 2008. That was a day of great market turmoil and — while there is no way of knowing what the two men spoke about — the calls did coincide with a major turnaround in stock prices. That was just one example.
There were many recipients of Paulson’s calls. And the conversations went on for years and were especially frequent when Washington needed a friend on Wall Street.
Bloomberg Markets magazine led last week with a story headlined, “How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word.” It addresses the morning of July 21, 2008 — a time when both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored organizations that buy most of the nation’s residential mortgages, were in serious trouble.
Paulson met that same day with hedge-fund managers at the office of Eton Park Capital Management. “Around the conference table were a dozen or so hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”
Quoting a fund manager at that Eton Park meeting, “After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil . . . the secretary [Paulson] went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into ‘conservatorship’.”
Paulson explained further how the publicly traded stock of both companies would be wiped out under the move. By giving confidential information to a roomful of traders, Paulson had to understand he’d influence the price of Fannie and Freddie stock and, by extension, the whole market. He’d also be giving the people receiving that information a chance to cheat — to rob public investors who weren’t lucky enough to be invited to such meetings.
All an investigator — not to mention a prosecutor — would have to do is check the trading records of the firms on the receiving end of Paulson’s chats to determine if there was any suspicious activity. And, guaranteed, they’d find it.
And that brings me to last week. According to other journalists’ reports, the Federal Reserve voted on Monday, Nov. 28, to approve a financial bailout for Europe using our dollars. That’s the same day that the stock market staged a strong rally, which turned out to be only a preliminary event to the 400-plus point surge the Dow would have two days later — after the rest of us found out about the European bailout.
It’s the UK, as per this excellent chart from Morgan Stanley.
A few notes here:
• This chart is looking at all kinds of debt, not just sovereign debt. The UK’s staggering debt-to-GDP ratio is largely due to the size of its financial sector.
• All financial sector debt is, to some extent, potentially government debt, since all governments end up having to rescue their financial sectors in the event of a crisis. That’s what brought down Iceland and Ireland.
• By no measure does the US look remarkable debt-wise — even household debt/GDP doesn’t look that bad. For that matter, Europe doesn’t look that bad either. Their problem is not debt, but fiscal/monetary structure.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wants you to be scared. Panetta warned that after possible cuts in the military budget, “we would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915, and the smallest Air Force in its history.”
Which would be pretty damn bad … [excerpt] Panetta’s comparison is logically nearly irrelevant. In fact, even the most massive cuts currently under consideration would return American military spending only to 2007 levels.
If Panetta had been interested in logical relevance, though, he wouldn’t have referred to the past at all. He would have focused on the present, and in the present, we spend more on our military than the rest of the world spends combined. And we spend more than five times more on our military than the second biggest military spender, which is China (numbers 3 and 4 are France and the UK, American allies).
But Panetta doesn’t want you to know these numbers. If you did, you might laugh at him when he describes military cuts as meaning “doomsday” for America.
The closest Panetta comes to anything specific about America’s defense needs is to note that cuts would be bad for contractors. At which point, you start to get a feel for what really drives him and who he really represents. It’s long past time that Americans understood the military is, among other things, a special interest, and reacted to its lobbyists.
[Excerpt of article by former CIA agent Barry Eisler]
The US government spent a staggering $US687 billion on “defense” last year. Think what could be done with that money if it were put into hospitals, schools or to pay off foreclosed mortgages.
The US, under George W. Bush, decided to privatize the invasion of Iraq by employing “contractors” such as the Blackwater company, now renamed Xe Services. In 2003 Blackwater won a $US27 million no-bid contract for guarding Paul Bremer, then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
For protecting officials in conflict zones since 2004, the company has received more than $US320 million. This year the Obama government contracted to pay Xe Services a quarter of a billion dollars for security work in Afghanistan. This is just one of many companies making its profits out of warfare.
In 2000 the Project for the New American Century published a report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, whose declared aim was to increase the spending on defense from 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent or 3.8 per cent of American gross domestic product. In fact it is now running at 4.7 per cent of GDP. (Britain spent about $US57 billion a year on defense, or 2.5 per cent of GDP, while Australia spends just under $20 billion, or 2 per cent of GDP.)
An editorial “Thank God for Saddam” in an in-house magazine for the arms industry explained that after the collapse of communism and end of the Cold War, the order books of the arms industry had been empty. But now there is a new enemy, the industry [has experienced] a bonanza.
The invasion of Iraq was built around a lie: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, but the defense industry needed an enemy, and the politicians duly supplied one.
And now the same war drums are beating for an attack on Iran.
It’s no secret that the Pentagon’s “repositioning” strategy implies an undisguised attempt to force … “denial of access” to Chinese shipping and an expanding Chinese blue-water navy.
The repositioning now on across Africa and Asia especially concerns chokepoints. Three of the world’s crucial chokepoints are matters of national security for China, in terms of its supply of oil.
– The Strait of Hormuz is the key global oil chokepoint (roughly 16 million barrels a day, 17 per cent of all oil traded worldwide, more than 75 per cent exported to Asia).
– The Strait of Malacca is the crucial link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and the Pacific, the shortest sea route between the Persian Gulf and Asia, with a flow of around 14 million barrels a day.
– And the Bab el-Mandab, between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, is the strategic link between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, with a flow of 4 million barrels a day.
The Obama administration’s National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon has been insistently arguing the US needs to “rebalance” its strategic emphasis from the Middle East to Asia. That goes a long way to explain Obama sending marines to Darwin, in Northern Australia. Darwin is very close to another chokepoint – Jolo/Sulu in the southwest Philippines.
The Pentagon/NATO’s moves [are bringing] Russia and China closer and closer – not only inside the BRICS ((Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), but especially in the expanded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which is fast becoming not only an economic, but a military bloc as well.
Forget about United States’ “strategic competitors” Russia and China yielding their sovereignty, or compromising their national security. Someone’s got to break the news to those generals at the Pentagon; Russia and China are not exactly Iraq and Libya.
We’ve been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have “taken a leaf” out of the “Arab spring” book, and how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been “inspired” by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in [the Arab world].
But this is nonsense.
What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries.
Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners.
The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become “anarchists”, the social “terrorists” of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can’t touch them.
[Excerpt of an Independent article by Robert Fisk]
Yesterday the news was broken that US-NATO troopa are deployed on the Jordanian-Syrian Border.
According to first-hand accounts by several sources in Jordan, during the last few hours foreign military groups, estimated at hundreds of individuals, began to spread near the villages of the north-Jordan city of “Al-Mafraq”, which is adjacent to the Jordanian and Syrian border.
According to one Jordanian military officer who asked to remain anonymous, hundreds of soldiers who speak languages other than Arabic were seen during the past two days in those areas moving back and forth in military vehicles between the King Hussein Air Base of al-Mafraq (10 km from the Syrian border), and the vicinity of Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border, such as village Albaej (5 km from the border), the area around the dam of Sarhan, the villages of Zubaydiah and al-Nahdah adjacent to the Syrian border.
This is a major shift for a country that has largely forbidden the use of the military domestically under the Posse Comitatus Act since it passed in 1878.
Ray McGovern, a retired 27 year veteran of the CIA, who used to provided the morning intelligence briefing to multiple presidents and security advisers, said that he thought the provisions allowing domestic use of the military and military detention were being added because of fear of civil unrest at home.
The Tea Party and Occupy Movement are signs of an American revolt – a revolt against a corrupt government that funnels wealth to the top 1% while leaving Americans economically insecure.
The vague language of the amendment would seem to allow the military to be used against protesters. Will the military obey orders to shoot Americans or make mass arrests of non-violent civilian protesters? That is an open question.
The Occupy Movement, despite more than 5,100 arrests and aggressive police actions across the country, is not going anywhere. In fact, it strives to become an even bigger movement and more powerful political force. Plans are being made to bring occupiers from across the country to Washington, DC for an American Spring. If the elites are scared now, what will it be like when this movement grows and matures?
One of the gravest grievances described in the Declaration of Independence was the misuse of standing armies against the colonialists. Now, the Congress are prepared to turn the military against Americans and allow indefinite military detention without any finding of guilt. If the elites think military force against Americans will quell the revolt of the people they are wrong; it will have the opposite effect and fuel the revolt against the elites.
Wednesday, December 14th is a national day of action against the use of the military in the United States.
[Excerpts of article by Kevin Zeese]
The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, is facing an intense campaign by hard-line pro-Israel voices in the U.S. who want him fired over remarks he made about anti-Semitism late last month.
Gutman, an Obama fundraiser-turned-ambassador, as well as a Jew and child of a Holocaust survivor, was addressing a Brussels conference devoted to combating anti-Semitism in Europe last month … and described what might be called classical anti-Semitism:
“There is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating. Those anti-Semites are people who hate not only Jews, but Muslims, gays, gypsies, and likely any who can be described as minorities or different. That hatred is of course pernicious and it must be combated. We can never take our eye off it or just dismiss it as fringe elements or the work of crazy people, because we have seen in the past how it can foment and grow.”
This type of anti-Semitism, he said, rears its head from time to time, but does not appear to be growing. But there is another phenomenon, Gutman argued, that is on the rise.
“It is the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews. It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.
“It too is a serious problem. It too must be discussed and solutions explored. No Jewish student – and no Muslim student or student of any heritage or religion – should ever feel intimidated on a University campus for their heritage or religion leading to academic leaders quitting in protest. No high school or grammar school Jewish student – and no Muslim high school or grammar school student or student of any heritage or religion – should be beaten up over their heritage or religion.
“But this second problem is in my opinion different in many respects than the classic bigotry – hatred against those who are different and against minorities generally — the type of anti-Semitism that I discussed above. It is more complex and requiring much more thought and analysis. This second form of what is labeled ‘growing anti-Semitism’ produces strange phenomena and results.”
He then goes on to explore how this problem might be addressed, including by a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Adam Serwer at Mother Jones makes the crucial point: “Gutman’s suggestion that anti-Semitism would subside if a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached isn’t the same as saying Israelis or Jews are ‘responsible’ for anti-Semitism.”
The Community Service Trust, a thoroughly mainstream British organization that specializes in the study of anti-Semitism and providing security for Jews similarly concluded in its annual survey on anti-Semitic incidents in the U.K., “It cannot be ignored that much contemporary anti-semitism takes place in the context of, or is motivated by, extreme feelings over the Israel/Palestine issue.”
In just one year, the Arab and Muslim world has undergone a total transformation.
It started in Tunisia, North Africa a year ago, when a 26-year-old street vendor decided he couldn’t take it anymore. Faced with constant petty police harassment and no recourse when he complained to the authorities, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and with that one act overturned decades of mostly docile popular obedience under the jackboot of Tunisian dictatorship.
Suddenly the whole region was ablaze with the fierce yearning for change: Two-thirds of the Arab and Muslim population is under 25. People are young, educated, wired, connected and they want exactly what they see the rest of the world enjoying: freedom, democracy, dignity, jobs.
After Tunisian dictator Ben-Ali fled, the revolt spread to Egypt, the leader of the Arab world. The people took to Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, and in a remarkable 18 days, forced down one of the region’s enduring leaders, a great ally of the United States and Israel, Hosni Mubarak.
So what does all this upheaval mean for the region, and for the United States? The big fear has always been whether Islamist parties would emerge strongest and turn the Arab world toward Islamic fundamentalism.
Because the dictators allowed no political space, the only political activity came out of the mosques. With the first Arab Spring elections now taking place, this experience is now paying off. In Tunisia a moderate Islamist party won the most votes in October elections, yet they are at pains to insist their Islam is not at odds with democracy. They point to Turkey, where an Islamist party presides over a secular democracy.
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood won the biggest block in this month’s parliamentary elections. But a more puritanical Salafist party named Nour came in a strong second.
There and across the Arab world, minorities, such as Christians, are watching the outcomes carefully, and so, of course, are the women. Having fully participated in all the revolutions, they want their rights enshrined in their future constitutions.
It was already established (see The shadow war in Syria Asia Times Online, December 2, 2011) that NATO had set up a command and control center in Turkey’s southern Hatay province – where British commandos and French intelligence are training the dodgy Free Syria Army (FSA *). The target: to foment a civil war engulfing northern Syria.
Now, via the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, that a pincer movement may be in effect, involving Jordan. Edmonds quotes local sources according to whom “hundreds of soldiers who speak languages other than Arabic” have been “moving back and forth … between the King Hussein air base in al-Mafraq” and “Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border”.
The base at al-Mafraq is virtually across the border from Dar’a. A lot of action has been going on in Dar’a recently – an epicenter of the anti-President Bashar al-Assad movement. As far as the Syrian news agency Sana is concerned, security forces have been routinely killed by “terrorist gangs”. As far as the “rebels” are concerned, these are patriotic army defectors attacking military supply lines.
NATO is now actively diversifying into an Iraq-in-the-1990s strategy; to submit Syria to a prolonged state of siege before eventually going for the kill.
[Excerpts of Asia Times article by Pepe Escobar]
* The FSA claims 15,000 army defectors. But it’s infected with mercenaries and what scores of Syrian civilians describe as armed gangs.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused U.S. drones and special forces of involvement in the death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Putin’s comments were prompted by a question during his traditional year-end question-and-answer program, broadcast live by state media.
Responding to a question about Senator John McCain purportedly predicting Putin would meet the same fate as Libya’s leader, the Russian prime minister described the televised images of Gadhafi’s final moments as “horrible, disgusting scenes” and pointed to U.S. involvement in his death.
“Is that democracy? Who did this? Drones, including those of the U.S., struck his motorcade and then commandos, who were not supposed to be there, called for the so-called opposition and militants by the radio, and he was killed without an investigation or trial,” Putin said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged the day after Gadhafi’s death that “it was a U.S. drone combined with the other NATO planes that fired on the convoy” in which the Libyan leader was traveling outside the city of Sirte. But the Pentagon denied that any U.S. forces were on the ground in a combat role in Libya.
The Iraq War has come to an official end, ending a chapter in U.S. history. In a small ceremony in Baghdad, the U.S. military formally ended its mission in Iraq after nearly nine years of war, 4,487 lives lost and more than 32,000 wounded.
For many Americans who served in the war, as well as their families, the feeling is bittersweet.
“I am glad they are finally pulling the troops out of there,” said veteran Robert Miltenberger, who served as a staff sergeant in Sadr City in 2004. “As soon as we pull out, they are going to have a civil war. That’s what I believe,” he said.
Iraq veteran Luke Fournier also has mixed feelings about the war, thankful the troops are coming home, but not sure it was all worth it. “When I first went, I thought we were going for the right reasons, but looking back on it, I don’t know what the right reason was. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Were we really over there for the right reasons? I don’t know,” he said.
Troy Denomy, still in the army and now a major, worries about what happens next. “With us leaving Iraq, are we going to lose a lot of the focus on the soldiers that are here now and are coming back, and have grave injuries and are going to require the country’s support for years?” he asked.
“It was definitely a big price to pay, but I’m glad that they’re coming home,” says his wife Gina. “The military family is small in the grand scheme of the nation and I hope that everyone else takes a moment to realize the prices that they do pay because it is pretty significant.”
According to a study by The Economist, America’s defense department had 3.2m people on its payroll last year, equivalent to 1% of the U.S. population.
Historically, Americans have always been more concerned about big government than big business or big labor in response to this trend question dating back to 1965. Today, Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government are near record-high levels.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, focused on “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations,” has drawn much attention and a large following.
Of the ten biggest global employers, seven are government-run. China, the world’s most populous nation and a big military spender, employs 2.3m people in its armed forces.
And the number of people working for the National Health Service in England is equivalent to over 2.5% of the country’s population.
A hearing for Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being behind the biggest intelligence leak in U.S. history, began Friday morning but almost immediately went into recess after Manning’s attorney asked the investigating officer to recuse himself.
Attorney David Coombs said Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the presiding officer, should step down. Among Coombs four objections was that Almanza, an Army reservist, had a conflict of interest with his civilian job with the Justice Department, which is investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Coombs objected to Almanza’s job as a prosecutor for the Justice Department because Manning could be called as a witness in the federal case against Julian Assange.
The United States accuses Manning, who turned 24 on Saturday, of violating military code, ranging from theft of records to aiding the enemy. Manning’s Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing that will determine whether enough evidence exists to merit a court-martial, was expected to last a week but could be delayed if Almanza recuses himself.
Coombs, also a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, has a reputation for creative military lawyering, his contemporaries told CNN. He is also an active blogger. He’s been posting about the Manning case, including his client’s alleged mistreatment at Quantico, since taking the case in 2010.
An attorney for the Bradley Manning Support Network says the group has paid about $150,000 in expenses toward Manning’s defense, money raised mostly in small donated increments online.
The following are economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe….
#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.
#3 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.
#4 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
#5 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.
#6 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
#7 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#8 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.
#9 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
#10 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.
#11 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 months in a row.
#12 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
#13 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant. That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.
#14 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
#15 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#16 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#17 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.
#18 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
#19 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
#20 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America’s biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.
#21 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.
#22 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
#23 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#24 Even if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#25 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#26 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.
#27 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
On 19 November 2005 a US marine squad was struck by a roadside bomb in Haditha, in Iraq’s Anbar province, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others. According to civilians they then went on the rampage, slaughtering 24 people. They included a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and a three-year-old child. It was a massacre.
When he heard the news, Major General Steve Johnson, the American commander in Anbar province at the time, saw no cause for further examination. “It happened all the time … throughout the whole country.”
Eight soldiers were originally charged with the atrocity. Charges against six were dropped, one was acquitted and the other is awaiting trial. A New York Times article ran on the same day that Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of American troops last week, hailing the almost nine-year war a “success”, resulting in “an extraordinary achievement” that the troops can look on “with their heads held high”.
And so it is that America moves on, holding nobody accountable and choosing to understand defeat as victory and failure as success.
A recent CBS poll asked: “Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (50% no, 41% yes), and “Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (67% no, 24% yes). The cost to Iraqis simply does not feature.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” wrote Emad Risn, argued an Iraqi columnist in a government-funded newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis too.” And few Americans seem to care.
While the departure of American troops should be greeted with guarded relief (guarded because the US will maintain its largest embassy in the world there along with thousands of armed private contractors), … nobody has been held accountable; few accept responsibility.
The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in cooperation with Iran, outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.
A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues. Maliki needed Sadr’s support, which was initially based on Maliki’s commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.
Publicly, the Maliki government assured the Bush administration it could count on a long-term military presence. Confident that it was going to get a South Korea-style SOFA, the Bush administration gave the Iraqi government a draft on Mar. 7, 2008 that provided for no limit on the number of U.S. troops or the duration of their presence. Nor did it give Iraq any control over U.S. military operations.
But Maliki had a surprise in store for Washington. A series of dramatic moves by Maliki and Iran over the next few months showed that there had been an explicit understanding between the two governments to prevent the U.S. military from launching major operations against the Mahdi Army, and to reach an agreement with Sadr on ending the Mahdi Army’s role in return for assurances that Maliki would demand the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Just two days after returning from a visit to Tehran in June 2008, Maliki complained publicly about U.S. demands for indefinite access to military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private contractors. In July, he revealed that his government was demanding the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops on a timetable.
The Bush administration was in a state of shock. From July to October, it pretended that it could simply refuse to accept the withdrawal demand, while trying vainly to pressure Maliki to back down.
In the end, however, Bush administration officials realized that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would accept the same or an even faster timetable for withdrawal. In October, Bush decided to sign the draft agreement pledging withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011.
The ambitious plans of the U.S. military to use Iraq to dominate the Middle East militarily and politically had been foiled by the very regime the United States had installed, and the officials behind the U.S. scheme, had been clueless about what was happening until it was too late.
A peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Health Services estimates 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear reactors. The article by Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman is the first published in a medical journal.
The authors write that that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks following the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.
Most of the deaths occurred among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks, the authors note.
The arrival of a radioactive plume over the United States following the March 11 disaster was downplayed by the establishment media despite the presence of levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal.
“Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here may be as high as 18,000, with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death,” said Janette Sherman, an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, and contributing editor of “Chernobyl – Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the NY Academy of Sciences in 2009.
If you know anything about Ron Paul’s economic views, it’s probably that he’s not a big fan of the Federal Reserve system, or that he loves the gold standard. But those are hardly the only noteworthy planks in his platform.
Spending: Paul proposes cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget during his first year in office, and balancing the budget by his third year. He would do this in part by eliminating five cabinet departments: Energy; Housing and Urban Development; Commerce; Interior; and Education. He would also scrap the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate corporate subsidies, end foreign aid, and return most other federal spending to 2006 levels.
Paul says he would cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, and accept a presidential salary of $39,336- roughly equal to what the average American makes. The president currently makes $400,000. Paul, who opposes almost all American military intervention overseas, also says he would save money by ending foreign wars.
Taxes: Paul has said in the past that he’d like to abolish personal income tax rates, but his plan doesn’t suggest that. It does propose lowering the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, from 35 percent. And it would extend the Bush tax cuts and eliminate the estate tax.
Regulation: Like most of his rivals, Paul would repeal President Obama’s health care law. He would also get rid of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law intended to increase regulation of Wall Street. And he’d scrap Sarbanes-Oxley, the corporate governance law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal.
Monetary Policy: Paul has written a book called “End the Fed,” but his plan calls only for auditing the central bank–something he’s been trying to do as a legislator. He also would push “competing currency legislation”–meaning he wants individuals to be able to use alternative currencies to the dollar, including gold and silver. The idea is to reduce the federal government’s control over the monetary supply.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: Paul says he wouldn’t scrap Social Security and Medicare. His plan “honors our promise to our seniors and veterans,” meaning that those currently in the programs could stay in them. But he would like to allow younger workers to opt out of the Social Security system and the payroll taxes it imposes.
The Republican congressman from Texas looks to have a real chance of winning the Iowa caucuses in less than two weeks.
How you view God is how you see man. An individual’s concept of “God” determines how one treats others. The same principle applies for a culture, nation or movement.
The distorting of Jesus’ image and words is a sacrilege that destroys individuals and nations – or, for that matter, the perversion of other revered theological figures.
If one envisions a vengeful, wrathful superior being, wrath and retribution are levied against “others” outside the “chosen.” The religion justifies prejudice with all its ugly manifestations: verbal abuse, theft, deceit, injustice, violence, and the ultimate – “final solution.”
America’s religious right loathes the concept of a Jesus who speaks of humility, meekness, generosity, compassion and sacrifice. Somehow these virtues de-masculinize the Messiah. [Many] worship a Nazi Jesus, not the Christ of the Bible. … A judgmental “God” justifies a judgmental following. Thus, it’s condoned to hate and kill gays, Muslims, aliens, liberals, and all others not of their belief-system.
Jesus’ Number One principle must be suspended in order for them to condone bigotry: “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength; and love others as you do yourself.”
In their view, this cardinal command must be set aside for the End Times prophecies to be completed – when a wrathful, vengeful “God” re-appears to annihilate the billions. This eschatological element is what drives America’s religious right to insanity and what is driving America off the cliff – since the religious right is such a significant segment of society.
The culture war is here and now, and it has its roots in religion – albeit counter to Jesus’ teachings. America’s religious right needs to return to its “first love.”
[Excerpts of a TPJ Magazine article by Loren Adams]
One month ago, 16-year-old Sean Quigley was just an ordinary student attending Oak Park High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Today, Quigley has become a YouTube sensation thanks to his rock rendition of the classic Christmas tune, “The Little Drummer Boy.”
The catchy video pays tribute to the song’s message about the true spirit of Christmas. That resonated deeply with Quigley, a Christian teen who plays drums in his local church.
“About a month ago I started thinking about this song,” said Quigley. “It’s the story of a little boy going to find Jesus and not having any gifts to bring — he just plays his drum. That spoke to me so much,” he said.
The teen’s production is all the more remarkable considering Quigley played all the instruments, sang the vocals, recorded everything and directed and edited the video.
Using a Canon digital camera and with the help of his sister, Quigley’s DIY project plays with surprising quality.
An amazing neighborhood Christmas light display with 60,000 lights!
As the story goes, the guy that owns this house lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Designed and programmed by this fellow Richard Holdman.
The display uses about $130 of electricity per season. It has raised over $40,000 for the Make-a-wish foundation.
Traffic at one time was backed up over a mile for people waiting to see it. Police were constantly being called for traffic jams and accidents in the neighborhood so they asked him to shut it down during certain hours.
Instead he started charging the carloads who drove by to see his light display, and paid off-duty police to supervise the traffic.
Music is transmitted over the radio while people view it.
President Obama will soon into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far behind North Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens, or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.
A couple of months ago came a mile marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, without trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal of his 2009 pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.
Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snuggled into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.
The detention bill mandates – don’t glide too easily past that word – that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes US citizens within the borders of the United States.
Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legislation knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the detention bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces”. Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”–This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor.
Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.
[Excerpt of an article by Alexander Cockburn]
The U.S. Congress has ended the year 2011 by assaulting the Constitution. The attack came in the form of the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) which passed both the House (December 14) and the Senate (December 15) by large margins … that allows the United States military to take into custody and hold indefinitely without trial, any American citizen designated a “terrorist suspect.”
Ironically, Congress did this to the country on the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.
A couple reactions to the Homeland Battlefield Bill:
Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: “It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration. It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries to drop.”
Professor Jonathan Turley, legal scholar: “How did we come to this place? Well, it took the joint efforts of both parties and a country that has been lured into a dangerous passivity by years of war rhetoric.”
The odd thing about President Obama’s willingness to sign this bill and, as Human Rights Watch notes, “go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law,” is that the FBI, the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Defense, among others, all oppose it.
The military in particular appears to have no wish to destroy a 200 year tradition of non-interference in domestic affairs. In fact, according to Heather Huburt, the executive director of The National Security Network, a non-profit organization focusing on national security, “you can’t find any national security experts in favor of these provisions.”
[Excerpt of article by Lawrence Davidson, professor of history at West Chester University]
50 million Americans live below the official poverty line, while another 100 million live in “near-poverty,” struggling to support themselves on incomes so low that they are one misfortune away from destitution.
According to a study by the McKinsey consulting firm, it took six months for the US economy to return to pre-recession job levels after the 1982 recession. After the 1991 recession, the recovery in jobs required 15 months. After the 2001 recession, it took 39 months.
At the current level of job creation, it would take 78 months –6 ½ years — to reach the level of 146 million workers employed before the onset of the recession—assuming that there is no further deepening of the economic slump.
One out of every four American children depends on food stamps. Some 1.6 million children were homeless at some point or other during this year. For young workers aged 18 to 24, jobless rates exceed the Depression level of 20 percent. Nearly 20 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
Some 25 million workers are either unemployed or underemployed, and 50 million live without health insurance.
[Excerpt of WSW article by Patrick Martin]
The encirclement of Syria and Lebanon has long been in the works. It appears that this roadmap is based on an Israeli document aimed at controlling Syria. The 1996 Israeli document (see A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm), which included prominent U.S. policy figures as authors, calls for “rolling back Syria”.
The roadmap outlines pushing the Syrians out of Lebanon, diverting the attention of Damascus by using an anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon, and then destabilizing Syria with the help of both Jordan and Turkey. This has all respectively occurred from 2005 to 2011.
The roadmap ultimately seeks to foment sectarian divisions as a means of conquering Syria and creating a Shiite-Sunni rift that will oppose Iran, and keep the Arab monarchs in power. For several years Turkey has been silently trying to de-link Syria from Iran, and to displace Iranian influence in the Middle East.
Turkey has been working to promote itself and its image amongst the Arabs, but all along it has been a key component of the plans of Washington and NATO. At the same time, it has been upgrading its military capabilities in the Black Sea and on its borders with Iran and Syria. In September 2011, Ankara joined Washington’s missile shield project, which upset both Moscow and Tehran.
According to the Turkish media, France has sent its military trainers into Turkey and Lebanon to prepare conscripts against Syria. The so-called Free Syrian Army and other NATO-GCC front organizations are also using Turkish and Jordanian territory to stage raids into Syria. Lebanon is also being used to smuggle weapon shipments into Syria. Many of these weapons were actually arms that the Pentagon had secretly re-directed into Lebanon from Anglo-American occupied Iraq during the George W. Bush Jr. presidency. Meanwhile, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is imposing sanctions that include an end to all flights to Syria.
For years, Jordanian forces have successfully prevented weapons from reaching the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from Jordanian territory. These same Jordanian forces work as a frontline to protect Israel, and the Jordanian intelligence services are an extension of the C.I.A. and Mossad. In the Israeli Knesset, the events in Syria were naturally tied to reducing Iranian power in the Middle East. So Damascus is being targeted as a means of targeting Iran and, in broader terms, weakening Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing in the struggle for control over the Eurasian landmass.
The pressure on Syria is directly tied to the American withdrawal from Iraq and Washington’s efforts to block Tehran from making any geo-political gains. By removing Damascus from the equation, Washington and its allies are hoping to create a geo-strategic setback for Iran.
[Excerpt of an article by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, social scientist,Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies]
President Obama tried for months to extend U.S. military involvement in Iraq beyond the December 31, 2011 deadline. Negotiations between Obama and the Iraqi government broke down when Iraq refused to grant criminal and civil immunity to U.S. troops.
It was after seeing evidence of war crimes such as those depicted in “Collateral Murder” and the “Iraq War Logs,” allegedly leaked to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning, that the Iraqis refused to immunize U.S. forces from prosecution for their future crimes.
Besides helping to end the Iraq war, those leaked cables helped spark the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning faces court-martial for exposing U.S. war crimes for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of these classified documents.
If Manning had committed war crimes instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today. If he had murdered civilians and skinned them alive, he would not be facing the death penalty.
Manning faces more than 30 charges, including “aiding the enemy” and violations of the Espionage Act, which carry the death penalty. However, after a seven day hearing, there was no evidence that leaked information imperiled national security or that Manning intended to aid the enemy with his actions.
On the contrary, in an online chat attributed to Manning, he wrote, “If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”
He went on to say, “God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”
[Excerpt of an article by Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law]
It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel’s legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s argument that Palestine is an “invented nation”.
The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people – Israel and the Israelis – from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible.
The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who wrote the book that would essentially inaugurate the Zionist movement. It was called Der Judenstaat (meaning “the Jews’ state” or “the Jewish State”), which was his proposal for moving the Jews out of Europe and into their own country.
Jews committed to assimilation insisted that Jews were not a nation, but a religious faith. Their nationalities were French, German, Polish, Iraqi or American – not some imaginary Jewish nationality that had not existed for 1900 years.
Today, it is impossible to argue that the Israeli nation is not as authentic and worthy of recognition as any in the world. Even though the concept of Israel-ness started just over a hundred years ago as nothing but an idea, they are Israelis, entitled to self-determination, peace and security in their own land.
And the Palestinians are every bit as much a nation. If the ultimate definition of authentic nationhood is continuous residence in a land for thousands of years, the Palestinian claim to nationhood is ironclad. They never left Palestine (except for those who either emigrated or became refugees after the establishment of Israel).
Those who deny that Palestinians have a nation base their case on two arguments, both of which are logically incoherent. The first is that Palestinians never exercised self-determination in Palestine; they were always governed by others from ancient times to the present day. So what? What makes a people real? Most nations in the world lacked self-determination for long periods of their history. The idea is ridiculous, especially when offered by Israelis or Americans (or Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians… ).
The second argument is that Palestinians never thought of themselves as Palestinians until Jews started moving into their territory, that Palestinian nationalism is a response to Zionism. Again, so what? When European Jews docked in Jaffa, Palestine in the early immigration waves of the late 19th century, there were Arabs waiting at the port. And if those Arabs didn’t call themselves Palestinians until the Zionist movement began, neither did the Jews call themselves Israelis.
The bottom line is that today, the Palestinian nation is as authentic as the Israeli nation – and vice versa. Those who think either is going away are blinded by hatred.
[Excerpt of article by MJ Rosenberg, Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network]
More than any other part of the former colonial world, the Middle East has never been fully decolonized. Here are seven lessons from the history of Western meddling:
1. The west never gives up its drive to control the Middle East, whatever the setbacks – In 2003, the US and Britain invaded and occupied Iraq. It was the strength of the Iraqi resistance that ultimately led to this week’s American withdrawal from Iraq, as in the rest of the region, they never leave unless they’re forced to.
2. Imperial powers can usually be relied on to delude themselves about what Arabs actually think – The neocons famously expected a cakewalk in Iraq and early US and British coverage of the invasion still had Iraqis throwing flowers at invading troops when armed resistance was already in full flow. And UK TV reports of British troops “protecting the local population” from the Taliban in Afghanistan can be strikingly reminiscent of 1950s newsreels from Aden and Suez.
3. The Big Powers are old hands at prettifying client regimes to keep the oil flowing – Any “Arab spring” state that ditches self-determination for the west’s embrace can expect a makeover – just as client regimes that never left its orbit, such as the corrupt police state of Jordan, have always been hailed as islands of good government and “moderation”.
4. People in the Middle East don’t forget their history – even when the US and Europe does – Given the history of the region, when western politicians rail against Iranian authoritarianism or claim to champion democratic rights while continuing to prop up a string of Gulf dictatorships, there won’t be many in the Middle East who take them too seriously.
5. The west has always presented Arabs who insist on running their own affairs as fanatics – As elections bring one Islamist party after another to power in the Arab world, the US and allies try to tame them – on foreign and economic policy, rather than interpretations of sharia. Those that succumb will become “moderates” – the rest will remain “fanatics”.
6. Foreign military intervention in the Middle East brings death, destruction and divide and rule – Whether it’s a full-scale invasion and occupation, such as Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have been killed, or aerial bombardment for regime change under the banner of “protecting civilians” in Libya, where tens of thousands have died, the human and social costs have been catastrophic. And that’s been true throughout the baleful history of western involvement in the Middle East.
7. Western sponsorship of Palestine’s colonization is a permanent block on normal relations with the Arab world – Israel could not have been created without Britain’s 30-year imperial rule in Palestine and its sponsorship of large-scale European Jewish colonization under the banner of the Balfour declaration of 1917. The unconditional nature of that alliance, which remains the pivot of US policy in the Middle East, is one reason why democratically elected Arab governments are likely to find it harder to play patsy to US power than the dictatorial Mubaraks and Gulf monarchs. The Palestinian cause is embedded in Arab and Islamic political culture.
“When a nation threatens another nation, the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit.
“Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry.
“The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations.
“Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors.
“This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.”
–Taylor Caldwell, “The Devil’s Advocate”, pg. 299 (1952)
A nuclear-armed Iran wouldn’t necessarily constitute a threat to Israel’s continued existence, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo reportedly hinted earlier this week to an audience of about 100 Israeli ambassadors.
The intelligence chief said that Israel was using various means to foil Iran’s nuclear program and would continue to do so, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean the destruction of the State of Israel.
“What is the significance of the term existential threat?” the ambassadors quoted Pardo as asking. “Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Absolutely. But if one said a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands was an existential threat, that would mean that we would have to close up shop and go home. That’s not the situation. The term existential threat is used too freely.”
Pardo’s remarks follow a public debate in recent months over a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Pardo’s predecessor as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, has argued that Israel should only resort to military force “when the knife is at its throat and begins to cut into the flesh.” He has also criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, accusing them of pushing for an Israeli attack on Iran, and warned that such an assault would have disastrous consequences.
For the past several years, Netanyahu has characterized a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to Israel. The prime minister has even compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler and argued that Iran should be treated as Nazi Germany should have been dealt with in 1938, just before World War II.
Hundreds of American and NATO troops are training militants on the Syrian border to overthrow Al-assad’s regime. The mainstream media (MSM) has finally begun reporting on these US operations, which have been going on for some 6 months now. (According to a former FBI official this has been going on since May 2011.)
Sibel Edmonds, founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, remarks, “I think it is safe to assume that the media has been given a ‘green light’ by the White House and Pentagon to report on long-ongoing war preparations, aka ‘intervention’ plans, on Syria.”
Following is an interview with Sibel Edmonds on the subject:
Syria remains the Middle East’s only independent secular state. Washington aims to replace its regime with a client one.
Syria’s economy deteriorates steadily. In 2011, its GDP collapsed 30% – from around $55 billion to $37 billion. Its currency also plunged from 47 to 62 to the dollar. Basic goods and services are in short supply. Heating and cooking oil are scarce. Electricity is on and off. Assad’s regime is weakening. National institutions are eroding.
Calls for military intervention are increasing. In late November on CNN’s State of the Union, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice accused Assad of “driving his country to the brink of civil war. (He’s) no friend of the United States.”
“Syria is the handmaiden of the Iranians throughout the region and so the fall of (Assad) would be a great thing not just for the Syrian people but also for the policies of the United States and those who want a more peaceful Middle East.”
A Syrian National Council (SNC) was established. It’s similar to Libya’s puppet Transitional National Council (TNC). Originally formed in 2005, it was revived on August 23, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. It represents Western-backed internal opposition elements against the rights and interests of most Syrians.
Since early 2011, NATO countries used regional bases to provide anti-regime support. Saudi Arabia, Lebanon’s March 14 alliance, Turkey, Jordan and Israel are financing and arming insurgents.
So far, Russia and China blocked a Libyan-style “humanitarian intervention.” Washington, however, wants regime change. Huge challenges remain to stop it.
[Excerpt of an article by Stephen Lendman]
Glittering fireworks exploded as revelers in Australia and Asia welcomed 2012 and others around the world looked forward to bidding a weary adieu to a year marred by natural disasters and economic turmoil.
New York’s Times Square was awash in hopeful sentiments as it prepared to welcome hordes of New Year’s Eve revelers.
In London, round 250,000 people are expected to gather to listen to Big Ben strike twelve at midnight during London’s scaled-back New Year’s celebrations. Fireworks are set off from the London Eye, the giant wheel on the south bank of the river.
Thousands of revelers are expected to descend on Scotland’s capital to attend the world-famous Hogmanay street party, where around 80,000 partygoers will welcome 2012 at the stroke of midnight, before erupting into a mass rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
Revelers in Spain will greet 2012 by eating 12 grapes in time with Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol clock, a national tradition observed by millions who stop parties to follow the chimes on television.
Some in Europe were already tamping down their hopes for a year that promises more financial pain. German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned in her New Year’s message that despite her country’s comparatively stable economic situation, next year will be more difficult than 2011.
For Japan, 2011 was the year the nation was struck by a giant tsunami and earthquake that left an entire coastline destroyed, nearly 20,000 people dead or missing and the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in meltdown.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who starts his second term on New Year’s Day, said he wants to help ensure and sustain the moves toward democracy that protesters sought in the Arab Spring.
Raymond Lo, a master of feng shui — the Chinese art of arranging objects and choosing dates to improve luck — offered hope that things might get better. He said he wasn’t surprised that 2011 was such a tumultuous year because it was associated with the natural elements of metal and wood.
Many Christians seem stuck in a worship rut – an unsatisfying routine – instead of having a vibrant friendship with God, because they force themselves to use devotional methods or worship styles that don’t fit the way God uniquely shaped them.
The best style of worship is the one that most authentically represents your love for God, based on the background and personality God gave you.
If God intentionally made us all different, why should everyone be expected to love God in the same way? As you read Christian classics and interview mature believers, you discover that Christians have used many different paths for 2,000 years to enjoy intimacy with God: being outdoors, studying, singing, reading, dancing, creating art, serving others, having solitude, enjoying fellowship, and participating in dozens of other activities.
In his book Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas identifies nine of the ways people draw near to God:
• Naturalists are most inspired to love God out-of-doors, in natural settings.
• Sensates love God with their senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their sight, taste, smell, and touch, not just their ears.
• Traditionalists draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols, and unchanging structures. Ascetics prefer to love God in solitude and simplicity.
• Activists love God through confronting evil, battling injustice, and working to make the world a better place.
• Caregivers love God by loving others and meeting their needs.
• Enthusiasts love God through celebration.
• Contemplatives love God through adoration.
• Intellectuals love God by studying with their minds.
Which one (or a combination of a few) of these paths helps you draw close to and love God in a style that is the most authentic representation of who you are.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to worship and friendship with God. God wants you to be yourself. “That’s the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship.”
[Excerpt from “Purpose Driven Life”, by Rick Warren]
Matthew Kroenig titled his Foreign Affairs January/February 2012 article, “Time to Attack Iran.” Kroenig’s a former Secretary of Defense Office strategist. He’s also a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called CFR a “front organization (for) the heart of the American establishment.” It meets privately and publishes only what it wishes the public to know.
Harvard International Affairs Professor Stephen Walt called this Kroenig article “a textbook example of war-wongering disguised as analysis. It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy. This is not fair-minded ‘analysis;’ it is simply a brief for war designed to reach a predetermined conclusion.”
For years, American pundits and policymakers have been debating whether the United States should attack Iran and attempt to eliminate its nuclear facilities.
However, Iran’s not aggressive or imperial. It poses no regional threat. It hasn’t attacked another nation in over 200 years.
Iran does maintain a strong military for self-defense. It’s vital given repeated Washington and Israeli threats.
No evidence whatever suggests an Iranian nuclear weapons program. US intelligence assessments through March 2011 found none. And during his December 1, 1997-November 30, 2009 tenure as IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei concurred.
We will never know the artists, poets, and peacemakers who have never lived because their parents were killed in senseless wars.
Imagine walking or driving through Kansas City, Kansas, or Syracuse, N.Y., or Rockford, Illinois, and knowing that every single man, woman, and child living in one of those cities represents a person who is now dead as a result of the recently “ended” U.S. war in Iraq. Now consider that this number (150,726 human beings) is the lowest credible estimate of war-related deaths. Imagine at the high end of the statistical spectrum, that the city of San Jose, Calif. (the 10th largest city in America, were filled with nothing but corpses; this begins to approach the 1,033,000 people who may have died unnecessarily in America’s war on Iraq.
Alternatively, if numbers alone are too abstract, consider the “litany of horrors” described by Kelley Vlahos in a piece on the birth defects among the children of Fallujah: “babies born with two heads, one eye in the middle of the face, missing limbs, too many limbs, brain damage, cardiac defects, abnormally large heads, eyeless, missing genitalia, riddled with tumors.” Reportedly, in 2010, congenital malformations were observed in 15% of all births in Fallujah. (Vlahos describes some of the possible causes of these horrors, including the American military’s use of depleted-uranium-tipped weapons and toxic plumes from burning waste on U.S. bases.) The war will never end for the people of that destroyed and contaminated city of 326,471 people.
Commenting on the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently said, “As difficult as [the Iraq war] was … I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”
Setting aside the sheer arrogance and insensitivity of this statement, it is worth asking if we are even capable of determining what price is worth hundreds of thousands of human lives (in Iraq) or the deaths of dozens of innocent civilians (in Libya)?
Are we gods with the moral authority to determine who will live and who will die? If not, then what business do we have proclaiming what is “worth” the deaths of people halfway around the world? More importantly, what business do we have killing (or causing the deaths of) those people in the first place?
New Year’s is a traditionally a time for reflection; I hope that each of us will consider these questions and ask ourselves what kind of people we want to be.
[Excerpt of article by Nicholas Kramer, former investigator for an oversight & investigations committee in the United States Senate.]
Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. …But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores.
Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down the shocking decline of our cities. As our economic infrastructure has been ripped out right in front of our eyes, an atmosphere of unemployment, poverty and despair has descended on many of our major cities like a soaking wet blanket.
Even in some of our most “prosperous cities” there are areas that closely resemble Third World conditions. For example, in San Francisco there is an area known as “Hunter’s Point” where more than half of the population lives in poverty and more than half of all children live in a home where there is no father present. The following is what one reporter found on a visit to Hunter’s Point….
“We cut through the complex, tromping over an expanse of dirt and concrete … A stream of ****, piss, tampons, and toilet paper spewed from a dark hole in the sidewalk, poured down the hill, and formed a sort of **** lagoon next to the street. … In the so-called developing world, according to the World Health Organization, water tainted by feces is a major killer, a prime cause of severe diarrhea, which takes the lives of an estimated 1.8 million people annually.”
In Fresno, California the theft of copper wire from street lights has become a major crisis. At this point, the loss of copper wire and the cost of repairing street lights is costing Fresno about $50,000 a month. So far, approximately 2,500 street lights have been stripped of their wiring.
And Los Angeles continues to come apart at the seams. Approximately 40 arson fires were started in Los Angeles in just the last three days alone. That is the highest number of arson fires that Los Angeles has seen since the 1992 riots.
The number of children living in poverty in the state of California increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2007 and 2010. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
Speaking of Detroit, it is almost unbelievable what has happened to “the motor city”….
*Only 25 percent of all students in Detroit graduate from high school at this point.
*If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
*An analysis of census figures found that 48.5% of all men living in Detroit from age 20 to age 64 did not have a job in 2008.
Today, Detroit has become a very frightening place to live. 100 bus drivers in Detroit recently refused to drive their routes out of fear for their own personal safety.
The rate of HIV infection in Washington D.C. is actually higher than it is in West Africa according to the director of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration….
President Obama quietly waited weeks to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) legislation on New Year’s Eve after publicly threatening to veto the bill that, among other things, authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens.
Critics in the ACLU and Human Rights centers have abandoned their comfort zones and attacked the president from the left for crossing the Rubicon on rights, as they rightly should.
Now is the time for more to join that call; for Americans of all stripes to speak out against so-called “laws” that enable blatant political targeting of dissidents and declare a war against the citizens of this country. Make no mistake, if we sit idly by and let this precedent become accepted– like the Patriot Act, with the appearance of law– more and more unconstitutional legislation will obviously take hold.
You can’t legalize tyranny. One of the nation’s most well known legal precedents, Marbury vs. Madison, set in 1803, makes clear that any “law” that is “repugnant to the Constitution is null and void.”
Despite long-term U.S. military occupations aimed at establishing representative governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, a real threat exists that Christianity now faces eradication in those countries. This is due to severe and persistent persecution of Christians there, according to the chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“We are looking at two different countries where the United States invaded, occupied, changed their governments in the last decade–Iraq and Afghanistan–where it’s possible Christianity might be eradicated in our lifetime?” CNSNews.com asked USCIRF Chairman Leonard Leo in a video interview.
“Yes,” said Leo, “and, unfortunately, that is sort of the pattern throughout the Middle Eastern region. The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year. It’s a very, very alarming situation.”
Similarly, despite the “Arab Spring” rebellion in Egypt earlier this year, the survival of Christianity is also threatened in that country because of the escalating persecution of Christians.
The following is an excerpt of an article by Miko Peled, born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well known Zionist family. Miko’s grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and signer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence:
Since my father was a general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform?
The short answer is this: Education – Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by education. In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some anti-Semitic imagination.
Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them.
Palestinians are portrayed as an existential threat through absurd comparisons like that of Yasser Arafat to Hitler, the Palestinians to Nazis, and the Palestinian resistance to Al Qaeda. Since Israeli kids never meet Palestinians what they learn in school, particularly in the school textbooks, is all that they know.
According to a new book by Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, not a single photo of a person who is a Palestinian exists in Israeli textbooks and there are millions of Palestinians in and around Israel. Israelis don’t learn about Palestinian doctors and teachers, engineers and writers. They don’t learn Palestinian poetry or prose and they don’t read the works of Palestinian historians.
Israelis don’t know that Palestinians never had an army, that they do not possess a single tank, a single warship or fighter jet, that they don’t have a single artillery battery and do not in fact pose a military threat at all.
At a recent lecture I mentioned the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and someone called out: “What ethnic cleansing?” People are unaware of the ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine because Israel hides it well and the mainstream media doesn’t care enough to ask. But for the past 64 years ethnic cleansing of Palestine is what drives the Zionist policies towards Palestinians. Had these same crimes been committed against Israeli Jews they would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is only a small part of the Israeli Palestinian issue. The greater issue is the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist state.
As the United States African Command (AFRICOM) begins to gain a foothold into the African continent with its troops officially present in Eritrea and Uganda in an effort to maintain security and remove other theocratic religious groups, the sectarian violence in Nigeria provides a convenient pretext for military intervention in the continuing resource war.
And on a recent trip to West Africa, the newly appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde ordered the governments of Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad to relinquish vital fuel subsidies. Much to the dismay of the population of these nations, the prices of fuel and transport have near tripled over night without notice, causing widespread violence on the streets of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and its economic center, Lagos. Much like the IMF induced riots in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, public discontent in Nigeria is channelled towards an incompetent and self-serving domestic elite, compliant to the interests of fraudulent foreign institutions.
Although Nigeria holds the most proven oil reserves in Africa behind Libya, it’s people are now expected to pay a fee closer to what the average American pays for the cost of fuel, an exorbitant sum in contrast to its regional neighbors. However, the vast majority of the Nigerian population struggle daily on less than $2.00 USD. (Other oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offer their populations fuel for as little as $0.12 USD per gallon.)
The abrupt simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies in several West African nations is a clear indication of who is really in charge of things in post-colonial Africa.
The timing of its cushion-less implementation could not be any worse, Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency after forty people were killed in a church bombing on Christmas day, an act allegedly committed by an Islamist separatist group.
At an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM is to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. There is little doubt that Nigeria will become a new front in the War on Terror.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Agency (TSA) have taken naked body scanners on the road so they are now equipped to peer through cars and walls in addition to clothes.
The question is still being debated whether it’s ethical and legal to allow the government to basically strip search men, women and children at airports using these naked body scanners, not to speak of TSA’s intrusive hand searches of genitals and breasts (While children 12 and under are exempt from groping on their genitals and breast, children 13 and older are not.)
And now the DHS and TSA are deploying these mobile units with the ability to body scan/peak inside your house plus bathe you with radiation against your will and your Fourth Amendment rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Where does it stop?
An unintended consequence of QE had been to spur several countries to think very seriously of how they could replace the dollar as their settlement currency for international deals.
The list of countries accumulating gold (Russia, China, India) is similar to the list of countries that were reported to be talking about the need for a new reserve currency to replace the dollar. I wonder if those who are seriously thinking of trying to unseat the dollar and create a currency which is backed by something other than debt and is not under the control of America’s corrupt banks and even more corrupt government, are investing in gold as a precursor to making a real bid for a new currency.
[Apart from a new Reserve Currency, there is also a ‘settlement currency’] In 2000, Iraq signed an agreement to sell its oil, all its oil, in Euros. Iran was contemplating doing the same at around the same time.
In January of this year the India Times reported that India was talking to Iran about moving out of dollar settlements so as to be able to buy Iranian oil despite a US embargo. India said it was discussing settling in Gold. India has also just signed a settlement agreement with China to use the Yuan.
China and Russia have been trading directly in their own currencies and using them both interchangeably for settlement for over a year. China and Japan will promote direct trading of the yen and yuan without using dollars.
The list of countries and trades no longer using the dollar for settlement for their trade is now considerable.
On Dec.28th, the Iranian news service reported, Iran and China signed two agreements on expansion of trade ties and joint investments. These trades too will not be settled in Dollars or in Euros.
Three days after that, The China Post reported that President Obama had signed a new law in which the U.S. imposes sanctions on banks dealing with Iran.
On Jan 7th, came the news that, Iran and Russia replaced the U.S. dollar with their national currencies in bilateral trade. So now almost none of Iran’s oil will be traded in Dollars.
I think the stand-off with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz over sanctions is as much to do with the moves to replace the dollar as anything else. The stand off is as much with China and its allies as it is specifically with Iran.
[Read full article]
Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said 200,000 new jobs were created which dropped the unemployment rate to 8.5%.
Economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com says the government reported more than 40,000 jobs that didn’t exist. In his latest report, Williams said, “The December 2011 payrolls included a false, seasonally-adjusted gain of roughly 42,000 in the “Couriers and Messengers” category.” Williams went on to report, “If unemployment was calculated the way BLS did it in 1994 and earlier, it would be 22.4%”.
By the way, the “tax cut” amounts to $20 a week on average, and it cuts cash to fund things like Social Security. Cutting Social Security sounds more like desperation to me and not a real recovery.
I think the best and most succinct 2012 prediction comes from renowned investor Jim Rogers, who says, “They’re going to make us all feel better for a while” because politicians will push money printing during a big election year. Rogers thinks what’s been going on is a “charade” and come the fall–look out! “This is all going to end in a terrible disaster for all of us . . . by the fall of 2012, I’d be very worried.”
The economy is clearly not headed for a real recovery, no matter how many positive reports are conjured up by the government. The government and the MSM can mask the decline, but they can’t stop it.
There’s a little known division of the Treasury Department called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) whose mission is to “to enhance U.S. national security, deter and detect criminal activity, and safeguard financial systems from abuse by promoting transparency in the U.S. and international financial systems.”
FinCEN is basically the CIA of the financial system. But unlike the CIA which is technically not allowed to spy on US citizens and typically has to pay informants, FinCEN has complete legal authority over US persons. And they’ve managed to turn the entire financial system into the world’s largest network of informants.
Simply put, your banker is an unpaid, often unwilling spy of the US government. FinCEN is the executive agency tasked with ensuring that every US banker is an unpaid government spy through Suspicious Activity Reports.
A Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, includes details of any transaction that may be deemed ‘suspicious’. Naturally, there’s no clear guidance on what is/is not considered suspicious. Banks, brokerages, money service businesses, precious metals dealers… even casinos are required by law to fill them out.
If you withdraw an unusual amount of cash from your bank account, that could be deemed suspicious. If you set up a new payee in your billpay service, that could be deemed suspicious. Anything and everything is fair game.
Banks and other businesses who do not fill out SARs face hefty penalties, including imprisonment. If they disclose to a customer that s/he is the subject of a SAR, they have hefty penalties, including imprisonment. When push comes to shove and they have to choose between a nasty penalty, or submitting a SAR about your unusual cash withdrawal, which option do you think they’ll pick?
Unsurprisingly, nearly 1.5 million ‘suspicious activity reports’ were filed across the US banking system in 2011, well over twice the number reported in 2004.
[ZeroHedge]
Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul is a guy who has been in Congress on and off for 12 terms, dating back to 1976. His views have been pretty consistent, and because he has run for president several times, also pretty well known. A practicing physician who claims to have helped in the births of over 4000 babies in his career, the 76-year-old Paul is a free-market advocate, an abortion opponent, an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, an opponent of government regulation, the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and of big government in general–especially big federal government.
Ron Paul is being called anti-American, both by some of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, and increasingly even by fearful Democrats. The basis for this claim is Paul’s argument that the 9-11 attacks on the US were the predictable result of the history of American imperialist activity in the Middle East, and his claim that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were gleeful after that attacks because it allowed them to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. The thing is, while you aren’t supposed to say it in polite company, Ron Paul is right about that.
Paul is also being labeled an “isolationist” (a hoary term that is supposedly a pejorative, dating back to World War I days, but which these days should actually be considered a compliment). The basis for this charge is that he calls for an end to America’s endless wars and to the fraudulent and enormously dangerous and damaging “War on Terror”. He also says he wants to close down the over 800 military bases that the US operates all around the world. Again, what has his establishment critics in high dudgeon is that his perspective is winning over an increasing number of Americans (including Republicans), who are finally waking up to the reality that a country that spends more than half of every tax dollar on its military, its wars, the debt for those wars, and on its secret spying operations, and that has itself on a permanent war footing, cannot prosper or even long endure.
Also making Ron Paul a pariah for the establishment is his position on Israel. He rightly points out and condemns the terrible distortion of US foreign policy that has occurred because of the unseemly power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which has most members of Congress in the pocket of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). As he put it in a 2007 interview: “The First Amendment grants all citizens the right to petition the U.S. government, and this applies to AIPAC as much as anyone else. However, I oppose certain lobbying groups having more of an undue influence than others, and since one of the main purposes of AIPAC is to lobby for generous taxpayer subsidies to Israel, that portion of their influence would end under my administration.”
With another term of President Obama, we would get more war, increased military spending, and at the rate he’s been stripping away our Constitutional rights, there wouldn’t be any of those after another four years. We would also be electing someone who we now know lies through his teeth, who takes money from some of the biggest corporate thieves in human history, and who has appointed some of those very criminals to most or all of the key economic policy positions in his administration.
With Ron Paul as president, at least we’d be done with all the wars, the people of the rest of the world would be finally free of US military interference, including attacks by US drones. The long-suffering Constitution and its Bill of Rights would mean something again. We might even get a Supreme Court justice or two who actually believed that Congress should declare any future wars before we could fight them, and that citizens who were arrested had an absolute right to a speedy trial by a jury of peers. And we’d be electing someone who appears, especially for a politician, to be that rare thing: an honest man who says what he means and means what he says — and who doesn’t seem to be owned by the banksters.
[Excerpts of an article by Dave Lindorff]
Up until a few years ago, most Americans didn’t know much about drones or unmanned aircraft. However, the U.S. military has been using drones in its various wars and conflicts around the world for more than 15 years, using the Predator drone for the first time in Bosnia in 1995, and the Global Hawk drone in Afghanistan in 2001.
Today almost one in every three U.S. warplanes is a drone, according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2005, the number was only 5%. And the market for these systems is only expected to increase. Some have forecast that by the year 2018 there will be “more than 15,000 [unmanned aircraft systems] in service in the U.S., with a total of almost 30,000 deployed worldwide.”
Now drones are also being used domestically for non-military purposes, raising significant privacy concerns. For example, this past December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased its ninth drone. It uses these drones inside the United States to patrol the U.S. borders—which most would argue is within its agency mandate—but it also uses them to aid state and local police for routine law enforcement purposes. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported in December that CBP used one of its Predators to roust out cattle rustlers in North Dakota. The Times quoted local police as saying they “have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June.” Some within law enforcement have even proposed using drones to record traffic violations.
Drones are capable of highly advanced and almost constant surveillance, and they can amass large amounts of data. They carry various types of equipment including live-feed video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. Some newer drones carry super high resolution “gigapixel” cameras that can “track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet[, and] . . . can see targets from almost 25 miles down range.”
Predator drones can eavesdrop on electronic transmissions, and one drone unveiled at DEFCON last year can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations—without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer.
Drones are also designed to carry weapons, and some have suggested that drones carrying weapons such as tasers and bean bag guns could be used domestically.
Many drones, by virtue of their design, their size, and how high they can fly, can operate undetected in urban and rural environments, allowing the government to spy on Americans without their knowledge. And even if Americans knew they were being spied on, it’s unclear what laws would protect against this. Supreme Court case law has not been friendly to privacy in the public sphere, or even to privacy in areas like your backyard or corporate facilities that are off-limits to the public but can be viewed from above. The Supreme Court has also held that the Fourth Amendment’s protections from unreasonable searches and seizures may not apply when it’s not a human that is doing the searching.
[Excerpt of an article by Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation]
The Marine Times reports: A select group of Marines is quietly battling terrorism across a wide swath of Africa as part of the first wave of what could become a long-term mission for the Corps.
The 180 members of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force 12 are serving in the Trans-Sahel region of Africa, which stretches across the center of the continent’s oil-rich north along the Sahara Desert. The unit has also deployed farther east, in countries such as Djibouti.
The unit, made up mostly of reservists, is supposedly focused not on combat but rather team-building with militaries scattered throughout this region. Members of 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company make up most of the ground combat element, and it’s assisted from above by two KC-130T Hercules, one each from Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 452 and VMGR-234. Rounding out the SPMAGTF are a variety of Marines from 41 other drill centers across the Reserve, plus some active-duty Marines and corpsmen.
The Africa unit activated in June, conducted pre-deployment training through September and deployed in October to Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy. Marines have since been deploying to the Trans-Sahel region to train foreign militaries on various missions.
“Basically, we’re putting a presence in another country,” Master Sgt. Bill Simpson, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said. “We’re putting a face for the United States of America.”
Ron Paul is doing much better in the Republican presidential race than anyone not named Mitt Romney. An increasing number of people think Ron Paul will play a huge role in the GOP fight — and in the general election. Here’s a look at why Ron Paul is a force to be reckoned with:
If he can’t win the nomination, why is Paul running?
A cause. Paul and his aides insist that the Ron Paul Revolution will keep on rolling through the GOP primary season, and perhaps all the way to the Republican National Convention in August. If he can win enough delegates, Paul will have leverage at the convention.
How would Paul get the GOP to listen to him?
It’s all about the delegates, which are awarded based on a candidate’s performance in primaries and caucuses. (Only Paul and Romney managed to get on every state’s primary ballot.) A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to secure the nomination. For the next couple months, every primary and caucus awards its delegates proportionally, before giving way to a winner-take-all system in April. If a third candidate gives Romney a run for his ample money, Paul’s delegates could be a critical tiebreaker. Paul could potentially swing his supporters behind the candidate of his choosing, effectively making him a “kingmaker.”
And Paul’s fans are important in the general election too, right?
Absolutely, says Peter Grier in The Christian Science Monitor. “Consider this: In New Hampshire, Paul won 47 percent of voters aged 18 to 29.” Keeping those voters in the GOP fold is key to “making inroads into Barack Obama’s appeal to younger demographics.” That’s why some GOP stalwarts are making “conciliatory noises about the Paulites,” and no longer dismissing them as “cranks, college students in favor of drug legalization, or disaffected liberals.” And even if the GOP doesn’t keep Paul’s voters, they need to keep Paul — the “Republican nightmare” is “Romney as the nominee, and Paul as a third-party candidate.”
Would Paul really launch a third-party bid?
He says he has no plans to, but he views his candidacy “as the leading edge of a much larger movement,” and if that movement is served better by an independent bid… well, anything could happen. And until Paul makes up his mind, he’s “the most dangerous man in (and to) the Republican party.”
[Excerpt of Yahoo article]
Without much media attention, thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.
Following are excerpts of an interview with Jim Rickards, who negotiated the release of US hostages from Iran in 1981. Rickards’ advisory clients include government directorates around the world, in addition to being heavily involved in US national security issues and the Department of Defense.
General Martin Dempsey, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has arrived in Israel and Israel is integrating itself with the U.S. European Command or EUCOM. There are joint exercises going on between the US and Israel. At the same time Iran is conducting war games.
All of the information I have is that the US is going to do it (attack Iran). So the tension between Israel and the United States is being resolved in favor of letting the US actually launch the attack.
[Iran does] have a serious missile capability. … There are an enormous number of US troops in Israel. I don’t know if people realize that, but they are operating the THAAD system (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). They oversee weapons that will shoot down incoming Iranian missiles.
We’ll need anti-missile warfare and we will need to strike those bases. We will need to do a lot of other damage to Iran, cyber warfare, take down the power grid, take down the command and control structure. Do whatever we can to stop them from attacking our assets in the Middle-East.
The other day the United States sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran. The Iranian currency, the rial, dropped 30% in a single day. Hyperinflation has broken out in Iran. This is financial warfare.
This is not a war game, not an exercise, it’s happening now and the clock is ticking.
• If, in 2002-3. the US really believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, then why did they send in more than 100,000 U.S. troops who would therefore certainly be annihilated?
• During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn’t do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
• For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a Southeast Asian country (Vietnam), a simple country that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
• “If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ‘suspected terrorist’ is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is ‘inevitable’. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians.” — Howard Zinn
• “Some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal others.” — The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006
• President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America’s never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
• American sovereignty hasn’t faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
• “The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks, it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: ‘The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road’, etc. etc.” — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.
Washington clearly wants Russia’s Vladimir Putin out! Hillary Clinton and friends have apparently decided Russia’s prospective next president, Vladimir Putin, is a major obstacle to their plans. Few however understand why.
Russia today, in tandem with China and to a significant degree Iran, form the spine, however shaky, of the only effective global axis of resistance to a world dominated by one sole superpower.
What Washington is doing in Russia is more than brazen and interventionist. A Washington-based NGO with the innocuous name, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is all over the place inside Russia. A few weeks before the December elections the NED financed an invitation-only conference featuring the Russian “independent” polling organization, the Levada Center. Levada, another recipient of NED money, had done a series of opinion polls, a standard method used in the West to analyze the feelings of citizens. The polls profiled “the mood of the electorate in the run up to the Duma and presidential elections, perceptions of candidates and parties, and voter confidence in the system of ‘managed democracy’ that has been established over the last decade.”
Helping youth engage in political activism is precisely what the same NED did in Egypt over the past several years in the lead up to the toppling of Mubarak. The same NED was instrumental by informed accounts in the US-backed “Color Revolutions” in 2003-2004 in Ukraine and Georgia that brought US-backed pro-NATO surrogates to power. The same NED has been active in promoting “human rights” in Myanmar, in Tibet, and China’s oil-rich Xinjiang province.
By their description, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a “private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world.” It couldn’t sound more noble or high-minded.
However, they prefer to leave out their own true history. In the early 1980’s CIA director Bill Casey convinced President Ronald Reagan to create a plausibly private NGO, the NED, to advance Washington’s global agenda via other means than direct CIA action. It was a part of the process of “privatizing” US intelligence to make their work more “effective.” Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
Washington and especially Barack Obama’s Administration don’t give a hoot about whether Russia is democratic or not. Their concern is the obstacle to Washington’s plans for Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet that a Putin Presidency will represent.
Faced with growing erosion of her unchallenged global status as sole superpower, Washington appears now to be turning increasingly to raw military force to hold that. For that to succeed Russia must be neutralized along with China and Iran. This will be the prime agenda of whoever is next US President.
This summer a senior Saudi official told Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.”
This is today’s “great game” – losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighboring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall – so its initiators insist.
The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s achilles heel – as the vulnerable conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran. US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor, but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces.
The external opposition continues to fudge its stance on external intervention, and with good reason: the internal opposition rejects it.
This is the flaw to the model – for the majority in Syria deeply oppose external intervention, fearing civil conflict. Hence Syrians face a long period of externally mounted insurgency, siege and international attrition. Both sides will pay in blood.
Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, in the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government puts us in rather troubling company.
1. Assassination of U.S. citizens
President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)
2. Indefinite detention
Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)
3. Arbitrary justice
The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)
4. Warrantless searches
The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)
5. Secret evidence
The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question.
6. War crimes
The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)
7. Secret court
The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)
8. Immunity from judicial review
Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)
9. Continual monitoring of citizens
The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)
10. Extraordinary renditions
The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and non-citizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.
[Excerpt of article by Jonathan Turley, George Washington University professor].
A Spanish judge re-launched an investigation into the alleged torture of detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one day after a British authorities launched a probe into CIA renditions to Libya.
The twin developments demonstrated that while the Obama administration has stuck to its promise not to investigate whether Bush administration officials acted illegally by authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques, other countries are still interested in determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.
In Madrid, Judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez handed down a 19-page decision Friday in which he said he would seek additional information – medical data, a translation of a Human Rights Watch report, elaboration on material made public by WikiLeaks, and testimony from three senior U.S. military officers who served at Guantanamo – in the case of four released Guantanamo captives who allege they were humiliated and subjected to torture while in U.S. custody.
Ruz ruled that under international law the United States has no right to declare itself immune from international prohibitions against torture “even in times of war or the fight against terrorism.” He also rejected U.S. claims that Guantanamo detainees had no right to protection under the Geneva conventions.
Ruz said, however, that it would be premature to notify the former U.S. officials named in the former detainees’ complaint that they are under investigation. Those officials include former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and two former Guantanamo commanders, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert and retired Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.
In London, the Crown Prosecution Service and Scotland Yard said Thursday that they would investigate allegations of British involvement in the Bush-era “extraordinary rendition” program, specifically whether British intelligence had a hand in delivering two Libyan opponents of Col. Moammar Gadhafi to Libyan jails, where they were tortured by Gadhafi’s secret police.
International human rights groups have turned to the European courts after losing successive efforts to bring cases in U.S. courts, which typically invoked the states secret doctrine to get lawsuits dismissed not on the merits but as a national security necessity.
[Excerpt of Miami Herald article by Carol Rosenberg]
