Who's fiddling.....and who's burning

Credited ro Cameron [Cam] Cardow

Greece: It's all those little envelopes

That the Greek economy is a basket case is now beyond doubt.

Why? One reason, amongst many, is that so few people pay their full due in taxes. The other is "fakelakia". What? Let Transparency International explain - from their 2009 Report:

"More than 13% of Greeks resorted to giving “ fakelakia” (or little envelopes) in 2008, paying an estimated €750 million [US $950 million] in bribes to public and private officials in 2008, €110 million [US $140 million] more than the previous year, according to the survey (Associated Press, AP).

Yiannis Mavris, head of the Public Issue, the polling firm commissioned by TI Greece to undertake the survey, noted that the amount equates to an “average of 1,450 euros [US $1,850] in bribes per family” (Kathimerini).

The majority of bribes, 60 percent of the total, are “related to doctor's fees, tax evasion and building permits,” said Costas Bakouris, Chair of TI Greece.

Bakouris called on the government, elected in March 2004, to enforce existing laws and create an anti-corruption task force (AP).

The six-month survey included around 6,000 respondents."

White House press corp intimidated [mice?]

Mice is the operative word! Or so Glenn Greenwald would have it in his latest piece on Salon that the White House press corp is intimidated and fearful of taking it on:

"Politico's Josh Gerstein and Patrick Gavin have a long article describing the growing anger of the White House press corps towards the Obama White House. Many of the grievances are petty, though some are serious and substantive (involving lack of transparency and media manipulation), but the passage that I found most revealing is this one:

'Much of the criticism is off the record, both out of fear of retaliation and from worry about appearing whiny. But those views were voiced by a cross section of the television, newspaper and magazine journalists who cover the White House.'

Just think about that for a minute. National political reporters are furious over various White House practices involving transparency and information control, but are unwilling to say so for attribution due to fear of "retaliation," instead insisting on hiding behind a wall of anonymity (which Politico, needless to say, happily provides). Isn't that a rather serious problem: that the White House press corps is afraid to criticize the President and the White House for fear of losing access and suffering other forms of retribution? What does that say about their "journalism"? It's the flip side of those White House reporters who need the good graces of Obama aides for their behind-the-scenes books and thus desperately do their bidding: what kind of reporter covering the White House would possibly admit that they're afraid to say anything with their names attached that might anger the President and his aides? How could you possibly be a minimally credible White House reporter if you have that fear? Doesn't that unwillingness rather obviously render their reporting worthless?

People before Politics

One has to wonder what the world is thinking Here is a sliver of land, Gaza, with some 1.5 million inhabitants, under siege and blockaded by Israel for 3 years now - with all the attendant hardship that has wrought - and the world turns a blind eye to the devastation inflicted on those poor people including a large proportion of children. Where is the humanity and goodwill of people around the world? - let alone a sense and urgency to bring an end to the blockade and bringing Hamas to the negotiating table.

AlterNet reports:

"Israel's siege of occupied Gaza, now approaching its third year, continues to impinge on every human right of the native Palestinian population. Gaza has no real economy due to Israel's blockade of everything from people, money, building materials and even a long list of food items from getting into the area. The effects of the siege are also heightened by Gaza's lack of necessary infrastructure, which Israel recently demolished during its December 2008 assault, which took the lives of over 1,400 people, a third of them women and children, in less than one month. At a recent press conference on Gaza at the United Nations in New York, Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees Operations in Gaza (UNRWA) John Ging, described Gaza's strangulated state, as he has many times before, with the aim of inspiring the international community to react with more than occasional condemnations of Israel. Ging also highlighted UNRWA's inability to provide education for thousands of hopeful Gazan children because UNRWA has not been able to build a school in the area for the past three years due to Israel's blockade on building materials.

According to Ging:

"We have no credibility with the population to tell them, as the United Nations, that we can’t do it. They expect us to find the way; to mobilize the support that is needed by whatever means and in whatever way to discharge our responsibility to the children."

Following a visit to Gaza last month, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commented that the recent developments that have taken place in Gaza where but a "drop in the bucket," or simply not enough considering the urgent necessity for real progress being made on a wider scale. Ging built on this categorization by noting that "a drop in the bucket is not a half-full glass," with even hope as a lifeline in Gaza quickly withering away, as water and sanitation prospects remain in a state of deteriorating collapse, and a lack of available fuel leaving people literally in the dark, without electricity for extended periods of time.

Ging also commented on Israel's recent slight "easing" of the blockade, where there was a slight increase in the amount of materials that were allowed into the area, noting that, while it was received well by the population, arguments made by the Israelis shortly after to excuse their siege undermine the positive effects.

"So, if we can have 20 truckloads of aluminum a month; then why not 50? And if you can have 50, why not a 100?" he said.

Ging ended his remarks with a plea aimed at governing authorities and the international community to put the needs of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza before their own political objectives:

"It's time to put the people before the politics. If we do prioritize the people, and if we do focus on the needs of the people, in many of our views, that will make the politics easier moving forward. Ignore the people, abandon the people, leave the people to despair and desperation, and that will make the politics more difficult going forward."

See here, also, for another dimension to Israel's unconscionable behaviour - "[Health Ministry's Director General] Abbas [told Press TV] that they were running out of all the fuel supplies in the hospitals of Gaza, which would mean death for premature infants, cardiac patients on life support and those in intensive care.

"The effect of power outage in hospitals is devastating," he warned, noting the urgent need for fuel to maintain the hospitals' emergency services, medicines refrigerators, labs and blood banks."

Winning the Afghanistan War via Spaghetti Junction?

Is it any wonder that things are going badly in the Afghanistan War?

The madness of PowerPoint as confronted by the US military....

The Australian [from a piece in The Times] reports:

"Winston Churchill knew where the enemy was by looking at the pieces on his "sand-table" mock-up and watching as his staff moved them around to adjust to the latest intelligence.

US General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of the war in Afghanistan, has to peer at a PowerPoint slide that is so complex it makes Spaghetti Junction look like a minor road network.

The latest computer-generated presentation of the security landscape in Afghanistan, delivered in a conference room at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, was so tangled in arrows and lines that General McChrystal remarked, to guffaws from the assembled audience: "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

No Greeks bearing gifts here

Credited to Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Today's big woops

Er, seems like the Washington Post hasn't discovered the difference between Obama, the US President, and Malcolm X.

Goldman's "explains" a "shitty" deal!

Need anything more be said about the alleged titans of Wall St.

Anyone interested in "investing" with Goldmans?

No thanks!

Running out of money to run the war

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, DC.

Writing in "Beginning of the end for Afghan war?" in The Guardian, he highlights how the Government in Afghanistan simply cannot afford the war in which it is presently engaged. Only problem is that its ally, the US, wants to continue.

"Imagine that the United States were spending an amount that exceeded 60% of its national income on the military and police. (For comparison, the US department of defence budget – bloated as it is – is about 5% of GDP; and spending on police is less than 1% of GDP). Of course the United States would never reach these levels of spending, but it's worth thinking about because any population in this situation would be looking for a way out of the horrific civil conflict that got them there. This would no doubt be true even if foreigners were fronting the money.

And so it is true for the people of Afghanistan, where spending for the army and police is programmed for $11.6bn (61% of projected GDP) in 2011. If that doesn't fit the definition of "unsustainable", it's not clear what would.

Not surprisingly, the Afghan people are looking for a way out. They want negotiations to end the conflict. But the United States says no. The US and its Nato allies are preparing for a major military offensive, perhaps the biggest of the war so far, in the southern province of Kandahar.

A poll sponsored by the US army showed that 94% of Kandahar residents support negotiating with the Taliban, rather than military confrontation.

The New York Times reports this week that "in some parts of the country, American and Nato convoys are already considered by Afghans to be as dangerous a threat as Taliban checkpoints and roadside bombs, raising questions about whether the damage" to the perception of US forces caused by the continued US killings of Afghan civilians "can be reversed to any real degree"."

How to slant the story...wrongly

From FAIR [Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting]:

"The headline of this Washington Post piece today (4/26/10) is certainly not promising:

Sharing a West Bank Highway Proves a Tall Order for Israel, Palestinians

The highway in question was built by the Israeli government on occupied Palestinian territory. Since 2000, Israeli authorities have barred Palestinians from using the road. They are now offering to open just two on-ramps for use by Palestinians, who would be searched upon entering the road. And the highway would still not provide access to the crucial Palestinian city of Ramallah.

So what would justify the notion that Palestinians, like Israelis, aren't doing their part to "share"? Nothing. This is the only explanation of any sort that the Post's Janine Zacharia offers:

'The debate over Highway 443 illustrates a fundamental rub in the West Bank: If the Israelis and Palestinians can't agree over how to share nine miles of pavement, how will they ever resolve the far more complex issues that divide them?

From an Israeli viewpoint, allowing Palestinians on the road increases the risk of violence and adds traffic. To Palestinians, the road is another example of Israel's reluctance to make life easier for them in occupied areas.'

Perhaps segregationists in the United States lodged similar complaints about overcrowding too."

Not so fast! The repercussions from the GFC continue.....everywhere

Those people who believe that with markets going upwards those countries which suffered the GFC, that the worst is over, ought to think again. It's just that it doesn't seem to make headlines unless you are a basket-case like Greece.

Two pieces, from different sources, clearly show all is not well out there.

First, from The Washington Post:

"This 12th-century gem, birthplace of the poet Giacomo Leopardi, rests on a lyrical hilltop in the Apennine Mountains. But these days, Recanati is also sitting on something else: a pile of financial trouble.

Concern over near-bankrupt countries forced Greece on Thursday to request a huge international bailout. The plight here, however, underscores fears of a new front in the battle against global debt -- at the state and local level.

Recanati is one of hundreds of municipalities around the world facing a deepening financial crunch from bad investments, plummeting tax revenue, high debt levels and rampant overspending. In the United States, at least six states have budget gaps bigger than Greece's, with Hawaii shifting to a four-day school week to cope. In Spain, a substantial drop in tax revenue from a bust in construction is battering budgets in the cities of Madrid and Valencia, as well as in the provinces of Catalonia and Andalusia, raising the threat that ratings agencies will downgrade their debt.

The picture is particularly bleak in Italy, where many cities and towns invested heavily in complex bets on interest rates. Now deep in the red, Recanati is being forced to sell off parkland, unload a public kindergarten, scale back aid to the elderly and scrap costly repairs on leaking churches and ancient cobblestone streets."

And second, this from AlterNet:

"A series of recent studies conducted by the Pew Research Center shed new light on the scope of the economic crisis in the US and the level of hostility the majority of the American population holds for the US government.

Released in March, before the passage of the Obama administration’s health care legislation, a survey entitled “Health Care Reform—Can’t Live With It, or Without It” indicates that 92 percent of Americans give the national economy a negative rating. No fewer than 70 percent of the respondents report having suffered job-related and financial problems in the past year, an increase from 59 percent the year before. Fifty-four percent report someone in their home has been without a job and looking for work in the past year, up from 39 percent in 2009.

The poll saw an aggravation of conditions in every area of economic life studied the year before. Increasing numbers of people are reporting difficulty receiving or affording medical care (26 percent) or paying their rent or mortgage payments (24 percent). More Americans faced problems with collections and credit agencies (21 percent), or had mortgages, loans or credit card applications denied (19 percent).

As could be expected, the poorest Americans are suffering the most. Some 44 percent of those making $30,000 per year or less report difficulty obtaining medical care, compared to 11 percent of those making $75,000 per year or more. A similar gap can be found in the category of rents and mortgages, with 37 percent of those making $30,000 or less reporting difficulty making rent or mortgage payments, compared to 11 percent of those making $75,000 or more. However, the percentage of those facing difficulties paying rent has increased dramatically for both groups since 2009."

Less and less paper for those fish and chips

In the UK old newspapers are used to wrap fish and chips.

The way things are going with the circulation of newspapers - a decided downward trajectory - there won't be many newspapers around in the foreseeable future. Some US cities already have no daily newspaper.

The New York Times, itself with a decreasing readership, reports on the latest, dire circulation figures:

"The reality facing many American newspaper publishers continues to look stark, as figures released Monday show deep circulation declines, with average weekday sales down almost 9 percent since the same time last year.

In the six-month period ending March 31, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported Sunday sales dropping 6.5 percent and weekday sales 8.7 percent compared with the same six-month period a year ago. The figures are based on reports filed by hundreds of individual papers.

The decline was widespread, as nearly all of the major newspapers and many of the smaller ones lost circulation. Among the 25 largest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle suffered the most, losing 22.7 percent of its weekday sales.

Among the 25 largest circulation newspapers, 10 had declines in weekday circulation of more than 10 percent. The Sunday circulation figures were slightly higher, though far from a bright spot, as five of the 25 largest papers reported double-digit declines."

Do the Brits have a revolution on their hands?

Politics is a strange game......and probably more so in 2010 as voters are jaded and angry with their elected representatives.

Watching the electioneering unfold in the United Kingdom has been fascinating as a "new" candidate steals the limelight and poses a real threat to the died-in-the-wool established Labour and Conservative parties.

Anne Applebaum on Slate reports on the man everyone has his or her eyes on, Nick Clegg:

"Here is a riddle: What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British, privately educated, and had once worked as a ski instructor in Austria?

Here is the answer: It would look like Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democrats—and possibly the beneficiary of the biggest British voters' revolution in decades. For those who don't follow these things, the Liberal Democrats are Britain's historically insignificant third party. In its current incarnation, the party dates from the late 1980s, back when the Labor Party was a near-Marxist monolith, the Tories were the party of Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of space in between."

Continue reading here.

Wall St. needs no sympathy

Obama is attempting to being some sort of order to Wall St. Needless to say the Street doesn't view that favourably - and the GOP is against too much incursions to Wall Street's free-wheeling conduct. One fears that big money and politics will win out.

Paul Krugman, Economic Nobel Prize winner, and op-ed writer for The New York Times, is with Obama all the way. In effect he urges Obama to stick it to 'em.

"Remember the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” in which Gordon Gekko declared: Greed is good? By today’s standards, Gekko was a piker. In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, the financial industry accounted for a third of total domestic profits — about twice its share two decades earlier.

These profits were justified, we were told, because the industry was doing great things for the economy. It was channeling capital to productive uses; it was spreading risk; it was enhancing financial stability. None of those were true. Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.

So why were bankers raking it in? My take, reflecting the efforts of financial economists to make sense of the catastrophe, is that it was mainly about gambling with other people’s money. The financial industry took big, risky bets with borrowed funds — bets that paid high returns until they went bad — but was able to borrow cheaply because investors didn’t understand how fragile the industry was."

Yet another ticking timebomb in the Middle East.... Egypt!

In talking about the Middle East, the talk is about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, unrest in Lebanon, the threats coming out of Iran and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Writing in the Toronto Sun Eric Margolis highlights yet another flash point in the Middle East....Egypt!

"Egypt was once the heart and soul of the Arab and Muslim world. Under Sadat’s predecessor, the widely adored nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt led the Arab world. Egyptians despised Sadat as a corrupt western toady and sullenly accepted Mubarak.

After three decades under Mubarak, Egypt has become a political and cultural backwater. In a telling incident, Mubarak recently flew to Germany for gall bladder and colon surgery. After billions in U.S. aid, Mubarak could not even trust a local hospital in the Arab world’s leading nation.

The U.S. gives Egypt $1.3 billion annually in military aid to keep the generals content and about $700 million in economic aid, not counting secret CIA stipends, and vast amounts of low-cost wheat.

Mubarak’s Egypt is the cornerstone of America’s Mideast Raj (dominion). Egypt’s 469,000-man armed forces, 397,000 paramilitary police and ferocious secret police keep the regime in power and crush all dissent.

Though large, Egypt’s military is starved by Washington of modern weapons, ammo and spare parts so it cannot wage war against Israel. Its sole function is keeping the U.S.-backed regime in power.

Mubarak has long been a key ally of Israel in battling Islamist and nationalist groups. Egypt and Israel collaborate on penning up Hamas-led Palestinians in Gaza.

Egypt is now building a new steel wall on the Gaza border with U.S. assistance. Mubarak’s Wall, which will go down 12 metres, is designed to block tunnels through which Gaza Palestinians rely for supplies.

While Washington fulminates against Iran and China over human rights, it says nothing about client Egypt — where all elections are rigged, regime opponents brutally tortured and political opposition liquidated."

Hooked on to technology a la drugs

No surprises in the findings of this research as Reuters reveals:

"American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links.

Susan Moeller, the study's project director and a journalism professor at the university, said many students wrote about how they hated losing their media connections, which some equated to going without friends and family.

"I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one student. "Between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

Moeller said students complained most about their need to use text messages, instant messages, e-mail and Facebook.

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life."

Learning.....up the pole!

Credited to Cameron [Cam] Cardow, Canada

Robert Fisk: 'I listen as a lost people tell of their woes in a kind of trance'

Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent:

"Outside, there was a tropical storm, all swaying palm trees, bright lightening and thunder like an airstrike.

You could imagine – amid the stale croissants and bland coffee of the "executive" lounge and the frightened local newspapers – that Malaysians grow used to this, the thousand shades of greenery amid the hanging trees, the little Chinese temples and the ancient mosques and the dripping villas wherein once lived the rubber-planters from Godalming and Guildford, men who believed the Japanese could never struggle through this mess and reach Singapore. And so, here in Kuala Lumpur, there was something perverse to my little meeting with the Palestinians of Malaysia – yet more representatives of a lost, occupied Middle Eastern people, washed up on the far side of the earth; the same accents, the same desperation, the same courtesy, the same patience when I unforgivably forgot to offer them tea for almost half an hour.

In Hong Kong, I visited Muslim families and traced the roots of their Yemeni origins, and in Kentucky this week – Lexington, to be precise – I met up again with Terry Anderson, the American hostage held for almost seven years by his Shia Muslim captors in Beirut, "trust-me" Ali featuring once more in our conversations: the kidnapper who always gave Terry hope and never produced it. In a frozen Ottawa, I once picked up a taxi driven by a man who lived next door to my favourite tea-house in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. Live in the Middle East and it follows you around.

Sometimes, it's a surprise – we Westerners are like this – to find that the people you write about don't take such a romantic view of the world. The old betrayals return. The casual remark knocks you over. "I went to the Palestine Embassy," one of the Palestinian men round the hotel table in hot, greasy Kuala Lumpur tells me casually. "I needed to renew my passport. But I come from Gaza and the ambassador refused. He refuses to renew all passports belonging to Palestinians from Gaza. That is how it is. Even here I must be punished by my own Palestinian government for the fact that Hamas rules Gaza. Because Hamas controls Gaza, I must be an illegal alien in Malaysia. This is my fate. What can we do?" And there are those familiar, beseeching, pathetic – in the literal sense of the word – upturned hands. Talk to Palestinians and they give you the world."

Continue reading this insightful piece here.

Being on the take.....with influence to boot!

TomDispatch, in "William Astore, The Business of America Is Kleptocracy" once again goes where many won't - dealing with the influence peddlers in Washington, the lobbyists and the extraordinary monies which swill around with and through them to, for example, former Congressmen. The numbers are truly staggering.

"It’s hard to miss these days. The headlines tell the story -- repetitively. Everyone, it seems, is on the take. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Goldman Sachs with securities fraud for creating and selling “a mortgage investment that was secretly intended to fail” -- and then betting against its own customers. JPMorgan Chase which, in a pinch in 2008, happily took taxpayer dough, just reported $3.3 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, a jump of 55% over the previous quarter. The bank set aside $9.3 billion in what’s called “compensation and benefits” for its employees in 2009.

Even when they lose, they win. According to James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario website, on a deal in which JPMorgan swallowed $880 million in losses, its bankers still managed to walk away with up to $10 million in compensation. As he wrote, “JPMorgan’s bankers did just fine, despite having placed a ticking time bomb on their own bank’s balance sheet.” Meanwhile, Robert Rubin, who helped create the world that led to the 2008 financial meltdown as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, then took a top position at Citibank and made more than $100 million before it tanked on his watch. As economist Dean Baker puts it, “In the fall of 2008, when Citigroup was saved from bankruptcy with a taxpayer bailout, Rubin quietly slipped out the back door (with his money), resigning from his position at Citigroup.” Only recently Rubin made the headlines for offering the least apologetic (non-)apology imaginable for taking the American people to the cleaners.

And when it comes to taking, according to Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times, “more than 125 former Congressional aides and lawmakers are now working for financial firms as part of a multibillion-dollar effort to shape, and often scale back, federal regulatory power.” In other words, the regulators and their aides legislate the rules and then simply step through that infamous revolving door and pick up a handsome check on the other side. There are, in fact, at least 11,000 well-employed registered lobbyists in Washington today. A $3.4 billion “industry” in 2009, lobbying is definitely a field to get into, even in bad times, and according to the Christian Science Monitor, “when the cost of grass-roots efforts and of strategic advisers are all counted, total spending on influencing policy in Washington approaches $9.6 billion a year.”

As for the money flowing into politics from corporate deep pockets, 2008 not only saw the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, but at $1.7 billion, more than doubled the 2004 campaign’s costs, and no one expects 2012 to be anything but more expensive. All this is, of course, known to anyone who glances at the front page of a daily newspaper, but what exactly do we make of it all? What does it add up to? William Astore, historian and TomDispatch regular, has a suggestion, but before you start his piece, you might want to close your purse or button that back pocket with your wallet in it. Otherwise, they could be picked bare by the time you’re done".

The Global Nervous System

The repercussions from that now infamous volcano in Iceland will reverberate for months, if not years. There is already talk of some airlines going to the wall. Commerce, world-wide, has been severely disrupted. And people found themselves where they didn't want to be.

Then there is how people were able to deal with the situation in this day and age. Writing in The Nation, Micah Sifry reflects on how he was affected and how things worked for him:

"Sixty years ago, on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. My mother, who was just shy of 6 years old, traveled with her parents and older brother and sister from Antwerp to the coastal port of Ostend, hoping to get a boat to England. Alas, the Nazis were faster. She and her family had to walk back from the coast, dodging bombardments along the way. Less than three weeks later, Belgium capitulated. She and her family went into hiding, sheltered by the Resistance throughout the war.
Editor's Note: This article initially erroneously claimed that Air France's Twitter account had been "silent" about the flight disruptions. It was not, and we have removed that assertion.

Speaking to my mother by Skype this afternoon as I sat in a hotel room in Zurich, three days into my own odyssey of being stranded in Europe by the Icelandic ash cloud, I heard some of the pain of that experience in her voice. Despite my efforts to reassure her that I was really fine, despite not knowing if I would make it home sometime in the next week, my mother, now 77, still worried. "Are you sure you're okay?" she asked. I suspect that she can't understand just how much I don't feel like a displaced person, but more like a ball being buoyed by an invisible network of friends and strangers, all connecting to me and with one another via the Internet."

Why Iran won’t attack Israel

A piece by Yousef Munayyer (executive director of the Palestine Center) in The Los Angeles Times suggests that the reality of Iran unleashing a nuclear attack on Israel just isn't there.

After back-grounding Benny Morris, and his views on Israel and the Palestinians, Munayyer writes:

"Yet the pesky Palestinian minority Morris wishes had been expelled decades ago serves as a deterrent from a nuclear-armed Iran, should the Islamic Republic ever build nuclear weapons and consider using them on Israel. The fact that Arab Israelis were among the casualties of the 2006 war with Hezbollah speaks to the reality that no nuclear attack on Israel could happen without the deaths of countless Palestinians and Israelis, not to mention the likely destruction of Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam.

The reality of Palestinian casualties, the destruction of Jerusalem, the onset of regional war and the immediate destruction of Iran's regime as a result of a multilateral conventional or even nuclear counterattack all serve as a credible deterrent to a nuclear Iran. The Iranian leadership has shown a demonstrable interest in self-preservation".

Meanwhile, Stephen Walt in his blog over at FP deals with the supposed Iranian threat:

"Back when I started writing this blog, I warned that the idea of preventive war against Iran wasn't going to go away just because Barack Obama was president. The topic got another little burst of oxygen over the past few days, in response to what seems to have been an over-hyped memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and some remarks by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, following a speech at Columbia University. In particular, Mullen noted that military action against Iran could "go a long way" toward delaying Iran's acquisition of a weapons capability, though he also noted this could only be a "last resort" and made it clear it was not an option he favored.

One of the more remarkable features about the endless drumbeat of alarm about Iran is that it pays virtually no attention to Iran's actual capabilities, and rests on all sorts of worst case assumptions about Iranian behavior."

Continue reading Walt's analysis, here - including the relative capabalities of Iran as compared to the US.

What's the matter with the world today?

The banner to this post poses a big question - and certainly a challenge to which to respond.

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, takes on the task of answering his own question in a posting on his blog on FP:

"Moreover, a key feature of contemporary globalization is that today's problems tend to be more complex and more far-reaching, and tend to spread with greater speed. A volcano in Iceland disrupts air travel in Europe. A failed state in Afgahanistan nurtures a terrorist network that eventually strikes on several continents. The Internet doesn't even exist in 1990, but now it empowers democratic forces, facilitates commerce and intellectual exchange, and enable extremists to recruit supporters and transmit tactical advice all around the world. The HIV virus emerges in Africa and eventually infects millions of human beings on every continent. Bankers in America's mortgage industry makes foolish and venal decisions, and a global financial collapse wipes out trillions of dollars of wealth and affects the lives of billions of people, some of them dramatically. Human beings in the developed world burn carbon fuels for a couple of centuries and now poor countries on the other side of the world face the risk of widespread coastal flooding (or worse) in the decades ahead. In short, the numerator of our critical ratio -- i.e., the rate at which big problems are emerging-seems to be rising."

Read the full piece here.

Goldmans Play, the Others Pay

"The story of the financial debacle will end the way it began, with the super-hustlers from Goldman Sachs at the center of the action and profiting wildly. Never in U.S. history has one company wielded such destructive power over our political economy, irrespective of whether a Republican or a Democrat happened to be president.

At least the robber barons of old built railroads and steel mills, whereas Goldman Sachs makes its money placing bets on people losing their homes. On Tuesday, Goldman announced a 91 percent jump in profit to $3.46 billion for the quarter, while the dreams of millions of families continue to be foreclosed and unemployment hovers at 10 percent because of a crisis that that very company did much to cause.

It was Goldman-Vice-Chairman-turned-Treasury-Secretary Robert Rubin who pushed through the radical financial deregulation during the Clinton presidency that made the derivatives madness possible. When Bill Clinton was asked on ABC’s Sunday show “This Week” if he now regretted the advice he received back then from Rubin and his protégé Lawrence Summers, now a top Obama adviser, he responded: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I was wrong to take it. …”

So begins a piece by Robert Scheer on truthdig, providing an incisive background to Goldman Sachs, those derivatives and all the main players behind it all - or, at least, those who were instrumental in facilitating Goldman Sachs to put in place what they did.

Assuming planes are flying....is this where we are headed?

Credited to Steve Kelly, The New Orleans Times-Picayune

Samaranch: No Olympian stature there

The death of the former International Olympics director Juan Samaranch the other day has drawn the predictable tributes - principally how he pulled the IOC back from bankruptcy.

Josh Keating, on FP, provides a different take on the man, none all too flattering.

"Former International Olympic Committee director Juan Antonio Samaranch passed away today at the age of 89. While Samaranch's tenure unquestionably transformed the Olympics into the multibillion-dollar global enterprise it is today and expanded participation among developing countries and women, the former Franco-regime official also left the games with a reputation corruption that will be hard to reverse.

Here's an excerpt on Samaranch from Olympic historian John Hoberman's "Think Again: Olympics" in the July/August 2008 issue of FP:

'The corruption was never worse than when Juan Antonio Samaranch, an unreconstructed Spanish fascist, was president of the IOC from 1980 to 2001. Samaranch brought with him from Franco's Spain an authoritarian style that facilitated the bribery of IOC members, destroyed any chance of curbing doping, and appointed a generation of committee members who never dared to oppose him.

Samaranch, who insisted on being called "Excellency," filled the IOC with such characters as South Korean intelligence operative Kim Un Yong and Indonesian timber magnate Bob Hasan. Both have served prison time for corruption. Then there's Lee Kun Hee, the chairman of Samsung Electronics (convicted of bribery in 1996) and Francis Nyangweso, once the military commander in chief for Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s. Nyangweso remains on the IOC board to this day. Why this rogues' gallery was recruited into a "peace" and "human rights" organization remains a mystery.

In fairness, one improvement in the way the IOC operates should be acknowledged. After the 1999 bribery scandal in which IOC members were paid off to support Salt Lake City's bid for the 2002 Winter Games, the IOC established a technical committee comprising a small number of vetted members to oversee the host city selection process, thereby reducing the risk of bribes to less trustworthy colleagues. The one topic this committee will not address, however, is whether staging the games in a repressive society might be a bad idea. Last year, the IOC rewarded Russia's pseudo-democracy with the 2014 Winter Games. When protesters showed up during the IOC's visit there in April, they were beaten by police.'"

Gitmo: No exit card if Obama has his way

All too sadly, the Obama administration is continuing the Bush era's unconscionable, and illegal, detention of many inmates at Gitmo. It is made the more startling given that Obama is a trained lawyer and in fact was a law lecturer.

Needless to say the "message" this conveys to principally Muslim nations, and the world generally, about America's rule of law and justice, can't be hard to imagine.

ProPublica reports in "As Gitmo Detainees’ Legal Victories Mount, Obama Administration Resists Orders to Release":

"The government is failing in more and more cases to produce evidence that the men it has imprisoned at Guantanamo belong there, according to ProPublica's latest look at the lawsuits that some 100 captives have filed in federal court to seek their freedom. But the Obama administration continues to challenge the courts' authority to make it release the prisoners.

In 34 out of the 47 cases that have been decided so far -- over 70 percent -- detainees have won judgments that the United States is subjecting them to indefinite detention as al-Qaida or Taliban enemies without proof, and that they must be released. Federal judges have been reviewing classified intelligence and interrogation reports since June 2008, when the Supreme Court recognized the detainees' right to sue. The remaining prisoners have been held seven years or longer."

Now that is what you call a real Q & A / Interview

Most Q's in a Q & A are limp, and certainly do not engage the interviewee with the really hard questions. Forget about the waffling answers which go unchallenged with a follow-up question.

So, here, via The Agitator, is a primer on how to really conduct an effective Q & A. Journo's and TV interviewers out there take note!

Eh? Re-visiting Napoleon's defeat in Russia

From Salon in a piece "Napoleon's Russian defeat, reexamined" - on the basis of how a well-prepared army -- and not the legendary winter -- turned the tide on the French emperor.

"Much has been written about how and why Napoleon came to lose more than a half-million men in the Russian invasion. Hitler and his generals even studied the ill-fated campaign hoping to avoid making similar mistakes. But missing from Western scholarship on the Napoleonic Wars is a full-fledged account of how Russia came to smash Napoleon. With "Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace," Dominic Lieven, one of the preeminent scholars of 19th-century Russia, aims to fill the void, tackling not only the French invasion of 1812, but also the battles of 1813-1814. What sets Lieven's book apart from the handful of other accounts is his prolific use of Russian sources, particularly regimental histories available to Western researchers only since 1991."

They Fled from Our War

President Bush and PM's Blair and Howard - the 3 "mates" who principally comprised the so-called Coalition of the Willing and who have now moved off centre stage, as it were - were the main instigators of the Iraq War back in March 2003. The country is still reeling from the onslaught and effects of the forces that attacked them. Remember the attack on Baghdad as one of "Shock and Awe" as it was described?

And what about the people of Iraq? The New York Review of Books takes up the story of one Baghdad citizen:

"Among the many consequences of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the plight of millions of Iraqi refugees is seldom mentioned. The stories of such people as Burhan Abdulnour, whom we met in Sweden in 2008, have hardly been told. Abdulnour, a doctor, was director of a Baghdad hospital for chest diseases. His wife, Sahar, also a physician, was teaching physiology at Baghdad University’s medical school. They lived in al-Riyadh, a mixed neighborhood in central Baghdad, with their three children. “We had jobs, we had homes, we had cars, we had normal lives,” Abdulnour recalled. They were members of Iraq’s Christian minority. Although life under the Baathist dictatorship had been tolerable for them, they assumed that the arrival of the Americans would bring new freedoms and much-needed economic development. “We were expecting to have new devices, new equipment for the labs, X-rays, operations, everything,” Abdulnour said.

The new technology never arrived. Instead, Iraq descended into horrific violence; Christians were among those targeted by armed gangs and Islamic militias. By 2006, there were frequent attacks near their house. That spring, their twelve-year-old son was home alone when a car bomb exploded so close that it broke the windows. Then came the death threats. “My wife was threatened in her medical school—they were threatened, the dean of the college, the head of the department also. One of her colleagues was killed in his own clinic,” Abdulnour said. That August, he moved his wife and children to Jordan. He returned to his job in Baghdad, where he had only a few months left until he could claim his pension. But before he could finish, armed men came looking for him. He fled too. Today, Abdulnour and his family have settled in Sweden; their lives in Iraq are over.

Following Iraq’s parliamentary election this March, much attention was devoted to the large turnout, the relatively orderly voting process (despite multiple attacks), the participation of Sunnis, and the apparent progress—after years of setbacks—toward a working political system in a still bitterly divided country. Widely forgotten in this analysis, however, are the two million Iraqis who remain in exile abroad. Most have ended up in the Middle East and Europe; a small number have been resettled in the United States and elsewhere."

Continue reading here.

Israel: Not such a celebratory birthday

It's not that often that a country celebrates its birth - in this case, Israel, 62 years ago - to be confronted with a piece in a leading daily newspaper throwing down the gauntlet to its PM.

Bravely, Ari Shavit, writing in Haaretz in "An open letter to Netanyahu: Act before it's too late", takes his pen to PM Netanyahu:

"Mr. Prime Minister, here are the basic facts: The grace period granted the Jewish state by Auschwitz and Treblinka is ending. The generation that knew the Holocaust has left the stage. The generation that remembers the Holocaust is disappearing. What shapes the world's perception of Israel today is not the crematoria, but the checkpoints. Not the trains, but the settlements. As a result, even when we are right, they do not listen to us. Even when we are persecuted, they pay us no heed. The wind is blowing against us."

And:

"In order withstand what is to come, Israel must once again become an inalienable part of the West. And the West is not prepared to accept Israel as an occupying state. Therefore, in order to save our home, is necessary to act at once to end the occupation. It is essential to effect an immediate and sharp change in diplomatic direction."

Postscript: Interestingly, The New York Times' Ethan Bronner reflects in "Mood Is Dark as Israel Marks 62nd Year as a Nation" how Israel is "celebrating" its birthday.

A fallout of a different kind

Credited to Cameron [Cam] Cardow, Canada

Google and Government censorship requests

Google, Governments and access to the internet - let alone providing details of Google users to Government authorities - seem to be an intertwined subject.

The Guardian reports on Google's release of a tool showing government censorship requests.

"Google has hit out at state attempts to clamp down on the internet by revealing governments' requests to remove data from the web and get information about users.

Tonight it released a web page with a map showing country by country where it has had government requests or court orders to remove content from the YouTube video service or its search results, or to provide details about users of its services.

The release of the tool, announced on its official blog, comes as it has had to counter complaints from data protection authorities in 10 countries, including the UK, that its Street View product, which provides pictures of public streets, and its ad-hoc social networking service Buzz "were launched without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws" and that Buzz in particular "betrayed a disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms".

All that food....and all going to waste

It's a scene repeated around the world in affluent countries......the wanton waste of food. And there are many who would desperately be happy to have the food from supermarkets even if it had the odd blemish, wasn't that day's pick of the crop and the packaging was dented.

AlterNet details how 63% of supermarket waste in the USA is food:

"Unemployment. Health care. The national debt. So many social issues take a lot to fix: experts, money, and lots of time. To add to a growing list of social issues, here’s another: 1 in 7 American households has trouble putting food on the table at some point during the year, according to a recent USDA report.

But in a nation where so many go hungry, a possible solution has emerged.

Grocery stores have lots of foods that need to be taken off shelves daily: stock that needs to rotate, surplus food like bananas that are starting to have brown spots, or refrigerated items that need to move for the new product coming in. Food products make up 63 percent of a supermarket’s disposed waste stream, according to a California Integrated Waste Management Board industry study. That’s approximately 3,000 lbs. thrown away per employee every year. The stores can’t sell the food, so they toss it in the compost or garbage.

Organizations and an army of volunteers -- called “food recovery” groups -- are stationed around the country, ready to transport that food from the stores to the people that need it most. Meats that are close to the sell-by date, for example, can be frozen and good for several more months."

Those Looters in Loafers

In the light of the proceeding brought against Goldman Sachs, Nobel Prize winner [in Economics] Paul Krugman comments in his regular op-ed piece in The New York Times:

"Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, “Goldman Sachs.”

Sure enough, last week the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Gucci-loafer guys at Goldman of engaging in what amounts to white-collar looting.

I’m using the term looting in the sense defined by the economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer in a 1993 paper titled “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” That paper, written in the aftermath of the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan years, argued that many of the losses in that crisis were the result of deliberate fraud."

And:

"The main moral you should draw from the charges against Goldman, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong — and not just because no such promise would be credible.

For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on."

What you can hold people responsible for!

One hesitates to publish this as it seems so incredible.....

First, there is Rush Limbaugh in the USA with this:

"One of the many views that Rush Limbaugh shares with the Iranian mullahs is his firm belief that natural disasters can be attributed to political or social developments. In his Friday radio appearance, he explains that the eruption of a volcano in Iceland is a divine response to Congress’s enactment of the Obama Administration’s healthcare reform legislation".

Go to Harper's Magazine, here, to watch the video.

And, then, there is this over in Iran:

"A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric's unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair."

Go to pressdemocrat.com, here, to read the full piece.

Noam Chomsky: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime"

Chris Hedges, writing his regular column on truthdig, analyses a speech given by Noam Chomsky recently - and takes up the matter, and issues raised in the address with "the man" himself:

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

Read the complete piece here.

A different take on that Sarah [Palin]

A piece on Slate "Sarah Palin Is the New Al Gore" reflects on what sort of person Sarah Palin - who seems to divide people between loving and deriding her - is and how she "sits" on the American political scene.

"A portion of Sarah Palin's speaking contract has been discovered. In it she requests that at the podium she get bendable straws for her two water bottles. When she flies, it must be first class (or on a midsize private jet); her cars must be SUVs or "black town cars," and she must be put up in a suite at the kinds of hotels where the packages of nuts in the mini-bar cost more than the average hourly wage.

Your reaction to this probably depends on your position on the political spectrum. If you are a liberal, you see it as proof that Palin is no "hockey mom" and that her humble persona was a fraud. If you are a conservative, you see it as proof that the free market has decreed that the Palin brand is more valuable than ever. (If you are fond of maxims, you are simply puzzled. Quitters never prosper, we're told, and yet Palin, who left her job with 17 months to go in her first term, has made $12 million since doing so, according to ABC News.)

But if you step back and judge Palin by the standards of other celebrities and reality-show hosts, the contract seems pretty benign. She didn't demand white roses or call for a police escort.* She doesn't ask that all televisions be tuned to Fox, like the man she wanted to succeed as vice president. She does ask that questions at her events be screened—which, given how thoroughly packaged presidential "town hall" performances are, should be considered a standard political request."

Columbine....11 years on

For a non-American it hard to understand how there could even be a debate about the right to bear arms. Yes, the Second Amendment does allow for the carrying of arms - but unfettered and almost unrestricted? And it's not as if the US hasn't suffered enough of extensive shootings over the years - with lots of deaths and attendant traumas for those in some way involved.

It's 11 years since the now infamous Columbine High School shooting.....and the right to bear arms in the US still rages. Witness rallies in Washington today, as The New York Times editorialises, making the point that there has to be a curb on America's gun culture:

"Two rallies by gun rights celebrants and anti- government polemicists are planned Monday on both sides of Washington’s Potomac River. They will invoke the Second Amendment and the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A more apt, and tragic, anniversary to keep in mind is the Columbine school massacre of 1999. Eleven years later, and Congress has failed to close the gun show loophole that made the carnage possible.

Two Columbine students had a friend obtain four high-powered weapons, no-questions-asked, from gun show “hobbyist” dealers, and then used them to kill 12 children and a teacher. Since then, the gun lobby and its all-too-willing Congressional enablers have managed to block all efforts to require buyers at weekend gun shows to undergo the same background checks required of buyers at federally registered gun shops.

Polls show the public favors closing the gun show loophole by a wide margin, but the people’s right to safety is nothing when compared with the gun lobby’s clout.

At a park in Virginia just across from the nation’s capital, marchers will be openly strutting with their weapons, as the state’s “open carry” law permits. Participants at the other rally on the National Mall are being told that it is illegal to flash guns, so they must dare to leave them home. Just up the Hill in Congress, the gun lobby’s ever-compliant caucus is fighting that ban too.

One hundred or so lawmakers have shown more courage and sense, signing on to a bill — sponsored by Representatives Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, and Michael Castle, Republican of Delaware — to close the gun show loophole. It is hard to imagine the founding patriots would not support this legislation. It demands the political courage to value human life over the bravado of the gun culture."

Get Fat, Die Young: A Whopper of a [Health-risk] Model

From CommonDreams:

"Just in case we needed any more reasons to assign a special place in Hell to the insurance companies, a new study has found they own almost $2 billion stock in the country's largest fast-food companies - that, on top of $4.5 billion in tobacco company stock. The study by Harvard Medical School found $1.9 billion invested in McDonald's, Burger King, KFC and other grease-laden purveyors of morbid obesity.

'They are essentially killing off their consumer base, so it's not a sustainable model in the long-term." - Dr. Sara Bleich of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.'"

Fox, the Murdoch press and contradictions

The Nation makes the more than valid point that the Murdoch empire is all over the place when one has regard to its Fox News [not news at all actually!] and its press, like The Wall Street Journal.

"Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel and the editorial page of his Wall Street Journal may scorn global warming as an anti-capitalist hoax perpetrated by greedy scientists, but when his media empire's own vast butt is concerned, he's hedging his bets. Murdoch's Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal, released a memo on Monday announcing that it is building "the largest solar power installation at a single commercial site in the U.S." And guess what: Instead of strangling free enterprise or other such rightwing claptrap, Dow Jones says, "We save the earth's resources and save money too."

All the stats of tree-huggy goodness--more than 13,000 solar panels covering nearly 230,000 square feet to generate 4.1 megawatts of electricity from the sun, etc.--are detailed here.
But seeing News Corp., Murdoch's overall company, earnestly brag about its environmental foresight, you would never know that Fox News is, hands down, the world's loudest pusher of the lie that "There's no global warming" (Hannity), that it's a "global warming scam" Glenn Beck), or, as Fox's newest hire, Sarah Palin, scoffs, it's "a bunch of snake oil science." Over at the Journal, Bret Stephens wrote last week, "global warming is dead... Which means that pretty soon we're going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place."

Continue reading, here, including this:

"Murdoch seems as much in the dark about Fox's Neanderthal stance on the environment as he is about its deep complicity in far-right politics. In a painfully embarrassing public interview with Marvin Kalb last week, Murdoch claimed he had no idea that Fox News has been actively and directly promoting the tea party movement. Fox shouldn't be "supporting the tea party or any other party," Murdoch said, adding, "I'd like to investigate what you are saying before I condemn anyone." So Media Matters handed him the dossier."

The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows About You

We all "do" it! Google. And yes, we are, mostly, impressed how Google gets us to the answer or source of what we are after.

All well and good, but what is Google doing with all the times you access or use it? Perhaps no good, as this piece on AlterNet explains.

"In June 2007, Privacy International, a U.K.-based privacy rights watch- dog, cited Google as the worst privacy offender among 23 online companies, ranking the “Don’t Be Evil” people below Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook and AOL. According to the report, no other company was “coming close to achieving [Google’s] status as an endemic threat to privacy.” What most disturbed the authors was Google’s “increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices.” The result: “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.”

Indeed, Google now controls an estimated 70 percent of the online search engine market, but its deep-drilling of user information — where we surf, whom we e-mail, what blogs we post, what pictures we share, what maps we look at, what news we read — extends far beyond the search feature to encompass the kind of “total information awareness” that privacy activists feared at the hands of the Bush Jr. administration’s much-maligned Total Information Awareness program.

Kevin Bankston, a privacy expert and attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group engaged in questions of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property in the digital age, warns of the possibilities. “In all of human history,” he says, “few if any single entities, other than the National Security Agency, have ever possessed such a hoard of sensitive data about so many people.”

Flying nowhere......

Credited to Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

Do we really want "our man" in Kabul?

TomDispatch makes more than some valid points about President Karzai - "our man" in Kabul:

"Over the past several years, when he complained again and again about American attacks in his country that were killing civilians in surprising numbers and remarkably often, he was generally humored and dealt with as an irrelevance or an annoyance. Now, given the rampant drug trade, the corruption, the "tantrums," the emotional outbursts, the threats to join the Taliban, and his embracing of the Iranians and the Chinese, he is dealt with in Washington as a cross between a big baby, an unstable adult, an overemotional drug-taker, and a prime danger to the American project in Afghanistan. He was given a lot of TLC by the previous resident of the White House, while being studiously ignored or reproved by this one. American officials have lavished praise -- and scorn -- on him. They have brandished hard power -- and laid on the soft power -- to tame him. They have regularly tried “new tacks” in dealing with him, and then tacked -- and tacked again. I’m talking, of course, about Hamid Karzai, the American-installed president of Afghanistan, our man in Kabul, as Alfred McCoy so aptly dubs him. He’s our boy, our nemesis, the definition of our problem in Afghanistan, our worst mistake, and our missing conscience all wrapped in one."

Possibility of a Two-State Solution recedes

Pres. Obama appeared downbeat about a two-state solution being achieved between Israel and Palestinians from comments made by him the other day. See the AFP report here.

Professor Juan Cole, in his must-read blog, Informed Comment, reflects on the implications of no progress in achieving a Middle East solution:

"Obama may well be right. But note the implications of no progress between Israel and the Palestinians on political settlement of their dispute:

1. Iran– the primary rejectionist state in the region, will grow in power and popularity in the Middle East

2. Anger in the Arab world toward Israel and the US will grow in intensity

3. Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem could itself be the cause for a war. Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as to Jews.

4. Israel’s status as a de facto Apartheid state will be made permanent and the boycott movement will grow, ultimately affecting the Israeli economy

5. The two-state solution is dead as a doornail, and Israel will either have to give the Palestinians citizenship, or face a long and bitter struggle by the Palestinians to make their state in the teeth of Israeli opposition."

The [Mad Hatters] Tea Party!

Credited to Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

Hamas condemned....and rightly so

The Washington Post reports on troubles in Gaza:

"The Gaza Strip's Hamas-led government on Thursday executed two Palestinians convicted of aiding Israel in the assassination of Palestinian militants, a move that highlighted the deep divisions that endure between the two main Palestinian political factions.

The executions -- carried out without the approval of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in the West Bank and is part of the rival Fatah movement -- represented a direct rebuke of Abbas's authority amid stalled efforts at reconciliation. While Hamas controls Gaza, Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad govern the West Bank from Ramallah."

Rightly so, the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, has condemned the executions:

"B’Tselem strongly condemns the execution today of two Palestinians convicted of collaboration with Israel, by the Hamas government in Gaza. The death penalty is immoral and violates the basic right to life of every human being. B’Tselem holds that under no circumstance must it be imposed.

In addition to objection in principle to the death penalty, today’s execution was based on a trial that did not meet even minimal standards of due process. Gazans charged with collaboration are unable to mount a proper defense or to appeal the verdicts and punishments imposed upon them.

Today’s execution is the first official execution in Gaza since Hamas’ takeover. Reports by media and Palestinian human rights groups indicate that 14 people were sentenced to death in Gazan military courts in 2009 for collaboration with Israel, treason and murder. Additionally, according to Human Rights Watch, during Operation Cast Lead, 32 Palestinians were executed without trial by Palestinian armed groups apparently associated with Hamas, for allegedly providing Israel with information."

An already strong case against Kissinger strengthens

Heavens knows why the world gives ex US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, the time of day, let alone turns to him to pontificate on world affairs.

His reputation, credibility and integrity is in tatters, as Christopher Hitchins so compelling revealed in his book on Kissinger back in 2oo1.

Scott Harper, writing on Harper's Magazine, now takes the matter further:

"On September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet placed a bomb in a car in Washington, D.C., used by Chile’s former ambassador, Orlando Letelier. When detonated later that day, the bomb killed Letelier and an American citizen accompanying him, Ronni Moffitt. Did the U.S. government play some sort of role in this double homicide, carried out in the nation’s capital? On Friday, as Ken Silverstein notes, the Associated Press’s Pete Yost published the essence of a damning new document, showing that Henry Kissinger canceled a State Department warning that was to have gone to Chile just days before the assassination:

In 1976, the South American nations of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in a program of repression code-named Operation Condor that targeted those governments’ political opponents throughout Latin America, Europe and even the United States. Based on information from the CIA, the U.S. State Department became concerned that Condor included plans for political assassination around the world. The State Department drafted a plan to deliver a stern message to the three governments not to engage in such murders.

In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as “Operation Condor,” preceded by the words “(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN.” The cable states that “secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo” Uruguay “and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.” “The Sept. 16 cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle on Kissinger’s role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning of Condor assassination plots,” Peter Kornbluh, the National Security Archive’s senior analyst on Chile, said Saturday. Kornbluh is the author of “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.”

In 2001, former Harper’s Washington editor Christopher Hitchens published the essential facts in “The Case Against Kissinger,” describing the essential role that Kissinger played in the events that brought Pinochet to power and held him there. Kissinger’s relationship to “Operation Condor” is discussed at some length.

A “Condor” team also detonated a car bomb in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing the former Chilean foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and his aide, Ronni Moffitt. United States government complicity has been uncovered at every level of this network. It has been established, for example, that the FBI aided Pinochet in capturing Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcon, who was detained and tortured in Paraguay, then turned over to the Chilean secret police and “disappeared.” Astonishingly, the surveillance of Latin American dissident refugees in the United States was promised to “Condor” figures by American intelligence.

As Hitchens notes, “a rule of thumb in Washington holds that any late disclosure by officialdom will contain material that is worse than even the cynics suspected.” The new documents clearly put Kissinger close to the scene of the crime, with greater knowledge and a more readily discernible wink to the assassination squads than even many of his enemies imagined. There is almost certainly more yet to come. In the meantime, Kissinger continues to face the prospect of arrest and prosecution when he travels abroad.

No, the law isn't applied equally to all.....

"At last we are waking up to what international law means. For the first time in modern history the underlying assumption of political life – that those who exercise power over us will not be judged by the same legal and moral norms as common citizens – is beginning to crack."

George Monbiot explains in a piece on his blog - originally published in The Guardian - that the law does not apply equally to all.