Indefinite detention? No trial? In the USA?

Most Americans would be startled, one assumes, to know what the Bill presently before the US Senate would provide for.   The military, anywhere in the world, would be authorised to detain people suspected of terrorism, indefinitely, without any trial.

"The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial. The measure would effectively extend the definition of what is considered the military’s "battlefield" to anywhere in the world, even within the United States. Its authors, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have been campaigning for its passage in a bipartisan effort. But the White House has issued a veto threat, with backing from top officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. “This would be the first time since the McCarthy era that the United States Congress has tried to do this,” says our guest, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, which has gathered signatures from 26 retired military leaders urging the Senate to vote against the measure, as well as against a separate provision that would repeal the executive order banning torture. “In this case, we’ve seen the administration very eagerly hold people without trial for 10-plus years in military detention, so there’s no reason to believe they would not continue to do that here. So we’re talking about indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens, of lawful U.S. residents, as well as of people abroad.”

Amazon: Take your business elsewhere

Amazon is a behemoth without a doubt.   But it is not a company which fair-minded people ought to support with their business.

Writing in The Nation, Harold Pollack looks more closely at Amazon and as a one-time purchaser has decided to nix them.

"But then I found this terrific story by Spencer Soper describing the labor practices at Amazon’s Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and other products are packed and shipped. Soper and his colleagues interviewed twenty current and former workers. It’s not a pretty story:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time."

****

"Like Walmart, Amazon pursues an unsentimental business plan that forces you to decide what you really believe about capitalism. Through a combination of innovation, name recognition and bargaining power, both Amazon and Walmart became hugely profitable. Much of this innovation comes through genuinely ingenious supply-chain management and through efforts to minimize labor costs. Both companies provide much value to the American consumer. Both have squeezed their suppliers and workers in ways that promote low prices, but that sometimes cross boundaries of good corporate citizenship and basic decency."

Murdoch newspaper "culture" exposed

It doesn't get more graphic and detailed than the revelations at the British inquiry into the media.   A former editor of the News of the World lays all bare.   And it confirms what a sleaze of an organisation the Murdochs head at News Limited.

"Former News of the World editor stuns UK media inquiry with a breathtakingly frank account of life at a British tabloid.

‘‘Privacy is for paedos,’’ declared former News of the World man and tabloid veteran Paul McMullan in the midst of his evidence at the British Leveson inquiry in the UK media.
He had only just observed that ‘‘in 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never found anybody doing any good’’ - statements that together amounted to a credo for the brutal tabloid newspaper world of which McMullan, former deputy features editor of the now-defunct Sunday, became the chief spokesman in the otherwise stifled confines of courtroom 73 at the High Court in London.

The public interest, he said, added up to no more than the sheer number of copies the News of the World could sell."

WikiLeaks ....One year on

It's hard to believe that it's one year, today, since WikiLeaks literally burst onto the scene.    And what an effect it has had, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in "Cablegate One Year Later: How WikiLeaks Has Influenced Foreign Policy, Journalism, and the First Amendment"....

"One year ago today, WikiLeaks started publishing a trove of over 250,000 leaked U.S. State Department cables, which have since formed the basis of reporting for newspapers around the globe. The publication has given the public a window into the inner workings of government at an unprecedented scale, and in the process, has transformed journalism in the digital age.

In recognition, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was just awarded Australia’s version of the Pulitzer Prize, in addition to the Martha Gellhorn journalism prize he won in the United Kingdom earlier this year. As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald observed, “WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined.” Yet at the same time, the Justice Department has been investigating WikiLeaks for criminal violations for doing what other media organizations have been doing in the U.S. for centuries—publishing truthful information in the public interest".

Now it's NATO v Pakistan

Well known author and commentator Tariq Ali, writing on Counterpunch on the latest issue between NATO and Pakistan....

"The Nato assault on a Pakistani checkpoint close to the Afghan border which killed 24 soldiers on Saturday must have been deliberate. Nato commanders have long been supplied with maps marking these checkpoints by the Pakistani military. They knew that the target was a military outpost. The explanation that they were fired on first rings false and has been ferociously denied by Islamabad. Previous such attacks were pronounced ‘accidental’ and apologies were given and accepted. This time it seems more serious. It has come too soon after other ‘breaches of sovereignty’, in the words of the local press, but Pakistani sovereignty is a fiction. The military high command and the country’s political leaders willingly surrendered their sovereignty many decades ago. That it is now being violated openly and brutally is the real cause for concern.

 In retaliation, Pakistan has halted Nato convoys to Afghanistan (49 per cent of which go through the country) and asked the US to vacate the Shamsi base that they built to launch drones against targets in both Afghanistan and Pakistan with the permission of the country’s rulers. Islamabad was allowed a legal fig-leaf: in official documents the base was officially leased by the UAE – whose ‘sovereignty’ is even more flexible than Pakistan’s.

 Motives for the attack remain a mystery but its impact is not. It will create further divisions within the military, further weaken the venal Zardari regime, strengthen religious militants and make the US even more hated than it already is in Pakistan.

So why do it? Was it intended as a provocation? Is Obama seriously thinking of unleashing a civil war in an already battered country? Some commentators in Islamabad are arguing this but it’s unlikely that Nato troops will occupy Pakistan. Such an irrational turn would be difficult to justify in terms of any imperial interests. Perhaps it was simply a tit-for-tat to punish the Pakistani military for dispatching the Haqqani network to bomb the US embassy and Nato HQ in Kabul’s ‘Green Zone’ a few months back."
 

An unhappy prognosis for 2012

There is the economic crisis and woes besetting many countries in Europe and also the USA.  Then there is the Occupy Wall Street movement sweeping the world.

The Boston Globe has an op-ed piece which takes a realist snap-shot of the world  today....and no less importantly, what things might bring in 2012.

"Around the world, this has been the year of uprisings - spurred in large part by financial concerns.

Athens, of course, has witnessed months of fiery protests. But the disaffected have also crowded the streets of Paris, London, Rome, and New York.

And economic woes extend far beyond the obvious.

As former New York Times war reporter - and current Truthdig columnist - Chris Hedges told me in August, the Arab Spring had a lot "to do with food prices. Commodity prices - especially wheat, which has increased in price by 100% in past eight months - has really made it difficult for families, especially poor families - and half of the population in Egypt lives on about two dollars a day - to feed themselves."

Hedges argued that skyrocketing prices helped foment dissatisfaction - and pushed people into the streets. "And that's why, if you looked closely," he said, "you saw within the crowds oftentimes, people actually carrying loaves of bread. And that's not going to go away."

Indeed, on the day before Thanksgiving, The Financial Times reported that more then 40% of food producers intend to hike consumer prices in the next few months, attempting to compensate for the rising cost of raw materials.

But the problem encompasses much more than food. Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia, wrote recently that the cost of education continues to outpace inflation - even as a four-year degree becomes a prerequisite for a comfortable, middle-class life. "Poor kids can't meet tuition," wrote Sachs, "and they drop out of college in droves. Yet with more cuts in state support for tuition and in federal Pell Grants, the situation is rapidly getting worse."

A few of the families that can't afford high tuitions protest. But most just feel angry, dispirited, and betrayed.

Still, as Sachs says, there is a strange, alternate narrative: "we have two economies, not one. The economy of rich Americans is booming. Salaries are high. Profits are soaring. Luxury brands and upscale restaurants are packed. There is no recession."

Hit up some of the more expensive restaurants in Boston, and you'll see $45 steaks and $60 bottles of wine liberally dotting packed tables.

The question, then - as prices for food, education, and health care continue to rise - is how long dissatisfaction can be contained.

"I drive by gated communities," the renowned geographer Jared Diamond wrote a few years ago, "guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools."

But financial insecurity can prove combustible. As Greece, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street have so powerfully demonstrated.

"If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people," Diamond says, with a nod to history, "gates will not keep the rioters out."

2011 may have seemed like a year of upheaval. But the real fireworks could be yet to come."

You pay for the cosmetics. He makes millions in avoiding tax

Is it any wonder that the Occupy Wall Street is gaining traction.   Revelations in The New York Times how Ronald Lauder - the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune - has manipulated US tax laws to make millions of dolllars only serve to highlight how the wealthy "play" at avoiding their liability to pay tax.

"As he stood in the opulent marble foyer of a Fifth Avenue mansion late last month, greeting the coterie of prominent guests arriving at his private art gallery, Ronald S. Lauder was doing more than just being a gracious host.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Neue Galerie, Mr. Lauder’s museum of Austrian and German art, he exhibited many of the treasures of a personal collection valued at more than $1 billion, including works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Matisse, and a Klimt portrait he bought five years ago for $135 million."

****

"An examination of public documents involving Mr. Lauder’s companies, investments and charities offers a glimpse of the wide array of legal options for the world’s wealthiest citizens to avoid taxes both at home and abroad.

His vast holdings — which include hundreds of millions in stock, one of the world’s largest private collections of medieval armor, homes in Washington, D.C., and on Park Avenue as well as oceanfront mansions in Palm Beach and the Hamptons — are organized in a labyrinth of trusts, limited liability corporations and holding companies, some of which his lawyers acknowledge are intended for tax purposes. The cable television network he built in Central Europe, CME Enterprises, maintains an official headquarters in the tax haven of Bermuda, where it does not operate any stations.

And earlier this year, Mr. Lauder used his stake in the family business, Estée Lauder Companies, to create a tax shelter to avoid as much as $10 million in federal income tax for years. In June, regulatory filings show, Mr. Lauder entered into a sophisticated contract to sell $72 million of stock to an investment bank in 2014 at a price of about 75 percent of its current value in exchange for cash now. The transaction, known as a variable prepaid forward, minimizes potential losses for shareholders and gives them access to cash. But because the I.R.S. does not classify this as a sale, it allows investors like Mr. Lauder to defer paying taxes for years."

WikiLeaks Wins Walkley for Revealing 'Inconvenient Truths' in Global Coup

A more than well-deserved award.     Anyone remotely interested in politics and openness in Government, should applaud what WikiLeaks has done.    Needless to say the powers that be are more than happy to target the messenger behind WikiLeaks - Julian Assange.

"WikiLeaks was last night awarded a Walkley for outstanding contribution to journalism for what was described by judges as a global publishing coup that achieved "justice through transparency".

"WikiLeaks applied new technology to penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup," the Walkley trustees said.

"Its revelations, from the way the war on terror was being waged, to diplomatic bastardry, high-level horse-trading and the interference in the domestic affairs of nations, have had an undeniable impact."

Iraq's young post Hussein and the US

Iraq has basically moved off the daily news.    There is a feeling of the West looking at Iraq as a "job well done".     That the country has been scarred in relation to the number of deaths suffered by its citizens, the large number of people who have re-located to other countries (think Jordan, for example) and the considerable damage to the country's infrastructure, has been overlooked.    And what about the young people who have lived with war for so long?

"About half of Iraq’s 33 million people are 19 or younger, and no Iraqi born since Saddam came to power in 1979 has known the country to be without war or dictatorship.

Iraqis in their late teens and 20s “grew up in a very dangerous climate” that did not foster a “civilian mentality,” according to Abduljabbar Ahmad Abdullah, dean of the political science college at the University of Baghdad.

“The political socialization of that individual is not correct,” Abdullah said over tea in his campus office in October. “Every student belongs to his clan, not his country.”

When Iraqis talk about the fate of the younger generation, they use expressions similar to “crossroads” and “tipping point.”

“We are at a very critical period, with the deterioration of security and the elevation of corruption,” activist Hanaa Edwar said at a September peace festival in Baghdad’s Zawra Park. “Elections are not enough. We need active participation from young people. They are not yet polluted by politicians. They need more than hope. They need to be empowered.”

Occupy London do what? Open libraries?

As libraries close their doors across the UK because of councils being unable to afford them, a new dimension to the Occupy London movement - opening libraries.

"As councils up and down the country close libraries faster than you can say "select committee", the Occupy London library is expanding, with two new branches.

The library at Finsbury Square is little more than a couple of shelves and a sofa in a tent, while around the corner at the Bank of Ideas there's a fair amount of shelving, though not much in the way of actual books. But according to the Bank's poet in residence – or maybe that should be "poet in occupation" – Pete the Temp, these are early days.

"There's not much here yet, but we're only just starting," he says, pointing out the "rigorous shelving system" which makes the divide between books and, um, poster paint. The collection is the same kind of hotch-potch as at the St Paul's site with Brand volume six next to Klein's The Politics of the NHS and Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues next to Joe Klein's Primary Colors. There aren't enough books yet to live up to the title of James Gleick's Chaos, but it's nice to see a copy of Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty? sitting free and easy on those shelves.

Despite the run-down office decor and woolly-hat temperatures – even on this sunny November afternoon – Pete says the library environment is something of an inspiration. Perched by a window on a reclaimed chair he's been working on a poem: "Now is the winter of our discount tents/ Where people regroup from their TV sets / And start to set out the new news agenda …" Here's hoping the Occupy London libraries won't meet same sorry fate as the library at Zuccotti Park."

The plight of the Bedouins

Israel's misconduct knows no bounds.   Flout international law?  Not a concern!   Ignore humanity or decency?   Not a second thought!    The plight of the Bedouins is graphically detailed in this piece from Jordan Valley Solidarity.

"Israel plans to uproot Bedouin communities from 60% of the West Bank and forcibly transfer them into controlled enclosures. If this is allowed to happen, 27,000 people will be evicted from their homes and land - they will be forced to live in ghettos, with no land on which to make a living. This cruel and shocking new development represents the acceleration of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Bedouin communities from the West Bank, since it illegally colonised the area in 1967, and they aim to complete this plan within the next 3 – 6 years. 

The first phase of this racist, apartheid strategy is scheduled for January 2012, with the forced removal of Bedouin communities from the land around East Jerusalem into a camp/ghetto next to a landfill site by Abu Dis in East Jerusalem. Work on constructing the ghetto has already started.

The second phase will be the expulsion of Bedouin communities from the Jordan Valley into a separate ghetto – the Israeli Civil Military Administration has not yet openly declared where this will be, but it is thought that an area close to Jericho is being considered.

Whilst these plans are now coming out into the open, they are of no surprise to Bedouin and farming communities living in the Jordan Valley. Over the years Jordan Valley Solidarity volunteers have gathered numerous accounts of local people who have been offered small amounts of land or money to leave the Jordan Valley and move to other areas of the West Bank. Others have quite simply been hounded out."

Two behemoths. China and the USA?

Whilst in Australia recently Obama announced a shift in the USA's military presence overseas.    Leaving aside why Obama chose to make the announcement in Canberra and not on "home turf" Washington, one has to wonder whether this new emphasis on effectively "taking on" China is a wise move.     Does the world really need these 2 superpowers - one ascending, the other descending - squaring off against one another?

"In a move that could prove as momentous—and dangerous—as President Truman’s 1947 decision to initiate a cold war with the Soviet Union, President Obama has chosen to commence a military buildup in the Asia Pacific region aimed at reasserting US primacy and constraining China. Announced in Canberra, Australia, on November 17, the buildup will include deploying 2,500 US marines at Darwin, on Australia’s north coast, and an expanded naval presence in the South China Sea. Along with this shift is a fresh US drive to bolster alliances with countries on China’s periphery, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. None of this is explicitly aimed at China—indeed, Obama insists he still seeks good relations with Beijing—but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the White House has decided to counter China’s spectacular economic growth with a military riposte.

The policy, described by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns as a “strategic pivot toward the Pacific,” rests on several key precepts. First is a belief that the Pacific has become the “center of gravity” of global economic activity and that the United States must remain the dominant actor in this region if it expects to retain its status as the world’s paramount power. Second is the realization that China has taken advantage of America’s ten-year obsession with Iraq and Afghanistan to establish powerful economic ties with the nations of Southeast Asia, supplanting the United States as the dominant regional actor. And third, there is the conviction that the United States must make up for lost time and contest China’s recent gains by any means necessary. And because Washington lacks Beijing’s economic clout, it must rely on its one remaining".

Arctic shrinking at "unprecedented rate"

Let it not be said that we haven't been warned.     We are killing off our planet - with all the consequences that brings.    Now it's the Arctic which is seeing loss of sea ice at an "unprecedented pace".   In no less than the last 1,450 years.

"The recent loss of sea ice in the Arctic is greater than any natural variation in the past 1½ millennia, a Canadian study shows.

"The recent sea ice decline … appears to be unprecedented," said Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the study and is a co-author of the paper published Wednesday online in Nature.

"We kind of have to conclude that there's a strong chance that there's a human influence embedded in that signal."

In September, Germany's University of Bremen reported that sea ice had hit a record low, based on data from a Japanese sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, using a different satellite data set, reported that the sea ice coverage in 2011 was the second-lowest on record, after the record set in 2007.

What makes recent sea ice declines unique is that they have been driven by multiple factors that never all coincided in historical periods of major sea ice loss, said Christophe Kinnard, lead author of the new report.

"Everything is trending up – surface temperature, the atmosphere is warming, and it seems also that the ocean is warming and there is more warm and saline water that makes it into the Arctic," Kinnard said, "and so the sea ice is eroded from below and melting from the top."

The big blogger gets sued by the little ["slave"] bloggers

The biter is bit!     The bloggers who have helped make The Huffington Post what it is, are suing for the work they have done.    How the ever voluble Adrienna will respond will be interesting to see.    Bear in mind that she sold the internet newspaper she established for $315 million earlier this year.

"A group of angry bloggers, being led by freelance journalist and trade unionist Jonathan Tasini, filed the class action in New York federal court, after Huffington sold her internet newspaper in February for $315m without paying certain contributors a penny.

Tasini, who wrote more than 250 posts for The Huffington Post on an unpaid basis leading up to the site’s sale, said: “Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffingtons’s plantation”. He said he was suing because “people who create content…have to be compensated” for their work.

The complainant and his lawyers believe that bloggers’ articles helped contribute to approximately a third of the sale value of the site, with about 9,000 people writing for the Huffington Post for free.

Tasini has had success in the courts in the past after he won a law suit against The New York Times a decade ago. He argued on the behalf of freelance journalists that publishers needed to seek permission from writers if they wished to use their piece for both print and online platforms."

Using "pinkwashing" as PR

There is just no stopping the Israelis using any device, or means, to counter the negative image the country has developed around the world.    Now it has decided to use the "gay" movement as a PR tool - pinkwashing it's called!    This op-ed piece in The New York Times explains.

"In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The government isn’t alone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”

The Netizen Report

No explanation or background needed....

"Today (23 November) is the International Day to End Impunity, honoring those who have been killed for exercising their right to free speech. Click here to learn more about some of the people who have been murdered for speaking out. Now that everybody can commit journalism on the Internet, any citizen in the world can end up on the list unless we fight to defend our rights against the many who want to silence us.

In Egypt the thugs are out of control with several dozen people dead and hundreds wounded as the violence in Tahrir Square continues for all the world to see. Each outrage committed by the Egyptian military and police is documented on the Internet through social media. Click here to follow Global Voices' special coverage.

In the United States the Occupy movement may not have a unified set of demands, but the protesters have found fresh unity and momentum against the thuggish manner in which police and other authorities have handled the protests. Abuses have been documented by citizen journalists as well as professionals who have in turn been getting arrested. After this pepper-spraying of demonstrators sitting on the pavement with locked arms at UC Davis in Northern California, netizens have created a website through which people are invited to upload mashups - like the image above - of the Davis policeman in question spraying various iconic targets. Meanwhile, the struggles for freedom and control of the Internet rage across the world.

Continue reading Global Voices Advocacy here.

At the frontline in Egypt

This amazing footage shot by Australian indy journalist Austin Mackell puts you in the midst of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.

In what world does this man (Newt Gingrich) live?

One has to wonder whether the man - none other than GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich - is serious, or bordering on deranged, or totally and utterly out of touch with the real world.  

"It has been suggested that the Republicans who would be president are determined to turn the clock back seventy-five years and “rescind the New Deal.”

Now, Newt Gingrich has gone his rivals one better.

The former Speaker of the House, and sudden contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nod, is not about to stop with the New Deal. He wants to turn the clock back 100 years and rescind the progressive era.

This is no small threat. While the New Deal brought a measure of economic security to the American experiment, along with a bolder vision of what government could do to tame the wildest excesses of bankers and speculators, it was the Progressive Era that introduced measures of basic humanity and democratic aspiration to the project.

Gingrich goes to the heart of the matter with his new proposal to attack public-sector collective bargaining rights with a proposal to fire school janitors and replace them with child laborers.

Blaming “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization” for “crippling” children,” Gingrich told a Harvard Kennedy School of Government seminar that “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid.”

”I tried for years to have a very simple model,” the former Speaker of the House continued. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they’d have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

Even in a party where cruelty is now considered a political virtue, there is something unsettling about a man who collected $30,000 each month to offer an hour of historical counsel to Freddie Mac administrators attacking elementary and secondary school janitors who, according to fresh Bureau of Labor Statistics data, earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 per year."

Best look inwards Mr President

Whilst the US president lectures Europeans on how they need to get their economic houses in order, he would be well advised to consider the financial plight of a large percentage of his people.

"Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal poverty threshold but still do not have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses, according to a survey of government and industry data.

The survey, released on Tuesday by the advocacy group Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), found that 45 percent of U.S. residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet.

That breaks down to 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children, the group found."

From National Geographic Top 10 Photographs 2011

A tree-climbing lion stirs in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park.

"This photograph is so beautifully executed. The color is magnificent, with the cobalt blue sky in the background and the warm light on the lion. The composition is perfect. Yet underneath all that beauty is a message: Lions are in trouble. Joel Sartore has devoted himself to photographing animals out of balance, endangered, crying for a voice."

—Chris Johns, Editor in Chief

We've heard it all before......now it's go for Iran

Anyone with half a memory will find what is now being said about Iran, and the reasons to take out the country's nuclear capability, is much the same rhetoric used before the attack on Iraq and Afghanistan.    Seymour Hersh does remember........

"While the United States, Britain and Canada are planning to announce a coordinated set of sanctions against Iran’s oil and petrochemical industry today, longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh questions the growing consensus on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. International pressure has been mounting on Iran since the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency revealed in a report the "possible military dimensions" to Iran’s nuclear activities, citing "credible" evidence that "indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device." In his latest article for The New Yorker blog, titled "Iran and the IAEA," Hersh argues the recent report is a "political document," not a scientific study. "They [JSOC] found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization," Hersh says. "In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities to build the bomb. This is simply a fact."

Out-sourcing the US PR "machine"

Startling revelation that the US is funding a third party - to the tune of millions of dollars - namely GE, to whitewash the image of dictators in Central Asia.    FP has the "story" in "Propagandastan"....

"When people read a news website, they don't usually imagine that it is being run by a major producer of fighter jets and smart bombs. But when the Pentagon has its own vision of America's foreign policy, and the funds to promote it, it can put a $23 billion defense contractor in a unique position to report on the war on terror.

Over the past three years, a subdivision of Virginia-based General Dynamics has set up and run a network of eight "influence websites" funded by the Defense Department with more than $120 million in taxpayer money. The sites, collectively known as the Trans Regional Web Initiative (TRWI) and operated by General Dynamics Information Technology, focus on geographic areas under the purview of various U.S. combatant commands, including U.S. Central Command. In its coverage of Uzbekistan, a repressive dictatorship increasingly important to U.S. military goals in Afghanistan, a TRWI website called Central Asia Online has shown a disturbing tendency to downplay the autocracy's rights abuses and uncritically promote its claims of terrorist threats.

Central Asia Online was created in 2008, a time when Washington's ability to rely on Pakistan as a partner in the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan was steadily waning. In the search for alternative land routes to supply U.S. troops, Uzbekistan seemed the best option. Nearby Iran was a non-starter, and Uzbekistan's infrastructure -- used by the Soviets to get in and out of Afghanistan during their ill-fated war there -- was far superior to that of neighboring Tajikistan. Today, the U.S. military moves massive amounts of cargo across Uzbekistan. By year's end, the Pentagon hopes to see 75 percent of all non-lethal military supplies arrive in Afghanistan via the so-called Northern Distribution Network, a web of land-based transport routes stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Amu Darya River."

The US isn't winning friends in the Middle East

Despite all the rhetoric from the Obama Administration that it supports the so-called Arab Spring - now presently again in full swing, as demonstrated in Egypt - a survey shows that the US is essentially on the nose in the Middle East.

"Despite repeated expressions of support by President Barack Obama for democratic change during the "Arab Spring", the United States remains widely distrusted in the region, according to a major new survey of public opinion in five Arab countries released here Monday.

Instead, Turkey is viewed as having played the "most constructive" role in the past year's events and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, emerged as the most admired leader by far in the region, according to the 2011 edition of the annual "Arab Public Opinion Survey" conducted by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution.

The survey, which was conducted during the last half of October, was based on detailed interviews of some 3,000 respondents from urban centres in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It also included Saudi Arabia, the results from which, however, arrived too late to be weighted with the other five countries.

"Turkey is the biggest winner of the Arab Awakening," said Telhami, who noted that, despite increasing disillusionment with Obama's performance on Israel-Palestinian issues, the U.S. president himself appears to have gained some ground in Arab public opinion since the summer of 2010 when the last survey was conducted.

Nonetheless, most Arabs, according to the new poll, continue to believe that Washington's policies in the Middle East are mainly driven by its desire to control oil and protect Israel from its Arab neighbours. Only five percent said they believe the U.S. is driven by the desire to spread human rights or democracy.

As in previous surveys, Israel and the United States are also seen as posing by far the greatest foreign threats to Arabs – at least several times greater than Iran despite the fact that a majority believe Tehran is trying to develop nuclear weapons and that its success in that effort would have a "negative" impact on the region.

The poll also found overwhelming support for opposition forces battling autocratic governments in Syria (86 percent) and Yemen (89 percent), as well as strong support in the region for the opposition in Bahrain (64 percent), although majorities in the two Gulf countries – the UAE and Saudi Arabia – said their sympathies lay more with the Al-Khalifa monarchy, according to Telhami."

Forget about Fox News (er, what news?).....

No comment called for.    Confirmation of what informed opinion has said for some time.

"A new survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University has found that viewers of Fox News are less informed about world events than people who do not watch any news. The study found viewers of Fox are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government six points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government compared to those who watch no news. Fairleigh Dickinson political science Professor Dan Cassino said, "The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

Who's on the decline and falling......

Roger Cohen, regular op-ed columnist in The New York Times reflect on the occupy movement and more importantly which nation is in the decline and falling - and where, and with whom, wealth seems to reside.     It's an interesting reflection by an American.

"Over in Europe, dreams are also unraveling. In France, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 27 percent of the population now believes that “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior.”

I haven’t read such depressing news in a long time. When humility overtakes French culture, it’s over, folks.

French culture is superior. Just consider the cut of a Chanel suit, the sweep of the Champs Elysées or the line of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s brow. It’s obvious — to everyone except the doom-struck French, apparently.

Here in the United States, according to the same survey, 60 percent of Americans over 50 believe “our culture is superior.”

I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: the new French modesty or an old U.S. delusion. These are not happy times in the Atlantic community. Germans are particularly angry. They don’t think they’re being thanked enough for not quite saving the euro.

Sure as there are acorns beneath the oak tree, the West is shot. As Jim Morrison put it, “Your ballroom days are over, baby.” The U.S.A. is negative-equity central. Some 100 million Americans live below or close to the poverty line.

Greece wallows in the words it gave us: crisis, chaos and catastrophe.

Elsewhere it’s the Renaissance. Palaces rise. A bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild goes for $4,000 in Hong Kong. Chinese and Brazilian bankers ponder whether Europe is creditworthy. It is payback time for the majority of humankind. They’re feeling pretty good about their former overlords feeling pretty bad. To be honest, I don’t blame them."

No, there isn't a Plan B

Shake your head at the irresponsibility of the rich nations on this world of ours at planning to sit on their collective hands in postponing taking any action in relation to climate change.

"Governments of the world's richest countries have given up on forging a new treaty on climate change to take effect this decade, with potentially disastrous consequences for the environment through global warming.

Ahead of critical talks starting next week, most of the world's leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, and that even if it were negotiated by then, they would stipulate it could not come into force until 2020.

The eight-year delay is the worst contemplated by world governments during 20 years of tortuous negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions, and comes despite intensifying warnings from scientists and economists about the rapidly increasing dangers of putting off prompt action.

After the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 ended amid scenes of chaos, governments pledged to try to sign a new treaty in 2012. The date is critical, because next year marks the expiry of the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to limit emissions.

The UK, European Union, Japan, US and other rich nations are all now united in opting to put off an agreement and the United Nations also appears to accept this.

Developing countries are furious, and the delay will be fiercely debated at the next round of international climate talks beginning a week on Monday in Durban, South Africa.

The Alliance of Small Island States, which represents some of the countries most at risk from global warming, called moves to delay a new treaty "reckless and irresponsible"."

The people speak!

As the world watches events unfold in Egypt there is not doubting that the general populace has, once again - remember events back in February this year? - made Tahrir Square the focus in which to demonstrate......

Bottled water sales targeted to the poor

We all know that Nestle targeted the poor in Africa to sell its canned milk products rather than have women breast feed.  Now it, and its fellow large multinationals, are flogging bottled water to minorities - who neither really need it, let alone can afford it.

"Water is the lifeblood of this planet, whose inhabitants are watching its accelerated spiral into crisis mode even as they struggle to address the issues and lifestyles that are stretching the earth's resources thin.

Outwardly, the global water crisis appears straightforward - people simply consume too much water. A key factor in this spiral is the fact that water has been morphing from a natural resource into a marketable - and costly - product, experts and reports have shown.

Exploring different aspects of the global water crisis, from privatisation of water to corporations marketing to minorities, reveals that water - as a human right, as a product, as a natural resource - is firmly entangled with a host of issues in areas, including public health.

By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in areas with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world's population - projected to reach eight billion by then - will be under stress conditions. Some 1.4 billion currently lack access to safe water.

Humans consume water at a rate more than twice that of population growth, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In 60 percent of European cities with a population greater than 100,000, groundwater is used more quickly than it is replenished, said the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Yet even though humans consume more water than is sustainable, some would say that people do not drink enough water, and when they do, they're often being tricked into doing so.

Water, the commodity

Early in November, the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International (CAI) accused the Swiss transnational Nestle of manipulative marketing.

"Pure Life marketing specifically targets Latino immigrants in the United States, many of whom have suffered the consequences of poor public water infrastructure in other parts of the world," said a fact sheet from CAI.

"For the past 30 years, bottled water corporations like Nestle, Pepsi and Coke have helped build a 15 billion dollar U.S. bottled water market by casting doubts on public drinking water systems," a CAI press release added.

An article published in Forbes Magazine in August also pointed out how corporations including Coca Cola, Las Oleadas and Ravinia Partners create brands that are Latino-specific, for instance, or target minority mothers.

It also noted how water companies' slogans often promise water that is utterly natural, pure or fresh. A label on an ordinary Poland Springs bottle, for instance, which is produced by a Nestle subsidiary, reads "Pure Quality" and "100 percent natural spring water" and features a picturesque mountain peak and in the background."

Sadly, all too true!

Credited to Pat Bagley

Shooting the messenger.........

Don't like what the newspaper publishes or the TV shows or the radio broadcasts?    In dictatorships they simply shut 'em down.   Not in democracies, right?     Well, the country regularly touted as the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel,  has just shut down a radio station dedicated to promoting peace.   Yes, you read that correctly!

"Israel has ordered the shutdown of a dovish Israeli-Palestinian radio station, officials and the station's operators said on Sunday.

The station and other critics said the move was politically motivated, and part of a broader assault on democracy by conservative forces in the government.

Some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition have pushed forward a series of measures recently that critics say are aimed at stifling opponents.

Among the proposed legislation are attempts to block most foreign funding for dovish nonprofit groups, lowering the threshold for politicians to file libel suits against the media, and a push to shift control of Supreme Court appointments from an independent panel to parliament.

Conservative lawmaker Danny Danon boasted that he had helped close the "All for Peace" radio station. Danon, a member of Netanyahu's Likud Party, claimed the Communications Ministry shuttered the station at his request, after he claimed it "incited" against Israel.

"A radical leftist station that becomes an instrument of incitement must not be allowed to broadcast to the broader public," Danon said."

And Obama has the temerity to lecture Europe?

Yes, there are manifold problems confronting many countries in the European Union.   That said, it hardly lies in the mouth of Obama to lecture the Europeans about getting their economic and financial houses in order.    What about looking outside the White House at what is happening with and to his own people?    The stats revealed in this New York Times piece make for truly frightening reading.

"They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.
Multimedia

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it."

Those nukes in Iran?

Seymour Hersh is a respected investigative reporter with The New Yorker.    He once again takes up the question of whether Iran does have nuclear weapons in the light of the recent IAEA Report.

"I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeatedly inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.

The Times reported, in its lead story the day after the report came out, that I.A.E.A. investigators “have amassed a trove of new evidence that, they say, makes a ‘credible’ case” that Iran may be carrying out nuclear-weapons activities. The newspaper quoted a Western diplomat as declaring that “the level of detail is unbelievable…. The report describes virtually all the steps to make a nuclear warhead and the progress Iran has achieved in each of those steps. It reads likes a menu.” The Times set the tone for much of the coverage. (A second Times story that day on the I.A.E.A. report noted, more cautiously, that “it is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years.”)

But how definitive, or transformative, were the findings? The I.A.E.A. said it had continued in recent years “to receive, collect and evaluate information relevant to possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program” and, as a result, it has been able “to refine its analysis.” The net effect has been to create “more concern.” But Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.”

Continue reading here.

Whither the EU?

The old European Union didn't work, that much has been made clear by the ongoing debt crisis. But many in Europe think there is now a clear path to a new, more integrated -- and smaller -- bloc. What must happen first? Greater democracy and less nation-state sovereignty.

Der Spiegel International take up the question here.

A different perspective on Syria

In all the hype, PR and hyper-ventilating about Syria, it is hard to know what the true facts really are.   The President is probably widely disliked, but enough for all the unrest and now for the last 8 months or so the widespread violence and deaths of over 3500 people?    And where does the Arab League and the West stand in all of this?   Is this the ramp up to another Libyan "exercise" as we saw a few months ago?

A different perspective from LD, Land Destroyer Report:

"The "Free Syria Army" is literally an army of militant extremists, many drawn not from Syria's military ranks, but from the Muslim Brotherhood, carrying heavy weapons back and forth over the Turkish and Lebanese borders, funded, supported, and armed by the United States, Israel, and Turkey. The latest evidence confirming this comes in the form of a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies where Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East Emile Hokayem openly admits Syria's opposition is armed and prepared to drag Syria's violence into even bloodier depths.

This report comes in sharp contrast to the propaganda fed via the corporate-media and the West's foreign ministers on a daily basis, where the violence is portrayed as one-sided, with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad "gunning down" throngs of peaceful, placard waving protesters. Just as in Libya where these so-called "peaceful protesters" turned out to be hordes of genocidal racist Al Qaeda mercenaries, led by big-oil representatives, fighting their cause upon a verified pack of lies, so too is Syria's "pro-democracy" movement which is slowly being revealed as yet another militant brand of extremists long cultivated by Anglo-American intelligence agencies, whose leadership is harbored in London and Washington and their foot soldiers supplied a steady stream of covert military support and overt rhetorical support throughout the compromised corporate media."

US airport x-ray machines nixed by the EU

Hooray!   The Europeans have, for once, stood up to the Americans, and banned the use of the US type x-ray machines / body scanners at European airports - for health and medical reasons.

"The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.

The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU's 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”
As a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation detailed earlier this month, X-ray body scanners use ionizing radiation, a form of energy that has been shown to damage DNA and cause cancer. (photo: Quinn Dombrowski)

As a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation detailed earlier this month, X-ray body scanners use ionizing radiation, a form of energy that has been shown to damage DNA and cause cancer. Although the amount of radiation is extremely low, equivalent to the radiation a person would receive in a few minutes of flying, several research studies have concluded that a small number of cancer cases would result from scanning hundreds of millions of passengers a year."

How Britain "protects" its young unemployed. Not!

It looks like the Brits have gone back to the dark ages or attempted to resurrect the days of Charles Dickens and child-labour.   It certainly looks like government supported exploitation of the young unemployed for the benefit of employers.   Yet another example of the powers that be just not getting it!   

"Britain's jobless young people are being sent to work for supermarkets and budget stores for up to two months for no pay and no guarantee of a job, the Guardian can reveal.

Under the government's work experience programme young jobseekers are exempted from national minimum wage laws for up to eight weeks and are being offered placements in Tesco, Poundland, Argos, Sainsbury's and a multitude of other big-name businesses.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says that if jobseekers "express an interest" in an offer of work experience they must continue to work without pay, after a one-week cooling-off period or face having their benefits docked.

Young people have told the Guardian that they are doing up to 30 hours a week of unpaid labour and have to be available from 9am to 10pm.

In three such cases jobseekers also claim they were not told about the week's cooling-off period, and that once they showed a willingness to take part in the scheme they were told by their case manager they would be stripped of their £53- a-week jobseekers allowance (JSA) if they backed out."

Cosying up to the Israel Lobby

US elections are in the air.   The Israel Lobby has to be kept on side, no matter what.    Forget about the interests of the US, foreign policy considerations and let alone how the rest of the world might be affected by Israel's and America's actions or policies.

"In Saturday night's Republican debate, Mitt Romney gave a defiant statement about Iran: he will stop it from getting nukes by any means, Obama won't. Yesterday Obama sought to parry Romney, saying that he is taking no option off the table.

Are we witnessing a primary between Romney and Obama right now, for the support of the Israel lobby?

I think so. Romney's braintrust includes neocons like Robert Kagan and Dan Senor, while David Brooks, David Frum and Bill Kristol have all said good things about Romney. Dennis Ross and Stuart Levey have both left the Obama administration, hurting his standing in the Israel lobby. Don't forget, the lobby defected from Bush to Clinton in '91 over settlements; and its fundraising abilities helped assure Clinton's election over the incumbent (as Max Blumenthal's post at AlAkhbar today points out).

Jews are sure to vote by a majority for Obama; but as a Forward package this week shows, Obama's polling numbers are sliding among Jews-- from 83 percent approval in early '09 to 54 percent in September. (Compared to overall #s going from 66 to 41.)"

Continue reading here.

One really, really big winner.....and lots and lots of losers

And you wonder that there is an Occupy Wall Street movement!    When will governments wake up that spiking the citizenry - and especially the most vulnerable in society - is just not on.   In the case of the  situation here (below) one might have thought that the Obama Administration would have been sympathetic to its constituency.

"Late last month, a national backlash forced Bank of America to abandon its plan to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. But Huffington Post reports that the corporation has quietly been mining other sources of fees, preying on its most vulnerable customers to rake in millions in revenue:

Shawana Busby does not seem like the sort of customer who would be at the center of a major bank’s business plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds…Busby visits the ATMs in her area and begrudgingly accepts the fees, which reach as high as five dollars per transaction. She estimates that she has paid at least $350 in fees to tap her unemployment benefits. [...]

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

Millions of jobless Americans like Busby have little choice but to rely on the bank’s prepaid debit cards to collect their monthly benefits. Forty-one states have contracted with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and other banks to provide access to public benefits, allowing them to collect unlimited fees, both from the unemployed and state governments. South Carolina, for instance, pays Bank of America a fee for each transfer it facilitates on a debit card, and for handling direct deposit of unemployment benefits.

Families who are living hand-to-mouth are outraged to discover that banks worth trillions of dollars are taking such a big cut of their benefits, when they depend on every penny. The New York Times reports today that banks have been quietly raising fees on everything from replacing lost cards to monthly maintenance. BofA customers can be charged $1.50 for speaking to a customer service operator more than once a month, $1.50 for using an “out-of-network” ATM, and $0.50 for entering the wrong PIN number too many times. "

Fly......but bring cash to pay for the fuel

What can one say?

"Passengers on a flight from India to Britain claim they were forced to fork out more than £20,000 in cash to pay for fuel to allow the plane to complete the journey.

According to BBC reports, more than 180 passengers on a chartered Austrian Comtel Air flight from Amritsar to Birmingham were stranded on the tarmac in Vienna during a refuelling stop after being told the airline "ran out of cash to fund the last leg of the trip".

Passengers said the airline then threatened to remove their luggage from the plane if they did not pay up.

The passengers refused to get off the plane in a six-hour standoff.

The dispute was finally resolved when Austrian police were called and the passengers were escorted to ATMs to withdraw cash."

Obama again shows his true colours. He supports the use of cluster bombs

There is just no stopping Obama.    The man's hypocrisy knows no bounds.     Everything of virtue, and what was decent, he espoused before being elected has been broken.    And now it's the use of cluster bombs by the USA.

"Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democrats have ecstatically celebrated, such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W. Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation rite.”

But one aspect of the December, 2009, attack that perhaps did merit some more critical scrutiny was the use of cluster bombs, weapons which “scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.” The inevitability of “duds” — “unexploded ordnance” — poses a great risk to civilians, often well after the conflict has ended, since — like land mines — they often detonate when stumbled into by children and other innocents long after they disperse. According to the Cluster Munitions Coalition, cluster bombs “caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 and Kosovo in 1999 than any other weapon system.” As Wired pointed out, while the U.S. used these weapons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, “neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against U.S. troops.” And here is how the Council on Foreign Relations describes the impact these weapons had in the 2006 Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon:

'They left dozens dead or maimed on both sides of the conflict. The reason . . . is because the “fighting in southern Lebanon was often in villages and towns where people were living.” Israel dropped up to four million submunitions on Lebanese soil, one million of which remain unexploded “duds,” according to the UN Mine Action Coordination Center. Throughout the thirty-four-day conflict, the United States resupplied Israel’s arsenal of cluster bombs, which prompted an investigation by the State Department to examine if Israel had violated secret agreements it signed with the United States governing their use. Hezbollah, meanwhile, fired thousands of cluster munitions—a Chinese-made Type 81 122mm rocket—into northern Israel, a number of which targeted civilian populations, according to human rights groups.'"

 

Great! Just what we need. A new type of war

There is just no way of stopping those who look upon war as some sort of game.    Never mind the death, destruction and mayhem caused to thousands of people.    On top of that hasn't the world seen enough armaments already around the world? 

Now, it's cyberspace being harnessed too and brought into play - as The Washington Post reports.

"The Pentagon is prepared to launch cyberattacks in response to hostile actions that threaten the government, military or U.S. economy, according to a new policy document submitted to Congress this week.

The report, obtained by The Washington Post, is the most detailed document so far from the government on its emerging cyberwarfare program, and it warns that adversaries attempting cyberattacks against the United States “would be taking a grave risk.”

Yet it remains silent on a number of important issues, such as rules of engagement outside designated battle zones and whether neutral countries would be consulted before their systems were used to carry out counterattacks in cyberspace. The report does not discuss the advisability of demonstrating cybercapabilities.

The report is more explicit than the Pentagon’s cyberstrategy released in July, which focused on the importance of deterring attacks by building defenses that would “deny” adversaries the benefits of success. In the latest report, the Pentagon states directly that it “has the capability to conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our nation, allies and interests.”

Hero's wife says it bluntly. Zionism has run its course

Heroes don't much greater than Moshe Dayan - that one-eyed Israel general, and then Cabinet minister, with an eye patch.  He has been dead for many years now, but his widow has been blunt in her observations about Israel.    For her Zionism has "run its course".

"Elegantly dressed and perfectly made up, Ruth Dayan, 95, receives me with a wide smile in her Tel Aviv home overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The charismatic, alert, and extremely intelligent Dayan is the widow of Moshe Dayan, legendary chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces and a key leader in the war of independence in 1948. Indeed, Moshe Dayan was transformed into a symbol of national strength during the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The Israelis felt invincible with this imposing figure at the helm. Having lost his eye in battle, he chose to wear a black eye patch, which became his trademark. In the years since his death, Ruth has continued to act as one of Israel’s most outspoken elder statesmen.


Sixty-three years after the founders began to build a democratic, secure, prosperous state, Israel is still struggling: there is no peace deal in place with the Palestinians, tensions between Arabs and Israelis grow by the day, and the violence drags on. Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party, Israel has been racked with political divisions. The government has moved to the right politically in order to keep a majority in Parliament. Yet over the summer, liberal Israelis set up tent cities protesting the massive income inequality and high cost of living that are plaguing the nation. Moshe Dayan is very much seen as one of the “founding fathers” of Israel. And there is a nostalgic turn today, mainly among the middle-class Ashkenazi who see him and his brethren as symbols of collective sacrifice and communal bonds.

Dayan is rich with memories of the Israel of then and gets furious when I ask her to compare it with the Israel of now: “We built this country inch by inch, and we lost so many lives. We built public and social institutions, schools, factories. What’s going on today is awful. They’re ruining this country. I am a proud Israeli. I’ve lived through every war, endured every moment of suffering, but I never stopped believing in peace. I lost friends and family members. I’m a peacemaker, but the current Israeli government does not know how to make peace. We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.”

Twitter....for snoops to read

You might have thought that your social networking contacts and "conversations" are private.    Think again.    Now a court has even determined that a well-known twitterer's messages - those of no lesser person than an Icelandic parliamentarian - must be turned over by Twitter to the US Department of Justice.

"Many of us who use the internet – be it to write emails, work or browse its growing landscape: mining for information, connecting with others or using it to organise ourselves in various groups of the like-minded – are not aware of that our behavior online is being monitored. Profiling has become a default with companies such as Google and Facebook. These companies have huge databases recording our every move within their environment, in order to groom advertising to our interests. For them, we are only consumers to push goods at, in order to sell ads through an increasingly sophisticated business model. For them, we are not regarded as citizens with civic rights.

This notion needs to change. No one really knew where we were heading a few years ago: neither we the users, nor the companies harvesting our personal information for profit. Very few of us imagined that governments that claim to be democratic would invade our online privacy with no regard to the fundamental rights we are supposed to have in the real world. We might look to China and other stereotypical totalitarian states and expect them to violate the free flow of information and our digital privacy, but not – surely? – our very own democratically elected governments."

Nuns were there well before OWS

Here is something one doesn't usually associate the Catholic Church with.     Nuns actively doing, for years now, what the Occupy Wall Street movement has just started.

"Not long ago, an unusual visitor arrived at the sleek headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.

It wasn’t some C.E.O., or a pol from Athens or Washington, or even a sign-waving occupier from Zuccotti Park.

It was Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia. And the slight, soft-spoken nun had a few not-so-humble suggestions for the world’s most powerful investment bank.

Way up on the 41st floor, in a conference room overlooking the World Trade Center site, Sister Nora and her team from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility laid out their advice for three Goldman executives. The Wall Street bank, they said, should protect consumers, rein in executive pay, increase its transparency and remember the poor.

In short, Goldman should do God’s work— something that its chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, once remarked that he did. (The joke bombed.)

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety."

Terror and revenge in post NATO Libya

There, that's done!    Mission accomplished with the death of Gadaffi.   NATO packs its bags and goes home with more than self-satisfaction and back-slapping about its achievements in Libya.    Sad to say the reality in Libya post NATO's departure is anything but positive, as this piece on CounterPunch clearly shows.

"The “new Libya” has entered its own “Terror” which is spreading inexorably, aided by NATO member states including American, French and British SAS units known locally as “disappearance squads”. This is one of the rapidly developing consequences of the UN’s rush to “protect Libya’s civilian population” last spring."

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"One of the fortunate language usages in this part of the world is the liberal transliteration tolerances applied to Arabic which helps those challenged by the language.  As is widely known there are many ways to write Arabic words in roman characters and most are accepted.  But one has to listen carefully in Libya these days to grasp the important distinction between certain English words when referring to the fate of increasing numbers of supporters of the Gadhafi regime.  In the current atmosphere one often hears that someone “has disappeared” which, depending on one’s political views is usually good news and it means the person is in hiding or left the area or fled the country to safety.  Alternatively, it might be said that a person “is disappeared” meaning that she or he was caught by the new regime and is gone, probably, forever without a trace for loved ones to pursue.

Following meetings with Libyan evacuees (disappeared) from NATO’s nine months of bombing who are now present in nearby countries  and from meetings  inside Libya with incarcerated former officials and some of their family members as well as fugitive opponents of the new “government” it is clear that the current period is cascading into  paroxysmal revenge attacks and political cleansing."

Media's lockstep march to war with Iran

One might have thought - no, hoped! - that the media would have learned not to simply parrot the PR spewed out by Governments about the threat from various countries (think, Afghanistan and Iraq) and unquestionally support their country going to war.    The New York Times is a god example of showing unstinting support for the US attacking Iraq.

"When Washington goes to war or threatens it, America’s media march in lockstep, cheerleading. Fiction substitutes for fact.

News is carefully filtered, dissent marginalized, and supporting imperial belligerence substitutes for full and accurate disclosure.

As a result, patriotism means going along with rogue policies. Never mind rule of law principles and democratic values. Free and open societies are risked. So is humanity if belligerents overstep.

The IAEA Iranian nuclear program report stirred a hornet’s nest of inflammatory commentary, no matter the agency’s fabricated contents. Previous US intelligence assessments refuted them, including most recently in March 2011.

Nonetheless, IAEA allegations proved red meat for America’s media."      

Continue reading, here, for examples of US media reporting in relation to Iran.