COLOMBIA BASE AGREEMENT

it has drawn heavy criticism from many Latin American leaders, most notably Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, but also Evo Morels of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and Rafael Correa of Ecuador among others.

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to help the US and Colombian governments carry out their war on drugs, “narco-terrorism”, and whatever else may come.

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the growing number of US troops in the Latin America (the US Fourth Fleet was reactivated in the Caribbean by Bush II after a 40-year plus hiatus) has the possibility of sparking a regional war.

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The US is literally encircling Venezuela with military bases and a naval fleet.

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Venezuela is the fourth largest petroleum producer in the world and is home to reserves rivaling and maybe surpassing that of Saudi Arabia.

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Is Chavez paranoid

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a look to the historical context of the situation will prove illuminating.

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In 2002 a coup took place

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the people of Venezuela forced the coup plotters to reinstate Chavez,

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the US government gave implicit if not explicit support to the coup.

In 2003 the US, after a years long process of encircling and weakening Iraq, invaded and occupied that oil-rich country and installed a government and neo-liberal economic framework more to its liking.

in 2008 the Colombian military launched a cross border raid into Ecuador to strike at a alledged FARC base, a move that was roundly condemned by every nation in Latin America and the OAS

the Colombian government is a recipient of massive amounts of US military aid, receiving over 6 billion dollars in the past decade under the auspices of Plan Colombia. This puts they country third behind Israel and Egypt

Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

that there is no military solution to the problem.

While eradicating the coca crops of poor framers and supporting right-wing paramilitaries has produced a situation where human rights abuses are continually placing Colombia among the worst offenders in the Western Hemisphere,

it has done next to nothing to stop the flow of cocaine coming from the country.

If the US was serious about addressing the problem it would have to recognize that while Colombia may be the largest supplier of the drug, it is the US that is the largest consumer. Following the Plan Colombia logic the US military should be engaged in operations in the US to eradicate cocaine users on a similar scale.

incidentally it is worth noting that poppy production, later processed into opium and heroin, has sky rocketed in Afghanistan since the US invaded and occupied that country. After being severely reduced under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now accounts for over 80% of world production of poppy.

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The message from the region is loud and clear: Yankees, take your guns and economic models and go home! We are ready and willing to deal with you on fair and equitable terms, but the days of imposing your will over ours have come to an end.

CLIMATEGATE

They’re calling it “Climategate.” The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade or so revealed by a thousand or so emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following a leak from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

TERESA FORCADES AND BAXTER

Highly educated Benedictine nun on H1N1...the undisputed fact is that Baxter sent a batch of contaminated vaccine to the Czech Republic, where it was discovered by a researcher. (according to a Bloomberg report the error could have caused up to 70 million deaths).

The conspiracy-theory take on this is that the Baxter foul-up, which the company admitted, was no accident, but a deliberate attempt to manufacture a global health crisis.

HOW GOLDMAN SACHS BET ON THE HOUSING CRASH

If we had gotten FDR instead of who we did get, these guys would have already been strung up instead of being put in charge of the US Treasury and TARP

CHINA AND THE DOLLAR

Obama, China and the Dollar

The US Must Solve Its Own Economic Problems

By MARK WEISBROT

H1N1

The gist is that she believes the H1N1 panic may have been falsely ginned up for the sake of increasing the power of the state on a false pretext. A key piece of evidence for her case: the undisputed fact that Baxter, a vaccine manufacturer, sent a batch of contaminated vaccine to the Czech Republic, where it just happened to have been discovered by a researcher. Had people been vaccinated with this stuff, it would have killed untold numbers, and likely set off a new and very deadly global flu pandemic (according to a Bloomberg report on the Baxter error, up to 70 million could have died worldwide if the deadly avian flu virus in the Baxter vaccine had gotten into the human population). The conspiracy-theory take on this is that the Baxter foul-up, which the company admitted, was no accident, but a deliberate attempt to manufacture a global health crisis.

US pours millions into anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan

$500,000 each plus plus $250,000 to deliver it and a $10 IED to take it out

Such a vehicle will combine the maneuverability of the Humvee, the military's workhorse vehicle, with the protection of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) troop carrier, Pentagon documents show.
The Pentagon could buy up to 10,000 of the new trucks, which the military will need as it plans to almost double the number of servicemembers in Afghanistan to 60,000 over the next few years. So far, the Pentagon says it will buy at least 2,080 of the new MRAPs.

There were a record 3,276 attacks from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in 2008. Those attacks killed 161 coalition servicemembers and wounded 722.
Brogan declined to estimate the new vehicle's cost, although the base price for a current MRAP is about $500,000. An armored Humvee costs $200,000.
troops prefer it to a Humvee because of the added protection, but it can get bogged down easily
"The problems that we are having with the current MRAP are that we get stuck in places that a lighter vehicle can go."

The bill to transport new armored vehicles to protect troops from roadside bombs in Afghanistan could top $2 billion, according to military figures.

Much of the equipment needed in Afghanistan must be flown in, because the landlocked country has no ports, though some supplies arrive by a hazardous ground route through Pakistan.

The military's Transportation Command estimates that it costs $165,000 to $230,000 to fly an MRAP from the United States to Afghanistan. If the Pentagon bought 10,000 of the new trucks and flew all of them to Afghanistan, transportation costs would total $1.6 billion to $2.3 billion.

From Wikipedia

72 percent of the world's bridges cannot hold the MRAP.[15] Its heft also restricts several of the vehicles from being transported by C-130 cargo aircraft or the amphibious ships that carry Marine equipment and supplies. Although three MRAP vehicles will fit in a C-17 aircraft, airlifting is extremely expensive at $750,000 per vehicle, estimated by the U.S. Transportation Command.[16] In an effort to rush more vehicles to the theatre, the US Air Force even contracted several Ukrainian Antonov An-124 heavy cargo aircraft, which became a familiar sight in the skies above cities such as Charleston, SC where some MRAPs are produced[17]. For comparison, sealifting costs around $13,000 per vehicle

manufactured by BAE Systems

ONE MILLION PER SOLDIER

The White House, meanwhile, has recently put the figure at twice that much -- a cost of $1 million per new solider. Interestingly, as the L.A. Times notes, an estimate from a Pentagon comptroller earlier this month, produced a number much closer to the Office of Management and Budget's estimate than that of the Pentagon. 



HALF KIDS ON FOOD STAMPS

Poverty and food insecurity are "two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health" and tag 22 billion dollars a year onto US health care costs, the study said.

"Children in poverty are significantly more likely to experience a range of health problems, including low birth weight, lead poisoning, asthma, mental health disorders, delayed immunization, dental problems and accidental death," it said.

"There's a strong connection between poverty, health and mental health," said Rank and the detrimental effects of growing up poor, even if just for a short period, often carry over into adulthood, he said.

USDA Report

The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.

FIGHTING HUNGER

It has been a good year for food in America: A record soybean harvest,
the second highest corn harvest ever, potatoes and apples . . . all up.

Last week, the government said 49 million Americans are unsure of
where their next meal is coming from. That is almost one in six . . .
and 17 million of those are kids.

HEALTH DEFORM

Congress could have defended and built up a system based on popular, high-quality government-run health programs like the military and veterans fully socialized health systems or Medicare, a single-payer program. Instead, the president and Congress let the corporations and government-haters take control of the agenda.

Let's call this what it is: another corporate bailout on the backs of working people.

HEALTH CARE SELL OUT

Karen “Killer” Ignagni, President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) won the following:

*

Still in business making billions of profits for Wall Street investors and CEO’s of insurance companies
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No cost controls that would decrease profits
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Mandate giving us at least 30 million new customers and fined if they don’t buy coverage
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Still able to deny doctor recommended care
*

Still able to increase premiums
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Kill or weaken public option
*

Investment in 3000 lobbyists and 1.4 million a day paid off

Then there is Billy “The Kid” Tauzin, President and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA.) He was able to check off everything on his list:

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Get a meeting with President Obama behind closed doors and make a deal to protect PhRMA profits
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No drug reimportation from Canada or Mexico
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Extend protections for lucrative biologic drugs
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No negotiating drug prices for Medicare Part D
*

U.S. drug market continues to be the most profitable

There was even a big, last minute win for the misogynist Catholic Bishops.

OBAMA'S SHOW TRIAL

Republicans and American conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They assume that police and prosecutors are morally pure and, in addition, never make mistakes. An accused person is guilty or government wouldn’t have accused him. All of my life I have heard self-described conservatives disparage lawyers who defend criminals. Such “conservatives” live in an ideal, not real, world.

In other words, Stuart Taylor and the National Journal endorse Mohammed’s trial as a show trial that will prove both America’s honorable respect for fair trials and Muslim guilt for 9/11.

Why was he held for years and tortured--apparently water boarded 183 times--in violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions? How can the US government put a defendant on trial when its treatment of him violates US statutory law, international law, and every precept of the US legal code? Mohammed has been treated as if he were a captive of Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s KGB. And now we are going to finish him off in a show trial.

how do we know he hasn’t decided to confess in order to obtain for himself for evermore the glory of the deed? How many people can claim to have outwitted the CIA, the National Security Agency and all 16 US intelligence agencies, NORAD, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, airport security (four times on one morning), US air traffic control, the US Air Force, the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the neocons, Mossad, and even the supposedly formidable Dick Cheney?

Are we really sure we want to create a Muslim Superhero of such stature?

Originally, according to the US government, Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11. To get bin Laden is the excuse given for the US invasion of Afghanistan, which set up the invasion of Iraq.

The prosecution doesn’t need any evidence, because no judge and no jury is going to let the demonized “mastermind of 9/11” off.

The outcome of Mohammed’s trial will complete the transformation of the US legal system from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. Feige writes that Mohammed’s statements obtained by torture will not be suppressed, that witnesses against him will not be produced (“national security”), that documents that compromise the prosecution will be redacted.

At each stage of Mohammed’s appeals process, higher courts will enshrine into legal precedents the denial of the Constitutional right to a speedy trial, thus enshrining indefinite detention, the denial of the right against damning pretrial publicity, thus allowing demonization prior to trial, and the denial of the right to have witnesses and documents produced, thus eviscerating a defendant’s rights to exculpatory evidence and to confront adverse witnesses, The twisted logic necessary to disentangle Mohammed’s torture from his confession will also be upheld and will “provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time--a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.”

It took Hitler a while to corrupt the German courts. Hitler first had to create new courts, like President George W. Bush’s military tribunals, that did not require evidence, using in place of evidence hearsay, secret charges, and self-incrimination obtained by torture.

Every American should be concerned that the Obama administration has decided to use Mohammed’s trial to complete the corruption of the American court system. When Mohammed’s trial is over, an American Joe Stalin or Adolf Hitler will be able to convict America’s Founding Fathers on charges of treason and terrorism. No one will be safe.

VENEZUELA ARMS

clipped from: wire.antiwar.com

President Hugo Chavez is hailing the forthcoming arrival of 300 Russian-made tanks and armored vehicles, and urging civilians to join government-organized militias to be ready to defend Venezuela from a foreign invasion.

The military acquisitions, coupled with weapons purchases among South American nations including Brazil and Ecuador, have raised concerns of an arms race in the region.

Venezuela must prepare for a possible armed conflict, Chavez said, because the United States and Colombia could attack. He claims U.S. "imperialists" want to undermine his "Bolivarian Revolution," a political movement named after 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar.

USA HAS PROBLEM WITH BRAZIL

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, is set to receive Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, here on Monday

is drawing criticism from lawmakers and former diplomats here and in the United States, who say it could undercut Western efforts to press Iran on its nuclear program, and consequently chill Brazil’s relations with the United States

Brazilian officials say the goal of the visit is to strengthen commercial ties between the two countries and help bring peace to the Middle East.

said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group in Washington. “And part of this has to do with Brazil sending a message to Washington that it will deal whomever it wants to deal with.”

“This state visit is a gross error, a terrible mistake,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy at a time when the world is trying to figure out how to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons.

Relations between the United States and Brazil were already tense after Mr. da Silva’s government criticized the United States over its handling of the crisis in Honduras and increasing its military presence in Colombia.

Ian C. Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said Thursday. “We would hope that Brazil would play a constructive role in trying to get Iran to do the right thing and fulfill its international obligations.”

But Mr. Amorim made clear that Brazil did not see its role as carrying water for the proposed agreement for Iran to export most of its enriched uranium for processing into nuclear fuel.

Since his election in 2002, Mr. da Silva has sought to cement Brazil’s dominance as Latin America’s economic and diplomatic leader, using its economic might to raise Brazil’s foreign-policy profile.

Brazil is no stranger to the region. Its national oil company, Petrobras, is helping Iran develop its oil fields and the two countries did about $2 billion in trade in 2007, mostly in Brazilian exports of food to Iran, Mr. Amorim said.

USA OPENS A SOUTH AMERICAN FRONT

clipped from: www.independent.co.uk

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia.

President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuado

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has not forgotten that US officers were present in government offices in Caracas in 2002 when he was briefly overthrown...warned this month that the bases agreement could mean the possibility of war with Colombia.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia called for the outlawing of foreign military bases in the region.

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, overthrown in a military coup d'état in June...has complained that US forces stationed at the Honduran base of Palmerola collaborated with Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the plotters

Brazil had already expressed its unhappiness at the presence of US naval vessels in its massive new offshore oilfields off Rio de Janeiro, destined soon to make Brazil a giant oil producer

The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008. The fleet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines –

the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique "in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting "full-spectrum operations throughout South America.... It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent. ("Full-spectrum operations" is the Pentagon's jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries.

The Colombian forces, for many years notorious for atrocities inflicted on civilians...Civil strife in Colombia meant some 380,000 Colombians were forced from their homes last year, bringing the number of displaced since 1985 to 4.6 million, one in ten of the population. This little-known statistic indicates a much worse situation than the much-publicised one in Islamist-ruled Sudan where 2.7 million have fled from their homes.

Amnesty International said: "The Colombian government must urgently bring human rights violators to justice, to break the links between the armed forces and illegal paramilitary groups, and dismantle paramilitary organisations in line with repeated UN recommendations."

MCCRYSTAL'S ENEMIES

Have you read the McChrystal report? It is quite an eye-opener.The McChrystal report lists three principal opponents:

• the Quetta Shura (the Afghan Taliban, based in Quetta, in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province);

• the network of Jalaladin Haqqani, operating in Afghanistan; and the followers of

• Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also operating in Afghanistan. What do these three groups have in common? They all have had connections with the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI).

It says relatively little about al-Qaeda, which President Obama has rightly singled out as the enemy. Al Qaeda is not even in Afghanistan anymore but in Pakistan's tribal regions. Al Qaeda's strength may not number more than a couple of hundred. The retrospective truth is that Afghanistan ceased to be a "necessary war" in late 2001, when al-Qaeda escaped into Pakistan.

WHY ARE WE IN AFGHANISTAN?

Malalai Joya is an Afghan politician who has been called "the bravest woman in Afghanistan." As an elected member of the Wolesi Jirga from Farah province, she has publicly denounced the presence of what she considers warlords and war criminals in the parliament. She is the author of "A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice"

She is finishing up a U.S. tour where she has pressed the Obama administration to pull the military out of her country. She says nothing could be worse for women than what she sees as the current civil war.

Why do you think the United States continues to have troops in Afghanistan and is poised to increase the footprint of the occupation?

It has three reasons.

First, they occupied my country because of geopolitical location of Afghanistan, my country, located in the heart of the Asia. When they will have their grip in Afghanistan, very easily they can control China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, etc.,

Second, and then they will have, very easily, access to the gas and oil of the Central Asian republics.

And the third reason, because after arms and oil trade in the war, they are receiving millions of dollars by dirty business of opium.

This was the main project of the CIA, that they changed Afghanistan to the center of drug by support of these drug lord. So, for example, since 2001 until now, 4,500 percent opium increase. And every year, through dirty process of opium, $500 million alone goes into the pocket of Taliban. Even New York Times gave report recently, brother of Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, that my people call him a "small Bush" in Kandahar, that he is a famous drug trafficker in the payroll of the CIA, receiving millions of dollar by CIA... In many example like this today, by presence of thousands troops in Kabul, we do not have security...Millions of Afghan, [that] they suffer from insecurity, injustice, corruption, joblessness, poverty in this eight years is enough to know better, US government and NATO, about the wrong policy. Now they put soft name on Taliban, these terrorist people, as a "moderate" and a fascist man like name Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to have a reason, through mainstream media to you, that to bring these Taliban also means Mullah Omar and also Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who has—name is in the blacklist of the UN, into power. Now situation will be more disaster, more bloody, especially for the women, if these two terrorists also come in power.

TELESUR

Telesur in the news. "On July 25, 2005, Chavez inaugurated TeleSUR, a proposed pan-American homologue of Al Jazeera that seeks to challenge the present domination of Latin American television news by Univision and the United States-based CNN en Español. Chavez's media policies have contributed to elevated tensions between the United States and Venezuela." Pravda.ru, 13 May 2008. "Chavez is ... trying hard to enable Latin American countries to co-operate and stand together to make them strong enough to free themselves from US economic and political control. ... That is why Chavez led the creation of Telesur, a Latin American TV station based in various South American countries." Keith Flett, letter to The Independent, 11 May 2008. Posted: 13 May 2008 Permalink

Proposed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, TELESUR is intended to be a counterweight to popular privately-run networks in South America like CNN en Español and Univisión. It is also intended as a spur toward Latin American integration. The network is funded by the countries that jointly own the network: Venezuela (a 51 percent share), Argentina (20 percent), Cuba (19 percent), and Uruguay (10 percent), with the prospect of other countries joining later. (On April 6, 2006 Bolivia's President Evo Morales agreed to buy a 5% stake in TELESUR.) These countries, as well as Brazil (which is working on its own international Portuguese station, TV Brasil) will collaborate on content and technology.

TELESUR's advisory council is formed by many international and regional intellectuals, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, poet Ernesto Cardenal, writers Eduardo Galeano, Tariq Ali and Saul Landau, editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique and historian Ignacio Ramonet, free software pioneer Richard Stallman, and actor Danny Glover. TELESUR's current president is Andrés Izarra, who briefly served as Minister of Communication and Information (MCI) in Venezuela's government. Izarra is also a veteran journalist and has worked for NBC's defunct Canal de Noticias NBC based at the NBC Newschannel Headquaters in Charlotte, North Carolina. He then moved on to CNN en Espanol and Radio Caracas Television, a private Venezuelan network.

CHOMSKY: OBAMA BRAND

Esta sociedad está básicamente dirigida por las empresas. Formalmente es una democracia, pero en realidad es una sociedad dirigida por las empresas y sus negocios, y sus intereses se ven afectados por estos acontecimientos. Así que hubo presión para que hubiera un cambio en la Administración Bush. De hecho, algunos de las figuras más destructivas, brutales y antidemocráticas fueron removidas; Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, y otros. Se quedó Cheney como asistente de Bush y quien, básicamente, era la administración. Así que las políticas cambiaron y se movieron más hacia el centro.

No hay indicación alguna de que Obama va a cambiar estas políticas. De hecho en algunas instancias él ha tomado una posición más agresiva, como con Afganistán y Pakistán. Obama es una persona inteligente y estoy seguro de que lo que él dice ha sido preparado cuidadosamente por él y sus asesores, y expresa lo que él quiere. Pero en todas sus declaraciones ha sido deliberadamente impreciso.

La campaña electoral de Obama ganó un premio de la industria publicitaria por la mejor campaña de mercadeo de 2008. Le ganó a las computadoras Apple. Los altos ejecutivos de la industria fueron muy efusivos, literalmente dijeron que habían comercializado candidatos de la misma forma como se comercializa la mercancía por 30 años, desde los tiempos de Reagan, pero éste ha sido el más alto logro que hayan tenido. Esto tendrá gran efecto sobre los Directores Ejecutivos, la cultura corporativa adoptará este modelo para comercializar otras cosas. Esta campaña electoral fue una campaña de mercadeo.

Ellos están bien claros en que tienen que aludir ciertos asuntos, y se concentran sólo en consignas vacías que sirven para levantar el ánimo, lo que la prensa llama “sorving rhetoric”, como por ejemplo: "esperanza", "cambio", "cambio en el que puedes creer". Pero, si la gente cuestiona qué medidas tomará, tendrán que esforzarse bastante para poder entenderlas. A lo mejor se pueda encontrar algo en su página web. Pero estos no eran los temas de la campaña, y fue exitosa como campaña de mercadeo. De hecho, ya hay estudios que lo demuestran, y a la industria les encantó.

Se habla mucho del apoyo masivo de pequeños contribuyentes, pero en realidad fue mínimo. El apoyo económico fue en su mayoría dado por industrias financieras, bufetes de abogados que también son lobistas, y sus políticas por supuesto reflejarán esto. Ya se puede ver por su selección de funcionarios y gabinete de asesores. Es básicamente una administración de demócratas de centro, con la cual la gente está familiarizada, y que no se diferencia tanto del segundo periodo de Bush. Sólo se diferenciará en algunos asuntos.

NO LOGO

In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: re-reading the branding gurus quoted in this book. Guys like Peters ("Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That's the message…for the late '90s and beyond.") and Scott Bedbury ("a great brand raises the bar -- it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience"). This time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House -- first under the presidency of George W. Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first U.S. president who is also a superbrand.

But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the U.S. government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence.

This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance.

One company that took over many of those services was Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States," observed a 2004 New York Times expose. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it …. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush's much-maligned defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. He entered the Defense Department not with the posture of a public servant but channeling a celebrity CEO -- the guy with the guts to downsize and offshore and, most of all, rebrand. For Rumsfeld, his department's brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said, sounding very much like Bill Gates, "we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively."

Iraq under U.S. occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed -- a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiraled out of U.S. control, an ever more elaborate privatized war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army.

Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for U.S. envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi Army in 2004. And as the war moved into the jails, with tens of thousands of Iraqis rounded up by U.S. soldiers, private contractors even performed prisoner interrogations, with some facing accusations of torture. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate citystate, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies like Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war.

That same kind of can't-do attitude applied even when the financial system imploded in the fall of 2008 and the U.S. Treasury stepped in with a $700-billion bank bailout. Not only did it fail to attach meaningful strings to the money, but it announced that it did not have the capacity to administer the program. It needed to outsource the rescue of the banks to the very banks that created the disaster and were receiving the bailout funds.

The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. First came Charlotte Beers, hired as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the seniority of the post, Beers had no previous diplomatic experience. She had, however, held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, where she built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. When Secretary of State Colin Powell came under criticism for the appointment, he shrugged it off: "There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can rebrand American foreign policy, rebrand diplomacy." Besides, he said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice."

ALBA VERSUS NEOLIBERALISM

Much has been made of the abolition, by President Clinton in 1999, of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated investment banking from commercial banking after the 1929 Wall Street crash.

But few have stepped back to note the even more profound policy implications of the 2000 expiry of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. Economics writer Henry C.K.Liu has noted that the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation in theory behoved the US government and Federal Reserve to sustain full employment.(2)
Among other things it “explicitly states that the federal government will rely primarily on private enterprise to achieve the four goals of full employment, growth, price stability, and balance of trade and budget. Liu's persuasive gloss on that is, "Implicitly, private enterprise must be regulated so that corporate profit is structurally aligned with the achievement of the four policy goals. The private sector cannot be allowed to prosper with counterproductive activities that negate the four policy goals and treat social costs as externalities to business. In welfare economics, an externality is a socio-economic cost created by one actor, the payment for which is imposed on others."

The expiry of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act was, in effect, the last goodbye to a United States governed in any sense for the benefit of the majority. It was President Clinton and the Democrat wing of the US oligarchy who finally and categorically handed over the United States economy to the country's corporate plutocracy.

In Latin America, the ALBA countries are building an unprecedented economic system with the human person at its centre, based on solidarity, cooperation, redistribution and complementarity. By contrast, the United States government and legislature have abandoned all but the most vestigial remains of any humanist, humanitarian vision of political economy. It is worth exploring this contrast more deeply, because it also explains why US imperialist military aggression is likely to plunge the region into war.

They created enormous volumes of out-of-control debt in the shape of convoluted notional securitized assets and swap quasi-insurance-bets beyond the reach of Central Banks and other regulators. Governments and Central Banks blatantly and grotesquely abrogated their regulatory functions in the name of "free markets", despite the accumulated wisdom of decades indicating that poorly regulated markets are bound to fail. Asset price inflation and ballooning debt were treated with unbelievable crassness by incestuous economic and political authorities as if they equalled growth.

Now, a structural adjustment is being imposed by their governments on the peoples of Western Bloc financial delinquents like the United States, Britain, Spain and Ireland, to name the obvious cases. At the same time, trillions of dollars - over US$13 trillion in the US alone - have magically appeared with which to bail out Western Bloc financial institutions.

Relatively trifling sums available for social spending, for reducing poverty at home and for development cooperation overseas, are cut. Conversely, the US military budget increases each year by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Forget the fairy tale of the "free market". No such thing has ever existed, nor ever will. Central banks and governments work intimately with giant corporate finance entities to nudge markets along desired lines - that is why, for example, major US financial entities like Goldman Sachs, J.P.Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and insurance giant AIG have been underwritten through the financial crisis, one way or another, by the US government.

Note that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P.Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are all Primary Government Securities Dealers - vital Federal Reserve partners in managing global markets. (4) Right now the dollar is being allowed to slide just as it was from 2007 into 2008. Once again commodity prices are rising sharply. Oil has risen abruptly to over US$80. Gold is well over US$1000.

This is not just because a weaker dollar helps close the US current account deficit. That kind of old-economy-thinking expired along with the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. Volatile dips, swings and lurches in commodity and currency markets allow major rich-country corporate financial entities to make billions of dollars in profits via bets using hapless tax-payers' bail-out money. On top of that, the low Federal Reserve funds rate means banksters are able to borrow at almost zero interest.

SWANS.COM

When given the opportunity humans have a strong tendency to cooperate, and so elites have always attempted to monopolize and co-opt this aspect of human nature to serve their ideological purposes. Thus in the seventeenth century, in spite of the widespread occurrence of slavery, it was the case that "where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals." (1) Such a state of affairs was problematic for those ruling elites profiting from slavery so laws were passed to prevent, or at least limit, such cooperation. Moreover, by playing different groups within society (classes) against one another, elites consolidated class loyalty to their regime of injustice by making limited concessions to selected constituencies (i.e., the middle class).

Consequently, by appropriating the "language of liberty and equality" elites succeeded in "unit[ing] just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality."

It seems that the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small landholders, and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much their old situation. (6)

The American Constitution itself provides another illustration of how the interests of the wealthy minority were protected by offering enough concessions "for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support." (Not so for "the blacks, the Indians, [and] the very poor whites.")

On top of this, the chaotic nature of the economic system meant that...

... only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis -- 1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929) -- that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery. During the 1873 crisis, Carnegie was capturing the steel market, Rockefeller was wiping out his competitors in oil. (p.237)

And so it went, in industry after industry -- shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the "welfare state." By the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly of the nation's telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations. According to a Senate report of the early twentieth century, Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations; Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations. (pp.251-2)

... in modern times, when social control rests on "the consent of the governed," force is kept in abeyance for emergencies, and every-day control is exercised by a set of rules, a fabric of values passed on from one generation to another by the priests and the teachers of the society. What we call the rise of democracy in the world means that force is replaced by deception (a blunt way of saying "education") as the chief method for keeping society as it is. (11)

Only when one recognizes the manner by which capitalist elites proactively manipulate civil society and co-opt agents of progressive social change can progressive citizens present an effective challenge to elite domination. This challenge will involve undermining the legitimacy of all aspects of elite power, most especially in those areas which are least understood, like that of liberal philanthropy.

SOUTH AMERICAN FRONT

According to Cordoba, the military agreement is "the first step of an imperialist escalation" in the region that will be followed by a military intervention in Venezuela.

"I think they will begin to create the circumstances that make it possible to isolate Venezuela, isolate President Chavez and will generate a series of alliances to undermine the process (of Chavez' Bolivarian revolution). I think the second step is to go there," the senator said on Venezuelan state television.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/6978-cordoba-calls-to-support-chavez.html

HE'S GOT NO CORE, HE'S ALL IMAGE

Not so fast Naomi, Brand Obama is fading fast.

A new poll shows Obama at 49% approval. His programs are rated even lower. While people support the public option Obamacare is a loser.

Obama's Asian trip was a disaster. Japan said get more troops off our soil, China pointed out our duplicitous behavior and students in South Korea protested against the War in Afghanistan.

Obama has been outed as a Sell Out by leading black columnists and bloggers. Bob Herbert and Glenn Ford are wondering where Obama's policies are for black unemployment.

The Unions are going their own way after Obama has unchecked Card Check.

The general public is growing skeptical and angry of the bailouts and bonuses of Wall Street as foreclosures climb and unemployment skyrockets.

His EU standing is falling fast as the climate talks in Copenhagen look to be a bust even before they have started.

His handling of the Honduran coup and the Columbian Military Base agreement have Latin America looking askew at Barack's real intentions.

He's got no core, He's all image, He won't take the lead on anything and it's business as usual, Bush III, but with better PR ... His silver tongue will not fix this mess.

Obama's honeymoon is so over. Twitter that!

GITMO: WHY NOW?

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/19/the-gitmo-trial-why-now/

"I asked myself : Why now? Why is the Obama administration moving at this particular moment to make a controversial move, one that could quite possibly backfire? They’re taking a risk in which the downside is clear – but what’s the upside?

...as the truth dawned on me: it’s all about the war in Afghanistan. With President Obama getting ready to announce his new course on the "Af-Pak" front, which will involve sending as many as 40,000 more US troops to that graveyard of empires, what better time to underscore the alleged dangers emanating from that part of the world than a public trial of these particular al-Qaeda prisoners?"

PSALMS 109:8

There's a hilarious new meme in the wingnut sectors of the internet: someone's coined a bumper sticker slogan encouraging people to pray for Barack Obama. But here's the funny part: it's really a secret Christian code for "Kill the President!'

Psalm 109 is known as "A Cry for Vengeance," which is one of the foundational values of Christianity, along with small-business tax cuts.

Psalms 109:8. Let his days be few; and let another take his office

PROPAGANDA ANALYSIS

Jowett and O’Donnell (1999) attempted to move beyond
description by providing a “plan of analysis” that features a 10-point
schema intended to help pinpoint propagandistic tendencies of a communication
campaign. This 10-step process simultaneously helps identify important
details of a campaign and addresses broader social and cultural
sources on which propaganda campaigns generally rely. Jowett and
O’Donnell’s 10 divisions for propaganda analysis are as follows:

1. The ideology and purpose of the propaganda campaign
2. The context in which the campaign occurs
3. Identification of the propagandist
4. The structure of the propaganda organization
5. The target audience
6. Media utilization techniques
7. Special techniques to maximize effect
8. Audience reaction to various techniques
9. Counterpropaganda, if present
10. Effects and evaluation. (p. 280)

Critical discourse analysis is
a branch of linguistics that focuses on identifying and explicating hints of
cultural and ideological meaning in spoken and written texts (Fairclough,
1989; Hodge & Kress, 1993; O’Halloran, 2003). With their focus on the use
of language in the context of power relations, critical discourse analysts
look at how individuals and groups use (and manipulate) linguistic strategies
to exercise or oppose power and uphold or challenge ideological assumptions.
Hodge and Kress, for example, claimed that propaganda
typically operates on two broad strategies: manipulation of reality and manipulation
of the orientation to reality. “It is possible for propaganda to be
fully successful without needing to resort to actual or demonstrable lies, so
a form of analysis is necessary that can isolate these processes and mechanisms,
irrespective of claims to truth” (p. 161).

WALT MAKES A MEME

Back in 2000, the United States was

• running a budget surplus,

• our military was second-to-none,

• our image in most parts of the world was quite positive,

• and our economy had been growing steadily for nearly a decade. Some of that growth may have been illusory,

however, and the next eight years featured a daunting combination of
misfortunes

• (9/11,

• Hurricane Katrina), and

self-inflicted wounds

• (e.g., the financial crisis,

• the invasion of Iraq,

• the endless war in Afghanistan,

• the abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility, etc.

OBAMA BOW, BUSH KISS

BIG OIL - IRAQ

Did Big Oil Win the War in Iraq?

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2009.

Antonia Juhasz is the director of the Chevron Program at Global Exchange. She is author of The Tyranny of Oil: the World's Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do To Stop It (HarperCollins, 2008), paperback to be released on Dec. 8 with a new foreword, and The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (HarperCollins, 2006). She is the editor and lead author of The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report. She is on the National Advisory Board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, a fellow with Oil Change International, and a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus. http://www.Twitter.com/AntoniaJuhasz

Lies, Wars and Empire

By Dr. Michael Parenti

Parenti speaks about lies, dissent, and how we arrive at the truth of our situation and still retain our sanity. He raises the question whether the Iraq war was not a failure but a success for some parts of the empire - and why.

"Lies, War, and Empire" given May 12, 2007 at Antioch University in Seattle.

More By Dr. Michael Parenti

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach that attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate. In other words, it is a theory and practice of helping students achieve critical consciousness. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as

"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)

Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. It is a continuous process of unlearning, learning and relearning, reflection, evaluation and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students who have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by traditional schooling.

Critical pedagogy was heavily influenced by the works of Paulo Freire, arguably the most celebrated critical educator. According to his writings, Freire heavily endorses students’ ability to think critically about their education situation; this way of thinking allows them to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded."^[1] Realizing one’s consciousness ("conscientization") is a needed first step of "praxis," which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education. "Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level."^[1]

Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories all play a role in further explaining Freire’s ideas of critical pedagogy




Contemporary critical educators, such as bell hooks appropriated by Peter McLaren, discuss in their criticisms the influence of many varied concerns, institutions, and social structures, "including globalization, the mass media, and race/spiritual relations," while citing reasons for resisting the possibilities to change.^[1] Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have created the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy at McGill University

Authors of critical pedagogy texts not only include Paulo Freire, as mentioned above, but also Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Howard Zinn, Suresh Canagarajah, Alastair Pennycook, Graham Crookes and others. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Other critical pedagogues more known for their anti-schooling, unschooling, or deschooling perspectives include Ivan Illich, John Holt, dead prez, Ira Shor, John Taylor Gatto, Matt Hern, and Carlo Ricci. Much of the work draws on anarchism, feminism, Marxism, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, Khen Lampert, postcolonialism, and the discourse theories of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Radical Teacher is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to critical educators. The Rouge Forum is an online organization led by people involved with critical pedagogy.

Peter McLaren

Corporate socialism and military keynesianism

http://current.com/items/90713531_what-could-have-been.htm

http://www.lafn.org/politics/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

http://www.disorderlyreport.com/2009/09/15/voodoo-economics-will-not-die/

ONE PARTY, TWO FACES

Bridge to the 21^st Century brought to you by Bill Clinton. Brought Republican Party doctrine and practice into the Democratic Party changing the two-party system into one party with two faces, accelerated deregulation of financial institutions and markets, trumped up the war with Serbia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, distracted the nation with Lewinsky Affair and impeachment proceedings, pushed NAFTA through the US Congress, accelerated arms sales to unsavory foreign regimes, did not game consequences of national security policy and practice, failed to competently track a fully funded Al Qaeda and convince national security apparatus of insurgent attack on American soil the result of decades of ill advised national security policy and practice in the Middle East, Central Asia.

12-1 RATIO

There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn't led to anything close to victory.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/troops-in-afghanistan-out_0_n_336096.html

Medical Costs

BIRTHERS

1. What are the qualifications to be president? How old must you be? [eligibility, requirements, minimum age]

Reply: It is found in the Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 1, Clause 5:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

2. What does it mean in the Constitution when it says "natural born Citizen?"

From Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition: "Natural born citizen. Persons who are born within the jurisdiction of a national government, i.e. in its territorial limits, or those born of citizens temporarily residing abroad."

3. I am in the U.S. Army, a natural born citizen, and my wife is a U.S. Citizen, natural born. If my son is born in Germany (Military hospital or not), and has a U.S. Consular Report of Birth Abroad, and a German birth certificate can he become President of the United States?

Yes, since your son was born of citizens temporarily residing abroad, as in the military service, then he may become eligible to be president. Of course he must still "have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

Two cases in point: (1) George Romney of Michigan who ran for president in 1968. Mr. Romney was born in a Mormon community in Chihuahua, Mexico. His parents were U.S. citizens so he was a natural born citizen. (2) John McCain of Arizona was a candidate in 2000. McCain was born in Panama where his father was stationed in the service, so he would also be "natural born."

MEXICAN CARTELS

SAY I AM YOU

Say I am You

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.

What is, and what isn't.

You who know, Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.

IRANIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

clipped from: www.counterpunch.com

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

STIGLITZ, VANITY FAIR

The Stiglitz article in Vanity Fair is superb; it very politely points out to the American populace that their asses are hanging out, just like their tongues, and that the whole world sees them as the mother monkey that tramples her own young to get at whatever fruit is in view.

He even evinces scorn for "the Chicago Boys" and their murderous school of economics (by putting quotation marks around their epithet), but he doesn't carry his own insights to their logical conclusions -- probably because he is an economist himself.

Economists do not recognize the natural world as a biological system. They see it as an endless chain of dead materiel, even as they refer to such input as 'natural' resources.

Stiglitz does not materially stray from the Chicago School, from the exploitative Debt Virus that is the essence of capitalism when he says, "Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction."

Horseshit.

Poverty throughout the human population could be eliminated with one or two percent of the world's GDP. No more starvation, uncontested epidemics, grinding wage slavery. Every human could be assured of food every day, clean water, decent shelter, and basic medical attention -- the preventive kind.

For another percent of GDP, literacy could be quadrupled at the least.

But caring for ourselves, our species, and the planet we live on is not the goal of capitalism. The pathology of capitalism is to extract and exploit, and then walk away from the garbage created thereby.

While you can. It's getting real hard to avoid the garbage anymore.

Our living biological world, the thin film of slime we call soil and water and air and ecology spread around this planet is not capable of being endlessly extracted, mined, harvested, cut, chopped, taken and the remains then abandoned as mountains of garbage. There is a natural limit, just as there is a finite measurement of the planet's girth. A finite amount of copper, of iron, of helium, of every damned thing, and the unrestrained concentration and redistribution of all these things is hitting up against the finite limits of the living systems we call life on Earth.

There are new elements of extreme danger involved in a return to unrestrained, perpetual growth all over the world. The kind of danger an addict faces when he can't quit no matter the consequences already experienced.

If we took the whole human species and rolled it into one human being, and took the whole ecology of this planet and rolled it into one house and backyard, and walked through it we could not help but perceive that this one human is trashing the place, shitting where he eats, killing every other species without the slightest heed, overfishing and overharvesting the soil, water, air, seas, and the rocks themselves, and is in all ways acting as if he can just move somewhere else when this house falls down.

Worst of all, he is so mismanaging his own health that he is redolent with hundreds of toxic chemical compounds he knows nothing about; they permeate his every cell and organ, and he is so poorly nourished that he is subject to every kind of affliction that a person who cared for himself could easily avoid.

And yet this human marches around with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other, stomping on whatever he can in order to prove that he can. Doing this is what floats his boat. This is what does it for him.

If this species is to survive in any health and sanity on this overused planet, the pathological pursuit of profit as a means of dealing with ourselves and our planet will have to be outgrown. Capitalism as the embodiment and sanctification of heedless greed will have to be treated as a personality disorder, not a political philosophy.

One thousand years from now, the humans on this planet will be looking first to their environment and ecology, to the thin layer of biological slime that sustains them. Just as a colony of humans traveling through interstellar space would keep their algae and soil and fungi and trees going in order to keep themselves going, the colonists currently trashing this round, blue globe -- as it travels through space -- are going to have to learn to live with our planet.

Not merely on it.

It's about a lot more than America's standing, or economics as a science, or politics, or even globalization.

It's about making it at all.

Posted by: Antifa | Jun 16, 2009 6:39:45 AM | 8

MEMRI'S MISTRANSLATION

Things Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not do: 1) deny the Holocaust; 2) say that Israel should be wiped off the map; 3) develop a nuclear weapons program

Written By StiflyStiferson on June 15th, 2009

Intro

With the Iranian election results disputed (a dispute that the incumbent will likely win), I think it’s important to revisit the American conventional wisdom about the Iran and its president. Suspicious sources and a lazy media echo-chamber have instilled many misconceptions into the American public’s mind about Iran. This is worrisome because such misconceptions leave the American public vulnerable for the type of hawkish manipulations that led us into the Iraq war, and so for that reason US attitudes towards Iran need reexamining.

Nuclear Weapons Program

Top among the controversies surrounding Iran is the issue of their nuclear development. One goal of Iran’s energy policy is to use nuclear energy for domestic energy needs so that more of Iran’s oil supplies can be diverted for foreign sale.

In developing their domestic nuclear energy program Iran has often skirted certain IAEA regulations, with the ostensible reason being that strict adherence to the rules has allowed the US to sabotage nuclear development contracts forged between Iran and other countries. This evasion of IAEA directives has been the primary basis on which Iran has been accused of having a nuclear weapons program.

However, in 2007, part of a United States National Intelligence Estimate was leaked that concluded that Iran had not worked on a nuclear weapons program since 1993. Ironically, Iran’s first nuclear weapons programs was facilitated by America in the 1950s.

“Vanish from the page of time” vs. “wiped from the map”

Since he was elected in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has received much criticism on his comments regarding Israel. The most famous of these was given in a speech called “A World Without Zionism” in which he quoted a line from Ayatollah Khomeini.

An improper English translation painted him as calling for Israel to be “wiped from the map.” When word got out there was an international uproar. As it happens, in Persian there is no such idiom. More accurate translations read “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] the page of time.”

The focus of the speech was a hopeful vision of a world free from Western oppression of Muslims, and, in context, it is clear that this is not policy—much less a military threat. In fact, Iran has never made a military threat against Israel. Israel has against Iran, though—many, many times.

Holocaust Denial

Ahmadinejad has also met sharp international criticism over his comments on the Holocaust. The widespread and misleading allegation is that he denies that the Holocaust ever occurred.

It is undoubtedly true that Ahmadinejad has raised some uncomfortable questions about the Holocaust. Indeed, in December 2006, he even convened a conference to explore historical evidence for the Holocaust, and he also occasionally referred to people making “a myth” of the Holocaust.

However, as Iran Specialist Professor Shiraz Dossa states, while Ahmadinejad’s “rhetoric has been excessive and provocative,” he“has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel’s liquidation. What Ahmadinejad has questioned is the mythologizing, the sacralization, of the Holocaust.”

Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory statements are all in the context of the Palestinian struggle. The questions are put in terms of skepticism towards the Holocaust’s use in justifying Zionist colonialism in Palestine. The intellectual exploration, undoubtedly born of a deep, sometimes justified, mistrust for the West, has never crossed the line into outright denial of the Holocaust.

When such statements have been conflated with anti-Semitism, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly clarified his position with statements like “creating an objection against the Zionists doesn’t mean that there are objections against the Jewish.”

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, the recent election dispute in Iran leaves one questioning the democratic scruples of the country’s leadership. Ahmadinejad’s Iran is far from the idyllic liberal democracy. But, however great the fervor for Ahmadinejad’s opponent, one need be careful not to lose sight of how unfairly Western caricatures of Iran have influenced attitudes toward the incumbent worldwide—a habit long in the making and likely slow to change.

THE GLOBE'S SINGLE GREAT GARRISON STATE...WHICH LIVES OFF WAR

clipped from: original.antiwar.com

He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States, which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state, which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 “diplomats.”

Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan.

He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more.

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures.

in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He’s just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated:

Although he’s now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counter-terrorism.”

The team he’s now assembling in Washington...It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work...bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Gen. McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans. … [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by Gen. McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror

The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but – a term that has only recently entered our press – “manhunters.” And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of “counterinsurgency” dissolved as well.

DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE ASS ON YOUR WAY OUT

UIGHURSTAN

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