Ya gotta be kidding!

From Foreign Policy in Focus the awards for 2011 worthy of more than a gasp..... The Golden Lemon Award to Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms company, whose F-22 Raptor fighter has some “performance” problems: the pilots can’t breathe. The F-22 Raptor. The U.S. Air Force was forced to “stand down” its fleet of 160+ F-22s—at $150 million apiece, the single most expensive fighter in the world—when pilots began experiencing “hypoxia-like symptoms” from a lack of oxygen. But the company got right on it, according to Lockheed Martin vice president Jeff Babione, who said he was “proud to be a part” of the team that got the radar-evading aircraft back into the air—for five weeks. When pilots continued to have problems, the F-22 fleet was grounded again. According to the Air Force, no one can figure out why oxygen is not getting to the pilots, but that pilots “would undergo physiological tests.” To see if the pilots can go without air? Runner-up in this category is Lockheed Martins’ F-35, at $385 billion the most expensive weapon system in U.S. history. The cost of an individual F-35 has jumped from $69 million to $113 million a plane, and while this is cheaper than the F-22, the U.S. plans to eventually purchase more than 16 times the number of F-35s than F-22s. It seems the F-35 fighter has “cracks” and “hot spots” that, according to the director of the program, Vice Adm. David Venlet, are “hard to get at.”

Acting unconscionably and illegally under "cover" of the upcoming US presidential election

Is there any need to be surprised anymore about Israel's actions - especially with the US presidential election in the offing and no one going to upset the Jewish Lobby? The big news that Mondoweiss recently highlighted (here by Allison Deger and here by Annie Robbins) is that construction in the controversial "E1" area in Jerusalem has restarted again, according to a Haaretz report. Completion of illegal settlement infrastructure and homes in the area would bisect the West Bank. But what the move also represents is a big, giant slap in the face to the United States. As Nir Hasson explains in Haaretz , it was "American pressure" from the Bush administration that "forced all work in the area halted in 2007." And according to this document from the "Palestine Papers," President Barack Obama "said he got Israel to commit to stop construction in E1" early on in his term. The US knows that no Palestinian official could accept an agreement that allows Israel to bisect the West Bank, though completion of construction in E1 would be only the most egregious example in a line of Israeli obstacles that has already carved up the West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going ahead with E1 construction because he knows Israel can get away with it, especially in a US election year. And because of the Israeli government's move, the next president (Obama or someone else) may wake up and realize there's no way to shove this Palestinian bantustan down the PA's throat. 

So, what is it about the Straits of Hormuz?

Whilst there is an ever seemingly louder slanging-match being engaged in between Iran and the US and it's allies about the Straits of Hormuz, what is so important about those Straits? The Global Post brings us up to speed. "These days, the Strait of Hormuz is like a a child of divorce caught between two angry parents. Not exactly a fun position to be in. But what exactly is the Strait of Hormuz, and why are the United States and Iran engaging in a back-and-forth war of words over it? Here are five key facts about it. 5. It is a narrow strait located between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz to the north, and the United Arab Emirates and Oman's Musandam Peninsula border it to the south. See the map in the slideshow above. 4. Much of the Persian Gulf relies on the Strait of Hormuz to export its petroleum and reach the ocean, making it one of the world's most important oil supply routes. 3. About 15 million barrels of crude oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz on a typical day. About a fifth of the world's oil supply goes through the strait. 2. The strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, and despite Iran's threats, it has never managed to cut it off completely to traffic. 1. Close to 300 people died in the Strait of Hormuz in 1988 when a US Navy missile cruiser, USS Vincennes, shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300 passenger jet over it."

America's tweedledum-tweedledee presidential election (aka circus?)

Glenn Greenwald, this time writing in The Guardian,not on his usual "home" at Salon, accurately puts the present race for president of the US into sharp and critical focus. Bottom line Obama is really not all that much different to the pathetic wanna-be aspirants as GOP candidate in next years election. "American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show. The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president. In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest. In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity."

Of all people, the Saudis now own Twitter

It will come as more than a surprise - shock! more likely! - to learn that off all people a member of the Saudi Royal family now owns Twitter. A dangerous omen? FPreports: "When most people want to become involved in Twitter, they open an account. Leave it to Prince AlWaleed bin Talal, the Saudi media mogul who is King Abdullah's nephew, to buy a chunk of the microblogging site. The prince's company announced on Dec. 19 that it was investing $300 million in Twitter, officially bringing the site into the mainstream of the Saudi media scene. Rightly or wrongly, social media is perceived as a revolutionary tool in Saudi Arabia -- one of the many factors that contributed to the Arab Spring. The association was so strong that a few days following the Egyptian uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak, a Saudi official had to deny a rumor that the Saudi king had offered Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg $150 billion to buy his social networking site -- a bargain, the thinking went, if it helped him ward off further revolutions. And indeed, sites like Twitter and Facebook are rapidly growing in the kingdom, precisely because they allow voices that otherwise would not have been able to find an outlet to flourish."

Bradley Manning: So much for open American justice

The Nation reports on the Bradley Manning trial - and how restrictions are being placed on reporters. So much for the sort of "open" justice the USA preaches to other countries they must have. "The details of Bradley Manning’s prosecution aren’t making their way into the public domain in large part because there is no full transcript being made public. During a recess from the hearing, I questioned a public affairs officer, who refused to provide his name, about when a transcript would be made available. He said that it would likely be three to four months—long after the media interest had faded. The government has banned all recording devices, audio or video, from the media center or the courtroom. This is particularly galling because the government has ample ability to record the proceedings in full and make them publicly available; in fact, the trial is being recorded and livecast to the media center, where reporters under the strict supervision of public affairs officers are taking frantic notes. Journalists are forbidden to connect to the Internet, making the possibility of live tweeting and live blogging challenging. The government allowed a mere twenty members of the public into the hearing. Spectators were denied laptops, meaning the only way for the public to get notes on the pretrial hearing is by scribbling notes on paper."

Looks like Iran is the next target for attack

As we approach another year, it looks like we won't be seeing things settle down in the Middle East. Just to the contrary! Haaretz reports that the US and Israel are considering the "line" which Iran will need to cross before the country is attacked. "Israel and the U.S. are discussing "red lines" in Iran's nuclear program, that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities, the Daily Beast website reported on Wednesday. According to the report, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, filed an official complaint with the administration following a speech by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta a few weeks ago, warning against a military strike on Iran."

Permits, permits......and yet more permits

And this isn't deemed discrimination? "Israel's Civil Administration issues 101 different types of permits to govern the movement of Palestinians, whether within the West Bank, between the West Bank and Israel or beyond the borders of the state, according to an agency document of which Haaretz obtained a copy. The most common permits are those allowing Palestinians to work in Israel, or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Over the decades, however, the permit regimen has grown into a triple-digit bureacracy. There are separate permits for worshipers who attend Friday prayers on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and for clerics working at the site; for unspecified clergy and for church employees. Medical permits differentiate between physicians and ambulance drivers, and between "medical emergency staff" and "medical staff in the seam zone," meaning the border between Israel and the West Bank. There is a permit for escorting a patient in an ambulance and one for simply escorting a patient. There are separate permits for traveling to a wedding in the West Bank or traveling to a wedding in Israel, and also for going to Israel for a funeral, a work meeting, or a court hearing. The separation fence gave rise to an entirely new category of permits, for farmers cut off from their fields. Thus, for instance, there is a permit for a "farmer in the seam zone," not to be confused with the permit for a "permanent farmer in the seam zone." Human rights organizations have challenged the permit regime on various grounds. According to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, international agencies operating in the West Bank waste an estimated 20 percent of their working days on permits from the Civil Administration - applying for them, renewing them and sorting out problems. The checkpoint-monitoring organization Machsom Watch claims that the Shin Bet security service uses the permit regime to recruit informers. Palestinians whose permit requests are rejected "for security reasons" are often invited to meetings with Shin Bet agents, who then offer "assistance" in obtaining the desired permits in exchange for information. Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, said in response that the Civil Administration is aware of the issues raised in the article and intends to evaluate them in the coming year as part of its streamlining program.

On the road....

Mahler's Prodigal Son is on the road for the next little while..... Posts might not be that regular nor the setting out as "orderly" as desired. Bear with us. Meanwhile, for those who celebrate Xmas, Merry Christmas....and a happy, healthy year for everyone. May your 2012 be a good one.

Who said George Orwell's 1984 wasn't still alive and well?

George Orwell's 1984 is still alive and well in Australia in 2011 - as this piece from The Sunday Age clearly demonstrates. One might have thought, and hoped, that in this post WikiLeaks era Governments might have learnt. No such luck it seems. 'NO COMMENT,'' said the Australian Information Commissioner. Never accuse the government of lacking a sense of humour. It was brilliant! Here was its new agency, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. An official-looking website claimed this supposed ''OAIC'' was part of the Attorney-General's Department. Committed to ''open public sector information'' it was, according to the mission statement. On and on it went about the integrity and importance of free, public, and open information in government. ''We will champion open government, provide advice and assistance to the public, promote better information management by government … we will have a comprehensive range of functions, including investigating complaints.'' Vigorous stuff, but was it too vigorous to be true? ''Government-held information is a national resource,'' said this OAIC. Just the place to go for some information, we thought. We had discovered public information had been disappearing from government databases. Something had to be done. Australian Information Commissioner, here we come. ''No comment,'' said the commissioner, via email. But hang on! Large files of public information had been quietly purged by the corporate regulator, and the central bank and Treasury. National resources, buried, three separate departments. We have a pattern. Here is the proof. ''No comment,'' said the email from the communications operative on behalf of the commissioner. Then the penny dropped.

Oh yeah......

Credited to Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune

Bradley Manning and what his trial means for all of us

Anyone remotely concerned about freedom of the press and what the media can, and cannot, publish, ought to be concerned about the issues thrown up by the Bradley Manning charges and the hearing the other day. And that is not to overlook the very fundamental issue of what governments don't tell their citizenry - and, no less critically, are often simply lying. Kevin Gosztola, who writes "The Dissenter" blog at Firedoglake, speaking on Democracy Now, makes a somewhat chilling point: "And then, I would say that the final thing that really struck me about this hearing is how they presented the evidence—the government—and actually linked Bradley Manning to aiding al-Qaeda. I mean, that essentially is criminalizing national security journalism, if you really work this thing out, because what they’re saying is anybody who puts this information on the internet—if you do a report on a drone strike, if you do a report on anything related to military operations, and then al-Qaeda reads it, then you could be accused of aiding the enemy."

Who are the heroes here?

The interminable Palestinian - Israel sees a heavy militarised nation, Israel, over-bearing an almost helpless Palestinian people.     Amira Haas, writing in Haaretz, puts matters into sharp focus in her piece "Palestinians are heroes, braving Israeli dictatorship".

"The Palestinians are heroes, and that's the only fact that's relevant after the slight shock of the hilltop thugs. The hands are the hands of thugs, and the head? The head is the head of the hostile regime under which the Palestinians live and which harasses them every moment of every day, week after week for decades. To live this way and remain sane - that's heroism. "And who says we're sane?" Palestinians answer me. Well, here's the proof: self-irony.

The thugs of the hills are only the icing on the cake. Most of the work is being done by thugs wearing kid gloves. Unlike the people who threw the stone at the deputy brigade commander, these are fan favorites in Israel. The flesh of our flesh. Officers and soldiers, military jurists, architects and contractors in the service of the army, Interior Ministry and National Insurance Institute clerks. The hands are their hands. The head is the head of the demos, the Israeli-Jewish people, who by the democratic process send governments to be the dictator over the Palestinians.
 

What is the Israeli dictatorship over the Palestinians? Not only control of their space and the creation of isolated enclaves; not only the 19-year-olds who are sent - masked and armed to the teeth - on military raids (560 last month, according to the monitoring group in the PLO's negotiations department ); not only daily arrests (257 arrests in November, including 15 Gazans ) and the 758 temporary roadblocks that were placed on West Bank roads that month.

The dictatorship is not even just a ban on Palestinian construction in more than 60 percent of the West Bank, permission to invent a new law every day to disenfranchise and expel, and the demolition, during 2011, of 500 Palestinian dwellings, wells, cisterns, animal pens, toilets and other essential structures. The dictatorship is all that together, and much more.

The Israeli dictatorship is the art of the double standard (Palestinians cannot build on their agricultural land so as not to impair rural zoning, but the state can legalize a Jewish outpost on Palestinian agricultural land ). It is the champion of self-righteousness and arrogance ("the only democracy" ), and holds an advanced degree in hypocrisy ("ready to return to negotiations any time" ). Instead of going crazy with rage, the Palestinians know that these characteristics will hurt the Israelis themselves."

The perils of being a journalist

We may watch with rapt attention to reporters on the TV news and read dispatches from correspondents as they report on conflicts around the globe, but that is not without its toll for those journalists.    The Committee to Protect Journalists reports on a grim year for those in the news-gathering business.

"At least 43 journalists were killed around the world in direct relation to their work in 2011, with the seven deaths in Pakistan marking the heaviest losses in a single nation. Libya and Iraq, each with five fatalities, and Mexico, with three deaths, also ranked high worldwide for journalism-related fatalities. The global tally is consistent with the toll recorded in 2010, when 44 journalists died in connection with their work. CPJ is investigating another 35 deaths in 2011 to determine whether they were work-related.

CPJ’s survey identified significant changes in the nature of journalist fatalities. Sixteen journalists died while on dangerous assignments, many of them while covering the chaotic and violent confrontations between authorities and protesters during the uprisings that swept the Arab world. The victims included Hassan al-Wadhaf, a Yemeni cameraman shot by a sniper while covering antigovernment protests in Sana'a, and Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, an Egyptian reporter gunned down while filming a protest in Cairo. “Journalists working in this environment are in no less danger than war correspondents covering an armed conflict,” said Ahmed Tarek, a reporter for the Middle East News Agency who was assaulted by police while covering protests in Alexandria, Egypt. “The greatest danger journalists are facing today in post-revolution Arab countries is the targeting of journalists by political forces hostile to anyone who exposes them.”

No loss!.....but what do we get instead?

Credited to Daryl Cagle

The Dragon's imprint in South America

Another dimension to China's financial and commercial prowess.   Not only are Chinese interests "expanding" into Africa and many South Pacific nations, but it has gained more than a significant toehold in South America - as this AlJazeera piece "The dragon goes shopping in South America" details.

"The small restaurants and shops selling plastic sandals, tacky umbrellas, kitchen wares and paper lanterns in Buenos Aires' Chinatown do not give the impression of impending economic dominance.

Away from this small urban area, however, China has been not-so-quietly buying up agricultural products, companies and minerals around South America.

Some analysts consider this aggressive drive for resources as a new form of imperialism, in which a big power wrangles raw materials from weaker states. Others believe China's push gives South Americans an alternative to the US, which critics say has attempted to control Latin economies through debt and support for dictators. Regardless of how it is seen, China's economic footprint in the region is growing dramatically.

"Across Latin America we are seeing that China is having an increasing importance in trade and investment," Ricardo Delgado, director of Analytica Consulting in Buenos Aires, told Al Jazeera.

"Brazil and Argentina produce and export many raw materials: soy, sugar, meat and corn… China is a very important driver of demand for these commodities."

Since 2005, China's development bank and other institutions have spent an estimated $75bn on financial investments in South America, said Boston University professor Kevin Gallagher. This is, he points out, "more [investment] than the World Bank, US Export Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank combined".

Chinese private investment, often coming from large state-supported firms that set-up operations in the region or buy local companies, has been about $60bn, Gallagher said.

In the past five years, Bilateral trade between China and South America jumped more than 160 per cent, rising from $68bn in 2006 to $178bn in 2010. In Peru, Chinese mining giant Chinalco spent $3bn buying "copper mountain" - an entire rock formation containing two billion tonnes of the precious metal. The firm expects a 2,000 per cent profit on its investment."

USA out of step on Palestine-Israel issue

It was pretty predictable that America would increasingly be out of step in relation to settling the interminable Palestinian-Israel conflict.    With the presidential elections looming take it as a given that the US won't be doing or saying anything which might, even remotely, upset the all-powerful Israel lobby in America.

This piece, "America's Growing Isolation" on Information Clearing House, notes a recent UN resolution which has gained little media attention.

"A longer headline would have added the words because of President Obama’s grovelling for Jewish campaign funding and votes.

On 19 December, in the Jewish Daily Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis wrote this:

“Top-level Jewish fundraisers from President Obama’s 2008 campaign are sticking with the president in 2012.

“Despite reports that President Obama faces a loss of Jewish funders due to his Middle East policy, analysis of a list of elite bundlers from his 2008 race shows no defections among the president’s top Jewish supporters in 2012.”

That’s not good news for the would-be presidents on the Republican side who are grovelling for Jewish campaign funds and votes.

On the same day, in what the BBC’s Barbara Plett called “a highly unusual move”, all the regional and political groupings on the UN Security Council sharply criticised Israeli settlement activities. They said in their statements that “continued settlement building threatened the chances of a future Palestinian state.” They also expressed dismay at rising settler violence. (“They” were the envoys representing the European Union, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab Group and a loose coalition of emerging states known as IBSA).
 
It was UK Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant who read the statement of the EU group.

“Israel’s continuing announcements to accelerate the construction of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, (1000 new housing units tendered for last week), send a devastating message. We believe that Israel’s security and the realisation of the Palestinians’ right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary they are mutually reinforcing objectives. But they will not be achieved while settlement building and settler violence continues.”

As Barbara Plett noted,

“Despite the unanimity of views, the envoys did not try to draft a single Security Council statement because they knew the US would veto it.” She also noted that the Obama administration’s stance was that “anything to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace talks belongs in a US-led bilateral process, not at the UN.”

It could be said, and I do say, that such criticism of Israel’s settlement activities is 44 years too late. So what, really, is its significance?

My answer is in three parts.

The first is that it’s a strong indication of America’s growing isolation because of the Obama administration’s unconditional support for Zionism’s monster child.

The second, related, is that it seems to confirm what I have been saying and writing for several months – that behind closed doors almost all of the governments of the world, European governments in particular, are more than fed up with Israel’s contempt for and defiance of international law.

The third is that the governments of most of the member states of the UN have come to terms with the fact that Zionism’s assertion that a Palestinian state on the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip could and would pose a threat to Israel’s existence is propaganda nonsense of the highest order. (This, of course, is only of academic interest because the two-state solution has long been dead if not yet buried)."

Airport security? Smoke screening?

At a time of the year when many people are flying this piece in Vanity Fair might not provide much comfort or re-assurance.  

"Ten years ago, 19 men armed with utility knives hijacked four airplanes and within a few hours killed nearly 3,000 people. At a stroke, Americans were thrust into a menacing new world. “They are coming after us,” C.I.A. director George Tenet said of al-Qaeda. “They intend to strike this homeland again, and we better get about the business of putting the right structure in place as fast as we can.”

The United States tried to do just that. Federal and state governments embarked on a nationwide safety upgrade. Checkpoints proliferated in airports, train stations, and office buildings. A digital panopticon of radiation scanners, chemical sensors, and closed-circuit television cameras audited the movements of shipping containers, airborne chemicals, and ordinary Americans. None of this was or will be cheap. Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe."

This is a novel idea! Occupy Christmas and Chanukah

A simple message from a rabbi for both Christians and Jews - as they celebrate Christmas and Chanukah respectively.

"Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism.

The symbolism of a homeless couple giving birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is akin to the symbolism of the candles lit on Chanukah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful: both offer a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.

All the more tragic to witness how both religions have been twisted in our own time to serve the powerful. Major forces in the Christian world have sided with the war-makers, ultra-nationalists, and the blame-poverty-on-the-poor cheerleaders for vast inequalities and protection of the rich against the needs of the rest. Jews, while retaining their commitment to domestic liberalism, have become tone-deaf to the cries of the oppressed in Palestine, to the huge inequalities of wealth in Israel, and have allowed their American institutions to be governed not by “one person, one vote” but “one dollar, one vote.”

One of the reflections of the way both religions have lost their ethical core is that the vast majority of people in both religious worlds have allowed their winter holidays to be turned into orgies of consumerism. The ethos of materialism and selfishness that is the dirty secret and driving force of global capitalism has infected the religious world almost as much as the secular."

Continue reading this piece, by Rabbi Michael Lerner, on truthout, here.

He's been trumped

Credited to Mike Luckovich

The man behind that Parisian bookshop

Whoever has been to Paris - and loves books - will have been to the now iconic Shakespeare and Company.

The present owner of the shop, George Whitman, died yesterday, aged 98.

Reflections on the man and his bookshop in this piece from the NY Daily News.

The corporations which influence the US Congress

Now why isn't one surprised reading this?   Pity is that most people don't know or realise what is happening.

"Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack of revenue.

Last month Citizens for Tax Justice and an affiliate issued “Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10″. It showed that 30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.

Another report, by Public Campaign, shows that 29 of those companies spent nearly half a billion dollars over those three years lobbying in Washington for laws and rules that favor their interests. Only Atmos Energy, the 30th company, reported no lobbying.

Public Campaign replaced Atmos with Federal Express, the package delivery company that paid a smidgen of tax — $37 million, or less than one percent of the $4.2 billion in profit it reported in 2008 through 2010.

For the amount spent lobbying, the companies could have hired 3,100 people at $50,000 for wages and benefits to do productive work."

A sober reflection on the war in Iraq

Forgotten all the bombast about attacking Baghdad as part of "Shock and Awe?"    Fullajah?   Another travesty in Iraq.   The are endless aspects of the whole Iraqi "adventure - Abu Ghraib to name but one very prominent incident - to conclude the war was a monumental mistake from inception.  There certainly were no winners.

"We can't afford the hawks to use withdrawal as an opportunity to airbrush the blood-drenched history of the invasion and occupation.

In his column today, the Guardian's Gary Younge writes that "withdrawing the troops [from Iraq] is about the only truly popular thing Obama has done in the last two years. Polls show more than 70% support withdrawal, roughly two-thirds oppose the war, and more than half believe it was a mistake".

So it is sad and frustrating to witness Barack Obama, who opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, referred to it as a "dumb" war and pledged to end the conflict and "bring the troops home" during his presidential campaign in 2008, now trying so hard to repackage and resell Iraq as a success story. For example, in his speech to returning troops at Fort Bragg last week, the president declared:

[E]verything that American troops have done in Iraq - all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering - all of it has led to this moment of success.

Success? Iraq is anything but a success. Yet, echoing Madeleine Albright's infamous words (on the huge numbers of Iraqi children killed by US-imposed sanctions), Obama's new defence secretary Leon Panetta claimed on Friday:

I think the price [of the Iraq war] has been worth it.

Worth it? Worth it?? Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead. As are Qusay and Uday. Good riddance. But consider the overall record of human suffering and all the other associated costs of this catastrophic conflict: millions of Iraqis left homeless, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or maimed, thousands of western troops dead or disabled, billions upon billions of dollars squandered in pursuit of non-existent WMDs and a moral high ground lost in towns and cities like Haditha, Fallujah and Abu Ghraib.

Younge writes in his column today:

While the departure of American troops should be greeted with guarded relief (guarded because the US will maintain its largest embassy in the world there along with thousands of armed private contractors), every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort their lamentable legacy. You'd think that would be easy. The case against this war has been prosecuted extensively both in this column and elsewhere. (The argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein somehow compensates for the lies, torture, displacement, carnage, instability and humans rights abuses is perverse. They used a daisy cutter to crack a walnut.)

This war started out with many parents but has ended its days an orphan, tarnishing the reputations of those who launched it and the useful idiots who gave them intellectual cover. Nobody has been held accountable; few accept responsibility.

In any case, they could not have done it alone. It was only possible thanks to the systemic collusion of a supine political class and a jingoistic political culture, not to mention a blank cheque from the British government. When the war started, almost three-quarters of Americans supported it. Only politicians of principle opposed it - and there were precious few of those. When Nancy Pelosi was asked why she had not pushed for impeachment of Bush when she became speaker in 2006 she said: "What about these other people who voted for that war with no evidence ... Where are these Democrats going to be? Are they going to be voting for us to impeach a president who took us to war on information that they had also?"

The shameful, lazy, bipartisan backing for the Iraq war, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a key point to highlight and remember, and one that is often lost and forgotten in the fog of Bush- and Blair-baiting."

Is Egypt spiralling out of control?

The Guardian reports:

"The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting – maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.

Six years ago, when popular protests started to hit the streets of Egypt as Hosni Mubarak's gang worked at rigging the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime hit back – not just with the traditional Central Security conscripts – but with an innovation: militias of strong, trained, thugs. They beat up men, but they grabbed women, tore their clothes off and beat them, groping them at the same time. The idea was to insinuate that females who took part in street protests wanted to be groped.

Women developed deterrent techniques: layers of light clothing, no buttons, drawstring pants double-knotted – and carried right on protesting. Many of the smaller civil initiatives that grew into the protest movement: "We See You", "Against Corruption", "The Streets are Ours" were women-led."

Europe: A fraught marriage

Just about everywhere one cares to look, and on whatever subject-matter, 2012 is not shaping up to be a good year.    The attempts to bring some sort of harmony into the EU and economic stability to boot, doesn't look too good from an objective observation.

"Europe is like an unhappy marriage in which the partners no longer get on but cannot bear to break up because the property settlement would cripple them. It is true that there is plenty of reason to be alarmed on the money front. If governments default on their debts, if banks fall like dominoes, depression looms. If the euro collapses, it will mean chaos and hardship for nations, households and businesses.

But the urgency over money has induced tunnel vision and distorted the dynamics of power. Greater unity over spending and taxes might be good for the currency but the long-term price of this "cure" might be social and political unrest. Resentful voters in individual nations may feel disenfranchised if they think their interests are being over-ridden by distant powers.
Already, there is widespread resentment of the size, wealth and power of "banksters" and their role in the crisis. Governments are blamed for not having reined in the excesses of banks and speculators - "wherever there was a reckless borrower, there was a reckless lender", says one Irish economist - and for allowing them to have grown too big to fail.

A study published in New Scientist in October suggests there is some justification for this view. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich used mathematical models to examine ownership links between more than 43,000 transnational companies. They concluded that just 147 tightly knit companies, mostly financial institutions, control 40 per cent of the world's revenue."

Occupy! The buzz word around the globe

Time Magazine might have nominated protesters as the people of the year, but occupiers, all around the globe, are, as it were, on the march.  Their presence has never been felt more - in all sorts of ways.    In fact, it's a phenomenon considered by Tom Engelhardt in a piece on TomDispatch - and which he sees as continuing in 2012.

"On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!”  Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian demonstrators.

“We exist!”  Think of it as a simple statement of fact, an implicit demand to be taken seriously (or else), and undoubtedly an expression of wonder, verging on a question: “We exist?”

And who could blame them for shouting it?  Or for the wonder?  How miraculous it was.  Yet another country long immersed in a kind of popular silence suddenly finds voice, and the demonstrators promptly declare themselves not about to leave the stage when the day -- and the demonstration -- ends.  Who guessed beforehand that perhaps 50,000 Muscovites would turn out to protest a rigged electoral process in a suddenly restive country, along with crowds in St. Petersburg, Tomsk, and elsewhere from the south to Siberia?

In Tahrir Square in Cairo, they swore: “This time we’re here to stay!”  Everywhere this year, it seemed that they -- “we” -- were here to stay.  In New York City, when forced out of Zuccotti Park by the police, protesters returned carrying signs that said, “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”

And so it seems, globally speaking.  Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Madison, New York, Santiago, Homs.  So many cities, towns, places.  London, Sana’a, Athens, Oakland, Berlin, Rabat, Boston, Vancouver... it could take your breath away.  And as for the places that aren’t yet bubbling -- Japan, China, and elsewhere -- watch out in 2012 because, let’s face it, “we exist.”

Everywhere, the “we” couldn’t be broader, often remarkably, even strategically, ill defined: 99% of humanity containing so many potentially conflicting strains of thought and being: liberals and fundamentalists, left-wing radicals and right-wing nationalists, the middle class and the dismally poor, pensioners and high-school students.  But the “we” couldn’t be more real.

This “we” is something that hasn’t been seen on this planet for a long time, and perhaps never quite so globally.  And here’s what should take your breath away, and that of the other 1%, too: “we” were never supposed to exist.  Everyone, even we, counted us out.

Until last December, when a young Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself alight to protest his own humiliation, that “we” seemed to consist of the non-actors of the twenty-first century and much of the previous one as well.  We’re talking about all those shunted aside, whose lives only weeks, months or, at most, a year ago, simply didn’t matter; all those the powerful absolutely knew they could ride roughshod over as they solidified their control of the planet’s wealth, resources, property, as, in fact, they drove this planet down.

For them, “we” was just a mass of subprime humanity that hardly existed.  So of all the statements of 2011, the simplest of them -- “We exist!” -- has been by far the most powerful."

Continue reading here.
 

Not the most cheery image for Xmas

Credited to Brian Fairrington  

A very, very belated rehabilitation....of witches

Remember those witches in Germany in a by-gone era?   They have just been rehabilitated.      Read on......in this piece from Spiegel Online Edition:

"Tortured and burned at the stake by the tens of thousands, Germany's alleged witches have been largely forgotten. But thanks to efforts by a small group of activists, a number of German cities have begun absolving women, men and children who were wrongly accused of causing plagues, storms and bad harvests.

It began with the trial and execution of an eight-year-old girl for witchcraft in the spring of 1630. Compelled to name others involved in an alleged nighttime dance with the devil in the German town of Oberkirchen, young Christine Teipel's confession sparked a wave of fingerpointing and subsequent trials. Within just three months, 58 people, including 22 men and two children, were burned at the stake there.

The Oberkirchen trials represent just a small fraction of those that led to the execution of some 25,000 alleged witches between 1500 and 1782 in Germany. The country was a hotbed of persecution, says witch-trial expert Hartmut Hegeler, explaining that some 40 percent of the 60,000 witches who were tortured and killed in Europe during the infamous era were executed in what is now modern Germany. Hegeler, 65, a retired Protestant minister and college religion instructor in the western German town of Unna, is now working to rehabilitate these supposed witches city by city.
"We owe it to the victims to finally acknowledge that they died innocent back then," Hegeler told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But this is not just about the past -- it's a signal against the violence and marginalization of people that goes on today."

It was mainly women who were targeted, although there were also a surprisingly high number of men as well as a few children like Oberkirchen's Christine Teipel. They were accused of not only cavorting with the devil, but also of causing insect plagues, bad weather, ruined harvests and even spoiling the production of beer."

A timely reflection: "Why Do They Hate Us?"

An "interesting" piece on Counterpunch "Why Do They Hate Us?" reflects on the actions of Americans around the globe and how that very course of conduct engenders hatred of the USA.

"Someday there will come a reckoning for the US, as there came a reckoning for Rome, for the British Empire, for the German Reich and for the USSR. A hollowed-out country like the this one, which is under-funding education, health care, infrastructure investment, research, and environmental protection, while its governing class steadily disenfranchises, disempowers, and impoverishes the public while systematically taking away their right to protest, is ultimately doomed."

****

On Iraq:

"First of all, let’s also dispense with the euphemistic term “contractors,” which is meant to bring to mind the image of a couple of overweight construction workers. In Iraq, and especially in lawless areas like Anbar at that time, “contractor” means “mercenary,” and we now know that mercenaries in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) were and are a lawless, bloodthirsty, group of former US military personnel and vicious thugs from various foreign fascist states like Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere, who have killed countless numbers of civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, operating outside of any government monitoring or legal constraints for “security firms” like Blackwater (now Xe) and DynCorp."

Even The New York Times calls Obama unprincipled

When even a supporter of the Obama Administration, The New York Times - in its editorial - calls Obama unprincipled in putting politics above principle, you know things are pretty bad in the land of the free and the brave.

"The trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, gave rise to a dangerous myth that, to be safe, America had to give up basic rights and restructure its legal system. The United States was now in a perpetual state of war, the argument went, and the criminal approach to fighting terrorism — and the due process that goes along with it — wasn’t tough enough.

Senate Approves Requiring Military Custody in Terror Cases (November 30, 2011)
President George W. Bush used this insidious formula to claim that his office had the inherent power to detain anyone he chose, for as long as he chose, without a trial; to authorize the torture of prisoners; and to spy on Americans without a warrant. President Obama came into office pledging his dedication to the rule of law and to reversing the Bush-era policies. He has fallen far short.

Mr. Obama refused to entertain any investigation of the abuses of power under his predecessor, and he has been far too willing to adopt Mr. Bush’s extravagant claims of national secrets to prevent any courthouse accountability for those abuses. This week, he is poised to sign into law terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law.

The measures, contained in the annual military budget bill, will strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military, which has made clear that it doesn’t want the job. The legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial. The bill, championed by Republicans in the House and Senate, was attached to the military budget bill to make it harder for Mr. Obama to veto it.

Nearly every top American official with knowledge and experience spoke out against the provisions, including the attorney general, the defense secretary, the chief of the F.B.I., the secretary of state, and the leaders of intelligence agencies. And, for weeks, the White House vowed that Mr. Obama would veto the military budget if the provisions were left in. On Wednesday, the White House reversed field, declaring that the bill had been improved enough for the president to sign it now that it had passed the Senate.

This is a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency. To start with, this bill was utterly unnecessary. Civilian prosecutors and federal courts have jailed hundreds of convicted terrorists, while the tribunals have convicted a half-dozen.

And the modifications are nowhere near enough. Mr. Obama, his spokesman said, is prepared to sign this law because it allows the executive to grant a waiver for a particular prisoner to be brought to trial in a civilian court. But the legislation’s ban on spending any money for civilian trials for any accused terrorist would make that waiver largely meaningless.

The bill has so many other objectionable aspects that we can’t go into them all. Among the worst: It leaves open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention and trial by a military court. It will make it impossible to shut the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And it includes an unneeded expansion of the authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan to include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda or an amorphous group of “associated forces” that could cover just about anyone arrested anywhere in the world.

There is no doubt. This bill will make it harder to fight terrorism and do more harm to the country’s international reputation. The White House said that if implementing it jeopardizes the rule of law, it expects Congress to work “quickly and tirelessly” to undo the damage. The White House will have to make that happen. After it abdicated its responsibility this week, we’re not convinced it will."

Vale Mustafa Tamimi

You may well ask - who is Mustafa Tamimi?  

Let this op-ed piece (published here in full from Haaretz) explain.... 

"Mustafa Tamimi threw stones. Unapologetically and sometimes fearlessly. Not on that day alone, but nearly every Friday. He also concealed his face. Not for fear of the prison cell, which he had already come to know intimately, but in order to preserve his freedom, so he could continue to throw stones and resist the theft of his land. He continued to do this until the moment of his death.

According to British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, in response to the reports about the shooting of Tamimi, the spokesman of the GOC Southern Command wondered on his Twitter account: "What was Mustafa thinking running after a moving jeep while throwing stones #fail." Thus, simply and mockingly, the spokesman explained why Tamimi was to blame for his own death.

Mustafa Tamimi, from the village of Nabi Saleh - son to Ikhlas and Abd al-Razak, brother to Saddam and Ziad, to the twins Oudai and Louai and sister Ola - was shot in the head at close range on Friday. Hours later, at 9:21 on Saturday morning, he died of his wounds. A gas grenade was fired at him from an armored military Jeep at a distance of only a few meters. It was not out of fear that the person who did fired the shot hit him. He poked the barrel of the rifle through the door of the armored vehicle and fired with clear intent. The shooter is a soldier. His identity remains unknown and perhaps it will always remain unknown. Maybe this is for the best. Identifying him and punishing him would only serve to whitewash the crimes of the entire system. As if the indifferent Israeli civilian, the sergeant, the company commander, the battalion commander, the brigade commander, the division commander, the defense minister and the prime minister had no part in the shooting.

The army spokesman was right. Mustafa died because he threw stones; he died because he dared to speak a truth, with his hands, in a place where the truth is forbidden. Any discussion of the manner of the shooting, its legality and the orders on opening fire, infers that the landlord is forbidden to expel the trespasser. Indeed, the trespasser is allowed to shoot the landlord.

Mustafa's body is lying lifeless because he had the courage to throw stones on the 24th anniversary of the first intifada, which begot the Palestinian children of the stones. His brother Oudai is imprisoned at Ofer Prison and was not allowed to attend the funeral, because he too dared to throw stones. And his sister was not allowed to be at his bedside in his final moments, even though she is not suspected of having thrown stones, but because she is a Palestinian.

Mustafa was a brave man killed because he threw stones and refused to be afraid of a soldier bearing arms, sitting safely in the military jeep covered in armor. On the day Mustafa died, the frozen silence roaming the valley was only slightly less chilling than the shrilling sound of his mother's laments which fell upon it occasionally.

Thousands of stone-throwers followed him at his funeral. He was lowered into his grave and stones covered his body. Soldiers stood at the entrance to his village. Even the anguish and solitude of separation was intolerable for the army, who set their soldiers and arms to shower mourners with teargas as they went down to village lands following the funeral. While the soldier who shot Mustafa is at large, six of the demonstrators were put behind bars.

Mustafa, we walk behind your body with our heads bowed and eyes full of tears. We cherish you, because you died for throwing stones and we did not."

A timely warning

Credited to Don Wright, The Palm Beach Post

Now it's NASA warning us on climate change

The sceptics keep on banging on about this and that relating to climate change - principally, out of pure ignorance, wilful or otherwise, that things aren't really changing at all, or not that much to be concerned about  - but the evidence, from reputable scientists and trusted bodies and organisations, keeps on confirming that a wake-up call on climate change is needed.

Now NASA has joined the ranks of those making predictions - which we ignore at our own peril.

"By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface.
 

Predicted percentage of ecological landscape being driven toward biome-level changes in plant species as a result of projected human-induced climate change by 2100. Biomes are major ecological community types. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Climate change will also drive the conversion of nearly 40% of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type - such as forest, grassland or tundra - toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modelling study.

"For more than 25 years, scientists have warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change," said Jon Bergengren, a scientist who led the study while a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the U.S..

"Our study introduces a new view of climate change, exploring the ecological implications of a few degrees of global warming. While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it's the ecological consequences that matter most."

****

"The model projections paint a portrait of increasing ecological change and stress in Earth's biosphere, with many plant and animal species facing increasing competition for survival, as well as significant species turnover, as some species invade areas occupied by other species. Most of Earth's land that is not covered by ice or desert is projected to undergo at least a 30% change in plant cover - changes that will require humans and animals to adapt and often relocate.

In addition to altering plant communities, the study predicts climate change will disrupt the ecological balance between interdependent and often endangered plant and animal species, reduce biodiversity and adversely affect Earth's water, energy, carbon and other element cycles."

Christopher Hitchens

The passing of Christopher Hitchens, at 62, is sad - whatever one thought of him and his views.     He certainly was controversial and fearless in promoting his position on whatever subject he was engaged in.

See here, on The Daily Beast, for a tribute and retrospectives on Hitchens.

For MPS his book "The Trials of Henry Kissinger", an expose of the former US Secretary of State, was first class.     He highlighted what a war criminal Kissinger was and remains to this day.    Interestingly, Kissinger never took Hithchens on - because the book is so well researched and supported by facts Hitchen's footnotes.  

Go here for a review of the book.

Obama stands condemned on outrageous law

Another nail in the coffin of Obama.    The man can only be described as hypocrite #1 and someone who has no compunction in switching positions.     He has now just agreed to sign into law legislation allowing for anyone, in or outside the USA, to be detained, indefinitely, without trial.

Constitutional lawyer and blogger at Salon, Glenn Greenwald explains:

"In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.

The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Worlds apart

Leaving to one side the question how the disparity of incomes will play out in communities around the country - that is, between Main Street on one hand and Wall Street on the other - the figures for the state of the economic well being of the US citizenry is truly alarming.

This is one side of the equation (Main Street):

"Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Scenario #2 (Wall Street):

"Chief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America's top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year, according to the largest survey of US CEO pay. The dramatic bounceback comes as the latest government figures show wages for the majority of Americans are failing to keep up with inflation.

America's highest paid executive took home more than $145.2m, and as stock prices recovered across the board, the median value of bosses' profits on stock options rose 70% in 2010, from $950,400 to $1.3m. The news comes against the backdrop of an Occupy Wall Street movement that has focused Washington's attention on the pay packages of America's highest paid.

The Guardian's exclusive first look at the CEO pay survey from corporate governance group GMI Ratings will further fuel debate about America's widening income gap. The survey, the most extensive in the US, covered 2,647 companies, and offers a comprehensive assessment of all the data now available relating to 2010 pay."

What do Iraqis think with the Americans gone / going?

President Obama, and Michelle, may be going through the "script" of welcoming the troops home from Iraq and making all sort of pronouncements, short of "mission accomplished" in the war-ravaged country, but what do the Iraqis think about it all?

The New York Times has gone out to "test" local reaction.

"As American forces start to pull out of Iraq, we asked Iraqis around the country three questions: Will Iraq be better or worse off after American troops leave? What did the Americans achieve in Iraq? And what have they personally lost or gained since the 2003 invasion? Some answered only one or two questions. Although the respondents varied from area to area and across social and religions divides, some clear patterns emerge.

In Sunni areas of the north and west — from Baghdad to Mosul and out across Anbar – there is abiding fear among Saddam Hussein’s once-ruling minority of the ancient regional foe, Iran, and how vulnerable a post-American Iraq may be to Tehran’s military, political and economic ambitions.

By contrast, in the areas controlled by Iraq’s majority Shiite population, more interviewees talked of the Iraqi security forces — now, of course, controlled by a Shiite-led government – being ready to take over.

Members of minorities like the Kurds, Christians and Turkmen are often the most pessimistic, since they are the most vulnerable. One can in many cases treat with skepticism the often disingenuous and self-serving canard –
from people who most likely never visited the gassed Kurdish town of Halabja or the drained Shiite marshes of the south — about Saddam’s Iraq being a blind meritocracy free of sectarian or religious divisions.

But it is significant that in both Sunni and Shiite areas, there are some who say that life was better under Mr. Hussein because of the security his omnipresent police and intelligence forces imposed on Iraq, even from those who shudder in the next breath when recalling the dictatorial nature of his regime."

AlJazeera also reports on the withdrawal of the US military:

"The US military presence in Iraq, once a force of more than 170,000, has already dwindled to 5,500 troops stationed on just three bases. A small contingent of a few hundred soldiers will remain at the embassy in Baghdad.

The war cost America $800bn, according to the Pentagon, and scholars say the total costs may eventually top $3 trillion. Nearly 4,500 American troops were killed, with tens of thousands more injured; the human toll for Iraqis has been far higher, with more than 100,000 civilians and members of the security forces killed since 2003. Millions more have been wounded or forced from their homes.

After all of that, the US leaves behind an Iraq visibly scarred and struggling to regain a sense of normalcy, let alone its once-prominent stature in the Arab world.

Traffic jams clog Baghdad’s streets as cars wait to pass through the city’s innumerable checkpoints. Neighbourhoods remain sealed off by concrete walls and mountains of barbed wire. Assassinations, roadside bombings and other outbreaks of violence still continue with chilling regularity.

The country has calmed since 2005 and 2006, but the atmosphere remains tense; Iraq is still riven by sectarian divisions and ruled by what some see as an increasingly authoritarian government.

As the US prepares to withdraw, the dominant emotion in the streets is not happiness, but apprehension. There is real fear from Iraqis of all stripes that violence will resume, the economy will continue to stagnate, and that their country will crack apart."

 

 

Job prospects!

Credited to Bill Day

Welcome to America's dismal economy

Brokers, and those with vested interests, might be talking up the US economy in 2012, but even leaving aside events outside the control of America - such as what is happening in Europe's economies - if Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics, is right, the economic "picture" in the US is pretty dismal.     His piece appears in Vanity Fair.

"It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.

The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.

Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion."

Simple! Just shoot anything - Judges, Pet Dogs, Fast Drivers and

Amazing!    From CommonDreams:

"Blackwater's "protective services" in Iraq consisted in large part of indiscriminately shooting any car that drove near its convoys, according to 4,500 pages of records acquired by Gawker four years after requesting them under the Freedom of Information Act. Uploaded to Document Cloud."

USA: Help or obstacle to Arab Spring?

Despite all the rhetoric coming out of the White House it doesn't appear that the Americans were all that keen on seeing the so-called Arab Spring gain traction.

"As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively.  It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.

As state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there.  During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings.

These recurrent joint-training exercises, seldom reported in the media and rarely mentioned outside the military, constitute the core of an elaborate, longstanding system that binds the Pentagon to the militaries of repressive regimes across the Middle East.  Although the Pentagon shrouds these exercises in secrecy, refusing to answer basic questions about their scale, scope, or cost, an investigation by TomDispatch reveals the outlines of a region-wide training program whose ambitions are large and wholly at odds with Washington’s professed aims of supporting democratic reforms in the Greater Middle East."

Continue reading this piece (reproduced from TomDispatch), on truthout, here.

James (Murdoch) knew of hacking

It wasn't going to take long before James Murdoch - Rupert next? - would be directly implicated in knowing of News of the World being engaged in hacking.

"Rupert Murdoch’s son James received and responded to e-mail messages in 2008 that referred to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the tabloid The News of the World, a chain of e-mail messages and replies released Tuesday by a British parliamentary panel shows. It is the first documentation that Mr. Murdoch had been notified of a wider hacking problem long before he has admitted.

In statements released Tuesday, James Murdoch, who runs the News Corporation’s operations in Europe and Asia, admitted he had received and replied to the message on his BlackBerry, but he said he “did not read the full e-mail chain.” He said he stood by his repeated public denials that he knew of widespread hacking at the tabloid at the time he approved a large legal settlement with a victim of the practice in 2008.

But the new documents appear to add fuel to a controversy that has severely damaged the reputation of the News Corporation and the Murdochs’ leadership, both in Britain and the United States. The e-mail chain of messages backs up the accounts of two of James Murdoch’s former senior executives, an in-house lawyer and an editor, who said they had told him of evidence that illegally intercepting voice mail messages to gather news and gossip went beyond a single “rogue reporter.”

The top e-mail in the chain — the one Mr. Murdoch replied to directly — came from the editor of The News of the World at the time, Colin Myler, who wrote that the potential legal fallout from the hacking problem was “as bad as we feared.” Mr. Myler urged Mr. Murdoch to call a meeting promptly to discuss the issue. Mr. Murdoch replied within minutes, saying he could be available that evening or the next day."

Thomas Friedman socks it to 'em

MPS has never been a great fan of Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, author, commentator and op-ed writer for The New York Times.   

However, in his latest column "Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir" Friedman uncharacteristically, takes a stick to Israel.   His piece is reproduced here, in full, for anyone who is remotely interested in the position of Israel in the Middle East, the Israel Lobby and America's almost subservient attitude to Israel.

"I have a simple motto when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I love both Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from some of their American friends — those who want to love them to death, literally.

That thought came to mind last week when Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes — by outloving Israel — to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an “invented” people and not a real nation entitled to a state.

This was supposed to show that Newt loves Israel more than Mitt Romney, who only told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because “I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. ... I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process. Instead, we should stand by our ally.”

That’s right. America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up. We have no interests of our own. And this guy’s running for president?

As for Newt, well, let’s see: If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?

I’d never claim to speak for American Jews, but I’m certain there are many out there like me, who strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state, who understand that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood yet remains a democracy, but who are deeply worried about where Israel is going today. My guess is we’re the minority when it comes to secular American Jews. We still care. Many other Jews are just drifting away.

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.

It confuses them to read that Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who met with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia last Wednesday, was quoted as saying that the recent Russian elections were “absolutely fair, free and democratic.” Yes, those elections — the ones that brought thousands of Russian democrats into the streets to protest the fraud. Israel’s foreign minister sided with Putin.

It confuses them to read that right-wing Jewish settlers attacked an Israeli army base on Tuesday in the West Bank, stoning Israeli soldiers in retaliation for the army removing “illegal” settlements that Jewish extremists establish wherever they want.

It confuses them to read, as the New Israel Fund reports on its Web site, that “more than 10 years ago, the ultra-Orthodox community asked Israel’s public bus company, Egged, to provide segregated buses in their neighborhoods. By early 2009, more than 55 such lines were operating around Israel. Typically, women are required to enter through the bus back doors and sit in the back of the bus, as well as ‘dress modestly.’ ”

It confuses them to read a Financial Times article from Israel on Monday, that said: “In recent weeks, the country has been consumed by an anguished debate over a series of new laws and proposals that many fear are designed to stifle dissent, weaken minority rights, restrict freedom of speech and emasculate the judiciary. They include a law that in effect allows Israeli communities to exclude Arab families; another that imposes penalties on Israelis advocating a boycott of products made in West Bank Jewish settlements; and proposals that would subject the supreme court to greater political oversight.”

And it confuses them to read Gideon Levy, a powerful liberal voice, writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily, this week that “anyone who says this is a matter of a few inconsequential laws is leading others astray. ... What we are witnessing is w-a-r. This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state.”

So while Newt is cynically asking who are the Palestinians, he doesn’t even know that more than a few Israelis are asking, “Who are we?”

The Dictators of the West......The Bankers!

Robert Fisk, veteran Middle-East journalist, writing for his newspaper, The Independent, minces no words as to who the dictators of the West are.     The bankers.    And then he reflects on the so-called "Arab Spring" in that context.......

"Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine."