TERRORISM DEFINED

For instance, who could fail to be dazzled by this Clintonian insight: "Tom Friedman is our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow and figuring out a clever way to say it that sticks in your mind -- like "real men raise the gas tax." You know what I mean?"

Mr. Clinton also lauded "big thinkers on the question of identity" like "Samuel Huntingdon, who wrote the famous book, The Clash of Civilizations."
But others like Nobelist Amartya Sen (author of Identity and Violence), who claim that Huntingdon's magisterial wisdom is in reality somewhat lacking in intellectual heft and moral substance; some go so far as to claim his work is actually shallow, reductive, highly toxic racist tripe

Clinton nails the truth about terrorism:

Terror mean[s] killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders.

Killing and robbery and coercion by people who do have state authority is,

• humanitarian intervention

• liberation

• preservation of national security

• maintaining great-power credibility

• restoring hope

• pre-dawn vertical insertion

If it comes from a state, then it is legitimate, it is good, it is necessary, it is noble. And even if mistakes are made these mistakes are the result of good intentions gone awry

what terrorism is depends on who does it. the legitimacy by people who have state authority is dependent on the state from which that authority derives: America.

All others are

• "rogue states,"

• purveyors of "state terror,"

MILITARY OCCUPATION OF HAITI

Watch the U.S. media and its coverage of the crisis in Haiti, and you get the impression that Washington is a benevolent power doing its utmost to help with emergency relief in the Caribbean island nation. But tune into al-Jazeera English or South American news network Telesur and you come away with a very different view. I was particularly struck by one hard hitting al-Jazeera report posted on You Tube which serves as a fitting antidote to the usual mainstream fare. The report is highly critical of the U.S., which according to the reporter has focused most of its energy on fostering stability and putting boots on the ground as opposed to rebuilding Haitian society.

The crucial test for Telesur was Honduras in 2009. Adriana Sivori, Telesur's correspondent in Tegucigalpa, was in her hotel room speaking on the telephone to her network when 10 soldiers arrived with rifles drawn. Sivori, along with producer María José Díaz and cameraman Larry Sánchez were taken to an immigration office, the authorities beat them...

Telesur went into Haiti and took a no-holds-barred approach. According to station manager Aram Aharonian. Telesur's Haiti coverage proved controversial with the Chilean, Argentine, and Uruguayan governments.

One of the first stories that Telesur broadcast, MINUSTAH, the United Nations' Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Latin American peace keeping soldiers were repressing the people. Now, in the wake of the earthquake Telesur has joined al-Jazeera

Telesur has focused on United States' misplaced priorities. Telesur focused on U.S. policy towards Haitian migrants, US to house the migrants at
Guantánamo. USS Carl Vinson to intercept Haitian boats

Telesur reported on European Union unhappiness. U.S. relief effort in Haiti,
more relief coordination and less of a foreign military presence

Reed Lindsay, Telesur's correspondent in Haiti, it is the U.S. military which decides who goes in and out of the Port-au-Prince airport and what kinds of humanitarian aid gets through

many who fear that the U.S. is using the crisis in Haiti to launch a military occupation. A report by Cuba's Prensa Latina, U.S. marines recently barred Venezolana de Televisión journalists from entering Haitian hospitals
Haitians seeking to help their loved ones inside were reportedly mistreated
marines stopped them from entering the facilities

REPEAL CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

when you take that supreme court decision they made yesterday, now they are in a position where they get free money from the government, they put it into bonuses, they can contribute unlimited money to campaigns, so they can keep getting free money from the government, that is their government.

USGS claims Venezuela sits on Earth’s largest oil reserves

Chavez recently approved construction of a massive oil REFINERY as a joint venture with China's CNPC. The project cost $6 billion USD, creates 10 percent of China's oil imports. Confucius say: I see a war in near future, with Haiti as base of operations.

CLINTON'S CHINA INTERNET SPEECH

Hillary Clinton's January 21 speech signals a major escalation of Sino-American tensions. Internet-driven regime-change. January 12, Google
charged attacks targeted Northrop Grumman, Adobe Systems and Juniper Systems, and email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google threatened to undo internet censorship programs. It might "well mean having to shut down Google.cn

Financial Times questions motives. US had not shut Pakistan for same and worse.

The event laid bare “the degree to which China and the United States are engaged in daily cyberbattles, a covert war of offense and defense on which America is already spending billions of dollars a year."

China is a rising strategic competitor. Afghanistan is bordering Tibet. US attacks into Pakistan, China's main ally. weapons sales to the Taiwanese. US alliances with India, Australia and Japan

The US demanded that Beijing increase the value of its currency, undermining
export competitiveness and costing jobs, US officials have pushed for punitive tariffs

Clinton speech goes to the broader agenda. "representatives of our International Visitor Leadership Program on internet freedom from China, Colombia, Iran, Lebanon and Moldova"—all countries hosting or targeted by US intelligence efforts—were also present

Clinton attacked Chinese Internet censorship which is only a cover for a global mandate to destabilize governments. Clinton praised the Twitter and Internet organizing behind US-backed "color revolutions,"

June 2009 Green Revolution which tried to overturn Ahmadinejad.

"In Iran and Moldovam online organizing is a critical tool. The result is to protest suspicious election results

Clinton reserved the right for “revolutions” anywhere in the world: create mobile phone applications to "allow people to rate government ministries," and "also to ferret out and report corruption." US would raise its differing views with China "candidly and consistently" in the coming period. She issued
warning: asymmetrica information is the causes of interstate conflict

The risk of war unless the CCP allows pro-US tendencies in Tibetan or Xinjiang, and religious and pro-democracy activists. This is a threat to use "color revolution" methods against Beijing

Chinese officials had played down. Vice-Foreign Minister He Yafei told Xinhua, the issue is not be linked to US-China relations. In the lead-up After Chinese People's Daily. US Internet plans a "shot in the arm for US hegemony."

Washington with a stranglehold on Internet infrastructure using Twitter and other to destabilize regimes in Iran and Libya. The bulk of the information flowing from the US, loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those
that do not follow their lead, "Countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest
political stability, conduct of economic and social life." censors news of popular protest

There is massive discontent in China, could come under the control of political forces hostile to the CCP, “mass incidents” —that is, protests, strikes or riots, typically repressed by mass police or paramilitary actions—reached 120,000 in 2008, up from 90,000 in 2006 and 74,000 in 2004
2009 could be 230,000. 77 major “mass incidents” in 2009, 30 percent spread by the Internet and mobile phones.

Clinton's speech amounts to a threat that the State Department might try to seize upon and direct protests to undermine the Chinese government—as it already has done in Eastern Europe, the ex-USSR and the Middle East.

One does not have to be a supporter of the Beijing Stalinist regime to realize the reactionary character of such plans. The "color revolution" regimes have all proven to be unpopular and anti-democratic pawns of Washington, with Yushchenko being voted out in the recent Ukrainian election. In China—an enormous state, riven by internal ethnic, regional and class divisions—such a policy by the US would pose the risk of unleashing large-scale violence and civil war.

COLOURED REVOLUTION

It was successfully applied by the U.S. neo-conservatives to set the stage for "regime change" in a number of former Soviet republics. However, the technique backfired when it was tried in a different cultural environment (Venezuela, Lebanon, Iran).

Georgia
November 2003
Edward Shevardnadze was overthrown
elections had been rigged.
Ukraine
November 2004
"Orange Revolution"
same allegations
elections had been rigged
Georgia
November 2003
dward Shevardnadze was overthrown
allegations
elections had been rigged.
Ukraine
November 2004
"Orange Revolution"
same allegations
elections had been rigged
Kievan Rus is the first Russian state
Ukraine has now been turned
historic achievement
Lebanon
ollowing the assassination of Rafik Hariri
"the Cedar Revolution."
enormous counter-demonstration by Hezbollah
ignored while
TV replayed
anti-Syrian crowd
Orwellian double-think
BBC
"Hezbollah
is so far the only dissenting voice
How can the majority be "a dissenting voice"
Kyrgyzstan
many predicted
same wave
would extend
Central Asia
Bishkek
was it a "lemon" revolution or a "tulip"
Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, was overthrown on 24th March 2005
Uzbekistan
armed rebels seized government buildings, sprung prisoners
ight of 12th–13th May in
Andijan
long standoff
government forces started to move

Western media immediately misrepresented
government forces had opened fire on unarmed protesters – "the people."
constantly repeated myth
popular rebellion against a dictatorial government
violent putsch occurred in Kygyrzstan, The Times
scenes in Bishkek reminded him of Eisenstein films about the Bolshevik revolution, The Daily Telegraph
"power to the people,"
Financial Times used a well-known Maoist metaphor
"long march to freedom."
key elements
"the people" are behind the events
and
spontaneous
In fact
highly organised
deliberately staged
usually funded and controlled by transnational networks of so-called non-governmental organisations which are in turn instruments of Western power
The literature on coups d’état
Lenin
developed the organisational structure for overthrowing a regime which we now know as a political party
differed from Marx
not
the result of ineluctable anonymous forces, but that it had to be worked for
Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of a Coup d’état
1931
regime change
a technique

summer of 1920: Poland had been invaded by Trostky’s Red Army (Poland having itself invaded the Soviet Union, capturing Kiev in April 1920
British minister
Sir Horace Rumbold, and the Papal nuncio, Monsignor Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti – the man who was elected Pope as Pius XI two years later
diplomatic corps
should flee
Papal Nuncio disagreed
no revolution did break out in Poland
revolutionary forces were simply not well organised enough
Malaparte
discuss
ifferences between Lenin and Trotsky,
For Malaparte, as for Trotsky, regime change could be promoted in any country
providing that there was a sufficiently determined body of men determined to achieve it.
Manufacturing consent
second body of literature
control of the media during regime change
creation of a virtual reality. Control of this reality is itself an instrument of power
revolutionaries seize is the radio station
strong psychological reluctance to accept that political events today are deliberately manipulated.
News reports

come from a single source, usually a wire agency
BBC simply recycle
second factor
to rubbish news reports as manipulated is to tell people that they are gullible, and this is not a pleasant message
many elements to
manipulation
One
is political iconography
iconic events
storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789
storming of the Winter Palace during the October revolution in 1917
Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922
events can be elevated
political imagery goes
beyond
a simple emblem for each revolution
exercised over a long period
official party line to be repeated ad nauseam
dissenting views may be expressed and published
being mere drops in the ocean
never a threat to the tide of propaganda

GOOGLE VERSUS CHINA

Rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries on a broad front. Google is part of a cartel of Internet companies which notoriously works closely with the US intelligence community for political purposes, including the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments. Twitter in Iran last summer

Internet is an indispensable part of the CIA’s recipe for
color revolutions,
velvet revolutions,
people power coups, and
postmodern coups

In Georgia, Sakaashvili. Yushenko, Orange Revolution of 2004. Obama took power in something of the same way

The Chinese government prevents Western intelligence from pumping black propaganda

January 4 reported the Great Firewall had momentarily come down. 10 days later, Google, Adobe, and Northrop Grumman accused Chinese hackers of entering their sites to gather information.

Chinese government has informed Google if they keep violating the law then they cannot continue to operate. Google has announced their imminent departure

That Google is opposed to censorship in principle is pure baloney. Researchers delving into questions about the September 11 attacks or the London 7/7 are familiar with Google attempted to hinder public access to facts and analysis that were not part of the official narrative.

Pakistan is targeted because it could function as an energy corridor between Iran and China. What is done by the United States in Yemen [5], Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma is fundamentally dictated by a desire to checkmate China.

In the Copenhagen climate change, US and the British was to use the big lie of global warming to institute a world carbon dictatorship which could then be used to strangle the economic development of China, India and others

The British Guardian reported chinese Prime Minister Wen directed a successful blocking operation with the help of Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia
personally snubbing Obama. Regarding sanctions against Iran, the Chinese are signaling that they will block them

China is the world’s largest exporter with 2.5 trillion dollars of foreign exchange. A coming trade war over such issues as tires and steel is now a distinct possibility.

The US is whining about the alleged dirty float of the Chinese currency unit, the renminbi. Is on the verge of a major arms sale to Taiwan. A visit of the Dalai Lama to Obama’s White House is immenent.

The Dalai Lama is a notorious Western intelligence asset who was the figurehead of a brutal regime of feudal oppression. The United States government continues to transfer money to Rebiya Kadeer and her “World Uighur Congress,”

Wen’s successful operations in Copenhagen are a clear indication that major changes are afoot in this department. The Chinese evidently see Google as a symbol of arrogance and hegemonism which they are no longer disposed to tolerate

Slavoj Zizek: todays economical crisis

"I think Berlusconi is one of the options for our future."

"I mean, Berlusconi we know is a living obscenity, but I don’t think this is just a joke. There is something very strange going on where it’s as if the state, or political powers, are discovering it can function in a totally cynical way..."

“Look at Italy if you want to see how our future authoritarianism will look.”

"It’s not the old style authoritarianism. It is…to call it by its name, Groucho Marx Authoritarianism. This is our future, I claim."

“My message to liberals is, are you aware that…your own dynamic of your own system is generating this nationalist, populist, potentially racist reaction?!”

STRATEGIC DEFAULT

Homeowners have found themselves in foreclosure for a number of reasons. Some purchased properties they could never really afford. Others lost their jobs--the national unemployment rate remains in the double digits--and had no way to make mortgage payments. But as the crisis rumbles forward, an additional driver of home foreclosures has become clear: Many borrowers have the means to keep paying the mortgage but are simply walking away because they believe it's best for their finances.

JUST WALK AWAY

Such voluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

AND THAT'S THE WORD

"The banks thought your honor was worth something, and they gave you a mortgage in exchange for your honor. It was so precious to those banks that they bundled your honor with other people's honor and cut that honor bundle into securitized honor derivatives which they then sold to Wall Street honor speculators. And in an attempt to get more honor to sell, they mixed your honor with the honor of people who did not honor their honor -- and eventually, the honor bubble burst."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/18/stephen-colber-takes-on-t_n_427258.html

TO SHOOT AN ELEPHANT

"To shoot an elephant" is an eye witness account from The Gaza Strip. December 27th, 2008, Operation Cast Lead. 21 days shooting elephants. Urgent, insomniac, dirty, shuddering images from the only foreigners who decided and managed to stay embedded inside Gaza strip ambulances, with Palestinian civilians. [Read more +]

Remember Where You Heard It First

.

KAZIN DISSES ZINN DISSENT

Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?

"99 percent" of Americans share a "commonality" that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that awesome fact is "exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent."

Nothing of consequence, in his view, changed during the industrial era, one wonders why anyone but the wealthy came to the United States at all and, after working for a spell, why anyone wished to stay.

a few moments of democratic glory-occasions when "the people," temporarily broke through ...

• Agrarian rebels formed cooperatives, allied with radical unionists, and charted their own financial system, the subtreasury, which they hoped would break the grip of heartless bankers. But, alas, the Populists were seduced in 1896 by William Jennings Bryan, who sold out their movement to the retrograde Democratic Party.

• During the Great Depression, wage earners across the industrial Midwest staged heroic sit-down strikes that demonstrated their ability to shut down the economy. But, for unexplained reasons, these working-class heroes allowed CIO unions and the New Deal state to smother their discontent within long-term contracts and bureaucratic procedures.

• Similarly, the civil rights movement toppled the Southern citadel of Jim Crow without taking on the capitalist system that kept the black masses mired in poverty.

most Populists cheered Bryan ...he shared their enemies and their vision of a producers' republic. ..they grasped the dilemma of third parties in the American electoral system, Short of revolution, a strategic alliance with one element of "the Establishment" is the only way social movements ever make lasting changes in law and public policy.

Zinn's conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power-and by its fear of losing them.

Ronald Reagan in 1980. It simply "meant that another part of the Establishment," albeit "more crass" than its immediate antecedents, was now in charge.

For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them.

• takes no notice of immigrants who built businesses

• women who backed both suffrage and temperance

• black Americans who merged the community-building gospel of Booker T. Washington and the militancy of W.E.B. Du Bois

• wage-earners who took pleasure in the new cars and new houses

Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted.

Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered.

THE FACT THAT his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling.

Of course, President William McKinley decided to go to war with Spain at "the urging of the business community." Zinn ignores the scholarly verdict that most Americans from all classes and races backed the cause of "Cuba Libre"

the meaning of the biggest war

• profits for military industries,

• racism toward the Japanese, and the

• senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima.

• the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.

September 11, assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan

Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam. Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.

Zinn punctuates his narrative with hundreds of quotes from slaves and Populists, anonymous wage-earners and such articulate radicals as Eugene V. Debs, DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stokely Carmichael, and Helen Keller.

Zinn also fills several pages with excerpts from poems by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and from the autobiography of Richard Wright. But the richness of these lines doesn't mitigate the poverty of his interpretations. Rage at injustice does not explain why that injustice occurs

Zinn brings dynamite to the job. "To understand," wrote Frederick Douglass, "one must stand under."

The years since 1980 have not been good ones for the American left, the phantom hope of state socialism vanished almost overnight; and progressive movements spent most of their time struggling to preserve earlier gains

"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history," "the people" can never really win, unless and until they make a revolution. But they can comprehend

an apology for political failure, He never mentions the Communist Party's lockstep praise of Stalin or the New Left's fantasy of guerilla warfare.

The gloom of defeat tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, he makes no serious attempt to examine why these rulers kept getting elected, or how economic and social reform improved the lives of millions even if they sapped whatever mass appetite existed for radical change.

intelligent, sober studies can make sense of how changing structures of power and ideas provide openings for challenges from below, while also shifting the basis on which a reigning order claims legitimacy for itself. These qualities mark the work of such influential (and widely read) historians on the left as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Gerda Lerner, C.L.R. James, and the erstwhile populist C. Vann Woodward. Reading their work makes one wiser about the obstacles to change

His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life

http://www.webcitation.org/5gKM9ODBN

HADJI GIRL

Wiki

A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
1980

Table of Contents
1.	Columbus the Indians, and Human Progress
2.	Drawing the Color Line
3.	Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
4.	Tyranny Is Tyranny
5.	A Kind of Revolution

09 1109 Dahr Jamail Part 1 of 2

PLANET OF SLUMS

Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the slum poor.

“In this trenchantly argued book, Mike Davis quantifies the nightmarish mass production of slums that marks the contemporary city. With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, institutional failure, and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. Scourge of neo-liberal nostrums, Davis debunks the irresponsible myth of self-help salvation, showing exactly who gets the boot from ‘bootstrap capitalism.’ Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffans over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear.” — Michael Sorkin

From Planet of Slums
“What is clear is that the contemporary mega-slum poses unique problems of imperial order and social control that conventional geopolitics has barely begun to register. If the aim of the “war on terrorism” is to pursue the erstwhile enemy into his sociological and cultural labyrinth, then the poor peripheries of developing cities will be the permanent battlefields of the twenty-first century.

“Night after night, hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring their hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts surely have the gods of chaos on their side.

Yeh na thee Hamari qismat - Ghalib by Habib Wali Muhammad

W.H. AUDEN