Wonderful "instruction" video from the British Heart Foundation...
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Is America a declining power?
There has been quite a bit of commentary lately - and from informed people too - on whether America is a declining power.
Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, in writing on his blog on FP suggests the question is the incorrect one.
As I've noted elsewhere, the issue isn't whether the United States is about to fall the from the ranks of the great powers, or even be equaled (let alone surpassed) by a rising China. The world may be evolving toward a more multipolar structure, for example, but the United States is going to be one of those poles, and almost certainly the strongest of them, for many years to come.
Instead, the real issue is whether developments at home and overseas are making it harder for the United States to exercise the kind of dominant influence that it did for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The United States had a larger share of global GDP in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn't running enormous budget deficits. The United States was seen as a reliable defender of human rights, and its support for decolonization after World War II had won it many friends in the developing world. It also had good relations with a variety of monarchies and dictatorships, which it justified as part of the struggle against communism. These features allowed the United States to create and lead combined economic, security and political orders in virtually every corner of the world, except for the portions directly controlled by our communist rivals. And the U.S. and its allies eventually won that struggle too, driving the USSR into exhaustion and watching the triumph of market economies and more participatory forms of government throughout the former communist world.
The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.
All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home."
The devastating result of challenging the Chinese Government
From Australia's Radio Australia:
In just over two weeks, China's leader-in-waiting, Vice President Xi Jinping, will visit Washington DC to meet President Barack Obama.
For Mr Xi, the trip on February 14 is a chance to bolster his foreign policy credentials and to establish personal ties to another of the world's major powers.
It will also be an opportunity for various campaigners to raise issues related to China, one being the continued detention of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
The group Freedom Now has just filed a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on behalf of Gao Zhisheng.
Correspondent: Liam Cochrane
For Mr Xi, the trip on February 14 is a chance to bolster his foreign policy credentials and to establish personal ties to another of the world's major powers.
It will also be an opportunity for various campaigners to raise issues related to China, one being the continued detention of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
The group Freedom Now has just filed a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on behalf of Gao Zhisheng.
Correspondent: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Jared Genser, founder of Freedom Now and one of Gao Zhisheng's international counsel
GENSER: Gao Zhisheng is a Chinese human rights lawyer interestingly was ranked by the China Daily, the state-run newspaper as one of the top ten lawyers in China about a decade ago, where he had more of a corporate law practice. But over the last decade, he started to first represent people whose properties had been wrongly taken away without compensation and then ended up representing a number of victims of human rights abuses and really crossed the line with the Chinese representing Falun Gong practitioners. And he was disappeared, ultimately convicted of subversion and given a five year suspended sentence and over the course of the last five years has spent more than three-and-a-half years in various terms of disappearances, the most recent one has been about 20 months long, although now the Chinese claim to have reappeared him, although no one has still seen him and he's in a prison allegedly in Western China and that three year sentence that he originally received for subversion has been reimposed.
COCHRANE: And during some of these periods of disappearance and imprisonment, he's been subjected to brutal torture that has been unveiled. Can you tell us a little bit of what the Chinese authorities have done to him?
GENSER: Sure, I mean it is about as horrific as it gets. I mean beating him to within an inch of death, piercing his genitals with pins, putting burning cigarettes up to his eyes, to the point that now his tear ducts are permanently damaged and he tears around the clock, tonnes of psychological torture, telling him that his family, his family members have committed suicide or that they were otherwise in bad health or dying or dead and trying to do anything humanly possible to get him to change his attitude toward the Chinese Government and, of course, none of this has been successful, which is precisely why he's had to be disappeared I think from the Chinese government perspective."
How to alienate many of your citizens
France is no stranger to violence in its streets. Much of that has been from Muslims and disadvantaged youth venting their frustration at the government's inability, or lack of will, to tackle myriads of issues confronting Muslims and the young. By referring to protesters as, in effect, being rabble, the French President has helped things!
Human Rights Watch has highlighted another problem in France in a just-released Report "The Root of Humiliation".
"Most people in France have been stopped and asked by police for proof of their identity—or “contrôle d’identité”—at some point in their lives.
Anyone can theoretically be asked for proof of identity, and a straightforward stop should
usually last only a few minutes and involve little more than providing
one’s identity card or other proof of identity upon demand by a police
officer.
However, research conducted in and around Paris, Lyon, and Lille in 2011 indicates that the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police, who use the system as a
central tool in their operations and have broad powers to stop and check
individuals regardless of whether they suspect criminal activity. These abuses
include repeated checks—“countless” in the words of most
interviewees—sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse. Stops can
involve lengthy questioning, orders to empty pockets, bag searches, and
intrusive pat-downs—including of children as young as 14-years-old, who
described having to put their hands against a wall or car to be patted down.
Moreover,statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that young blacks and Arabs living
in economically disadvantaged areas are particularly frequent targets for such
stops, suggesting that police engage in ethnic profiling(i.e. making
assumptions who is more likely to be a delinquent based on appearance,
including race and ethnicity, rather than behavior) to determine who to stop.
Many of the youths interviewed by Human Rights Watch for this report said they
viewed identity checks to be the sharp edge of their broader experience of
discrimination and exclusion in French society.
Such practices are justified by French authorities as security measures and have been
court-sanctioned, and there may be some cases, as police officials argue, where
there is good reason for police to intervene—such as unruly behavior that
prompts calls from neighbors or illegal activity such as smoking marijuana.
Moreover, police profiling can be a legitimate preventive and
investigative tool, including when suspect descriptions including ethnicity or
national origin are based on specific, reliable information. Human Rights Watch
recognizes that police officers often face dangerous and
threatening situations and must restrain violent individuals to protect
themselves and others".
Anyone can theoretically be asked for proof of identity, and a straightforward stop should
usually last only a few minutes and involve little more than providing
one’s identity card or other proof of identity upon demand by a police
officer.
However, research conducted in and around Paris, Lyon, and Lille in 2011 indicates that the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police, who use the system as a
central tool in their operations and have broad powers to stop and check
individuals regardless of whether they suspect criminal activity. These abuses
include repeated checks—“countless” in the words of most
interviewees—sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse. Stops can
involve lengthy questioning, orders to empty pockets, bag searches, and
intrusive pat-downs—including of children as young as 14-years-old, who
described having to put their hands against a wall or car to be patted down.
Moreover,statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that young blacks and Arabs living
in economically disadvantaged areas are particularly frequent targets for such
stops, suggesting that police engage in ethnic profiling(i.e. making
assumptions who is more likely to be a delinquent based on appearance,
including race and ethnicity, rather than behavior) to determine who to stop.
Many of the youths interviewed by Human Rights Watch for this report said they
viewed identity checks to be the sharp edge of their broader experience of
discrimination and exclusion in French society.
Such practices are justified by French authorities as security measures and have been
court-sanctioned, and there may be some cases, as police officials argue, where
there is good reason for police to intervene—such as unruly behavior that
prompts calls from neighbors or illegal activity such as smoking marijuana.
Moreover, police profiling can be a legitimate preventive and
investigative tool, including when suspect descriptions including ethnicity or
national origin are based on specific, reliable information. Human Rights Watch
recognizes that police officers often face dangerous and
threatening situations and must restrain violent individuals to protect
themselves and others".
Grief diagnosis
The death of someone usually results in grieving by family and friends - which if the deceased was someone close, may go on for some time.
A question now under consideration in America is whether 2 months of grieving qualifies someone as being depressed.
Australia's ABC's Radio National Breakfast program takes up the issue:
"It is clear that a period of prolonged grief could turn into depression. But should the two conditions be diagnosed and treated in the same way? Next year the American Psychiatric Association will publish a new diagnostic and statistical manual, and a debate has broken out over whether grief should be included in the definition of depression."
Go here to hear an interview with Dr Allen Frances - Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University, and Chair of the task force overseeing the compilation of the new diagnostic manual.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Now climate change threatens wheat crops
Last Friday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by a number of scientists challenging whether there really was climate change as many eminent scientists and science bodies have concluded. The piece was, presumably, part of the Murdoch stable's stance of denying that the world is experiencing climate change. Perhaps someone should send Murdoch and his op-ed writers this piece "New Study: Climate Change Threatens World's Wheat Crop. It could be much more difficult than we thought to feed everyone in a warmer world" on CommonDreams.
"A study released Sunday afternoon finds that wheat crop yields could plunge due, in part, to climate change.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, researchers warn that current projections underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process. Extreme heat causes wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, the Stanford University-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world continues to warm."
"A study released Sunday afternoon finds that wheat crop yields could plunge due, in part, to climate change.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, researchers warn that current projections underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process. Extreme heat causes wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, the Stanford University-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world continues to warm."
The "secret" about Victoria's Secret
First it was Gap, then Apple and now Victoria's Secret - companies who "use" employees in foreign countries to manufacture goods in and under conditions which are utterly appalling. AlterNet reports about the fantasy world sought to be created Victoria's Secret on the one hand and the devastation caused by them on the other.
"Victoria’s Secret is in the business of selling fantasy. Its elite team of supermodels (called “angels”) are painstakingly selected and considered some of the most beautiful women in the world, and its fashion show is a major television event, this year attracting musical performances from Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj. It is about glamor and exceptionalism, and its marketing is centered inextricably around making women who wear Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie feel equally glamorous and exceptional.
But the company cannot ignore the increasing demand for sustainable products, and so when it began using “fair trade, organic cotton,” the sexy-seeking, environmentally minded could ostensibly feel better about their choice to patronize Victoria’s Secret. Little tags in tinier thongs noted: “Made with 20 percent organic cotton from Burkina Faso.”
Which sounds comforting, only an expose published this week by Bloomberg reports that the cotton at that farm in Burkina Faso is harvested by children, who are not only forced to work long hours in the grueling sun, but are beaten if they don’t perform up to par.
As Victoria’s Secret’s partner, [fair trade leader Georges] Guebre’s organization, the National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible for running all aspects of the organic and fair-trade program across Burkina Faso. Known by its French initials, the UNPCB in 2008 co-sponsored a study suggesting hundreds, if not thousands, of children like [13-year-old laborer] Clarisse could be vulnerable to exploitation on organic and fair-trade farms. The study was commissioned by the growers and Helvetas. Victoria’s Secret says it never saw the report.
The report goes on to note that because organic, fair trade cotton sells at a much higher price than cotton that is not stamped as such, the potential for exploitation increases. “The program has attracted subsistence farmers who say they don’t have the resources to grow fair-trade cotton without forcing other people’s children into their fields,” it says. The Bloomberg reporter spent six weeks in the cotton fields of Burkina Faso, investigating the lives of six children as young as 10, who work in conditions of slavery, with no possessions, and who live in fear of being whipped. The 13-year-old named Clarisse who’s the focus of the story lives with her cousin, the farmer who beats her, and eats once a day at the most, without access to education though school is legally mandated for her."
But the company cannot ignore the increasing demand for sustainable products, and so when it began using “fair trade, organic cotton,” the sexy-seeking, environmentally minded could ostensibly feel better about their choice to patronize Victoria’s Secret. Little tags in tinier thongs noted: “Made with 20 percent organic cotton from Burkina Faso.”
Which sounds comforting, only an expose published this week by Bloomberg reports that the cotton at that farm in Burkina Faso is harvested by children, who are not only forced to work long hours in the grueling sun, but are beaten if they don’t perform up to par.
As Victoria’s Secret’s partner, [fair trade leader Georges] Guebre’s organization, the National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible for running all aspects of the organic and fair-trade program across Burkina Faso. Known by its French initials, the UNPCB in 2008 co-sponsored a study suggesting hundreds, if not thousands, of children like [13-year-old laborer] Clarisse could be vulnerable to exploitation on organic and fair-trade farms. The study was commissioned by the growers and Helvetas. Victoria’s Secret says it never saw the report.
The report goes on to note that because organic, fair trade cotton sells at a much higher price than cotton that is not stamped as such, the potential for exploitation increases. “The program has attracted subsistence farmers who say they don’t have the resources to grow fair-trade cotton without forcing other people’s children into their fields,” it says. The Bloomberg reporter spent six weeks in the cotton fields of Burkina Faso, investigating the lives of six children as young as 10, who work in conditions of slavery, with no possessions, and who live in fear of being whipped. The 13-year-old named Clarisse who’s the focus of the story lives with her cousin, the farmer who beats her, and eats once a day at the most, without access to education though school is legally mandated for her."
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Once again, Obama's rhetoric doesn't match the reality
Obama's message of late has been a populist one - you know, referring to those fat cats on Wall St. and urging a more level playing field in the USA - but, yet again, Obama's words don't match the reality in how he conducts himself. Justin Elliot in "Wall Street execs are major Obama fundraisers" on Salon details the "story" behind the Obama rhetoric.
"The consensus view of President Obama’s State of the Union address is that it was a “populist pitch” that sought to, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “tap widespread anti-Wall Street sentiment and voter anger about economic disparity without scaring independents.”
That take on the Obama reelection campaign strategy is in line with what we’ve been hearing for months out of the White House, which previewed the concept to the Washington Post as early as October, just as the Occupy movement was getting underway.
The tension or perhaps contradiction with this strategy is that, as I’ve been documenting, this administration and the Democratic Party are not fundamentally anti-Wall Street institutions. They have deep ties to the financial services industry.
Aspects of that relationship that have surfaced recently include: Obama’s hiring as a top campaign aide of Broderick Johnson, who had been pursuing a lucrative career lobbying for the big banks; the fact that executives of Bain Capital have contributed generously to Democratic campaigns in recent years; and so on.
The latest interesting data point emerged this week in the form of an analysis of the bundlers to Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee performed by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The campaign, to its credit, voluntarily released the names of people who have bundled – in other words raised money from their social and professional circles and sent it to the campaign in one large chunk — more than $50,000.
There were just 357 of these elite bundlers in the second and third quarters of 2011. And the second most represented industry after law was the securities and investment industry, according to the CRP analysis.
The 62 bundlers who work in that industry have raised at least $9.4 million for Obama and the DNC. That “at least” is significant because the Obama campaign specifies only a dollar range in its disclosures, with the top category being “$500,000+.” So the real aggregate figure may be considerably higher.
Among these bundlers are employees of big-name firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Citigroup.
It’s worth emphasizing that for all the talk about grass-roots fundraising by the Obama campaign, the bundlers are a major part of the effort. The data released so far shows that at least one-third of all the money raised was sent in by a bundler, according to CRP.
The strong support for Obama from the financial services industries is not new. In 2008, employees of Goldman Sachs contributed more to Obama than employees of any other company.
None of this is to say that all of these bundlers are helping Obama exclusively out of self-interest – say, to protect their industries (or tax advantages) from tightened regulation. But it certainly prompts the question: If Obama wins a second term with these donors in his corner, how robustly will he follow through on his populist rhetoric?"
What is he hiding from?
Another excellent op-ed piece by Nicholas D Kristof in The New York Times - republished here in full.
"In a filthy Ethiopian prison that is overridden with lice, fleas and huge rats, two Swedes are serving an 11-year prison sentence for committing journalism.
Martin Schibbye, 31, and Johan Persson, 29, share a narrow bed, one man’s head beside the other’s feet. Schibbye once woke up to find a rat mussing his hair.
The prison is a violent, disease-ridden place, with inmates fighting and coughing blood, according to Schibbye’s wife, Linnea Schibbye Steiner, who last met with her husband in December. It is hot in the daytime and freezing cold at night, and the two Swedes are allowed no mail or phone calls, she said. Fortunately, she added, the 250 or so Ethiopian prisoners jammed in the cell protect the two journalists, pray for them and jokingly call their bed “the Swedish embassy.”
What was the two men’s crime? Their offense was courage. They sneaked into the Ogaden region to investigate reports of human rights abuses.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s increasingly tyrannical ruler, seemed to be sending a signal to the world’s journalists: Don’t you dare mess with me!
So the only proper response is a careful look at Meles’s worsening repression. Sadly, this repression is abetted by acquiescence from Washington and by grants from aid organizations.
Those Swedish journalists will probably be released early because of international pressure. But there will be no respite for the countless Ethiopians who face imprisonment, torture and rape.
I’m in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, and so is Meles. I’ve been pursuing him for the last few days, trying to confront him and ask him about his worsening pattern of brutality.
He has refused to see me, so I enlisted my Twitter followers to report Meles sightings. I want to ask him why he has driven more journalists into exile over the last decade than any other leader in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York City.
Meles has done genuine good in fighting poverty. He has some excellent officials under him, including a superb health minister, and Ethiopia’s economy is making progress in health and agriculture. Ethiopia is full of aid organizations, and it has a close intelligence and military relationship with the United States government.
Yet since 2005, when an initial crackdown left 200 protesters dead and 30,000 detained, Meles has steadily tightened his grip. A Human Rights Watch report this month noted that the government is forcibly removing tens of thousands of people from their rural homes to artificial villages where they risk starvation. Those who resist endure arrests, beatings or worse.
“The repression is getting worse,” notes Tamerat Negera, who fled to the United States after the newspaper he edited was closed down in 2009. “His vision seems an attempt to root out any dissent.”
Meles has criminalized dissent, with a blogger named Eskinder Nega now facing terrorism charges, which could mean a death sentence. His true crime was calling on the government to allow free speech and end torture.
Appallingly, the Meles regime uses foreign food aid to punish his critics. Ethiopia is one of the world’s largest recipients of development aid, receiving about $3 billion annually, with the United States one of its largest donors. This money does save lives. But it also “underwrites repression in Ethiopia,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.
Families and entire areas of the country are deliberately starved unless they back the government, human rights groups have shown. In Ethiopia, the verb “to starve” is transitive.
Look, I’m a huge advocate of smart aid to fight global poverty. But donors and aid groups need to ensure that their aid doesn’t buttress repression.
The Meles regime, run largely by a coterie from his own minority Tigrayan ethnicity, has been particularly savage in the Ogaden region, where it faces an armed uprising. When Jeffrey Gettleman, a colleague at The New York Times, went to the Ogaden in 2007, he found a pattern of torture and rape. The government then arrested Gettleman and two colleagues, detaining them for five days in harsh conditions.
The two Swedish reporters illegally entered the Ogaden and met a rebel group to examine that human rights wasteland. In December, they were sentenced to 11-year terms.
Steiner, Schibbye’s wife, said of the harsh conditions: “Eleven years in an Ethiopian prison is equal to life, because you do not survive that long.”
Amnesty International says that in the last 11 months, the government has arrested at least 114 Ethiopian journalists and opposition politicians. It described this as “the most far-reaching crackdown on freedom of expression seen in many years in Ethiopia.”
Prime Minister Meles, you may have dodged me in Davos, but your brutality toward Swedish, American and Ethiopian journalists will not silence the world’s media. You’re just inviting more scrutiny."
"In a filthy Ethiopian prison that is overridden with lice, fleas and huge rats, two Swedes are serving an 11-year prison sentence for committing journalism.
Martin Schibbye, 31, and Johan Persson, 29, share a narrow bed, one man’s head beside the other’s feet. Schibbye once woke up to find a rat mussing his hair.
The prison is a violent, disease-ridden place, with inmates fighting and coughing blood, according to Schibbye’s wife, Linnea Schibbye Steiner, who last met with her husband in December. It is hot in the daytime and freezing cold at night, and the two Swedes are allowed no mail or phone calls, she said. Fortunately, she added, the 250 or so Ethiopian prisoners jammed in the cell protect the two journalists, pray for them and jokingly call their bed “the Swedish embassy.”
What was the two men’s crime? Their offense was courage. They sneaked into the Ogaden region to investigate reports of human rights abuses.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s increasingly tyrannical ruler, seemed to be sending a signal to the world’s journalists: Don’t you dare mess with me!
So the only proper response is a careful look at Meles’s worsening repression. Sadly, this repression is abetted by acquiescence from Washington and by grants from aid organizations.
Those Swedish journalists will probably be released early because of international pressure. But there will be no respite for the countless Ethiopians who face imprisonment, torture and rape.
I’m in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, and so is Meles. I’ve been pursuing him for the last few days, trying to confront him and ask him about his worsening pattern of brutality.
He has refused to see me, so I enlisted my Twitter followers to report Meles sightings. I want to ask him why he has driven more journalists into exile over the last decade than any other leader in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York City.
Meles has done genuine good in fighting poverty. He has some excellent officials under him, including a superb health minister, and Ethiopia’s economy is making progress in health and agriculture. Ethiopia is full of aid organizations, and it has a close intelligence and military relationship with the United States government.
Yet since 2005, when an initial crackdown left 200 protesters dead and 30,000 detained, Meles has steadily tightened his grip. A Human Rights Watch report this month noted that the government is forcibly removing tens of thousands of people from their rural homes to artificial villages where they risk starvation. Those who resist endure arrests, beatings or worse.
“The repression is getting worse,” notes Tamerat Negera, who fled to the United States after the newspaper he edited was closed down in 2009. “His vision seems an attempt to root out any dissent.”
Meles has criminalized dissent, with a blogger named Eskinder Nega now facing terrorism charges, which could mean a death sentence. His true crime was calling on the government to allow free speech and end torture.
Appallingly, the Meles regime uses foreign food aid to punish his critics. Ethiopia is one of the world’s largest recipients of development aid, receiving about $3 billion annually, with the United States one of its largest donors. This money does save lives. But it also “underwrites repression in Ethiopia,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.
Families and entire areas of the country are deliberately starved unless they back the government, human rights groups have shown. In Ethiopia, the verb “to starve” is transitive.
Look, I’m a huge advocate of smart aid to fight global poverty. But donors and aid groups need to ensure that their aid doesn’t buttress repression.
The Meles regime, run largely by a coterie from his own minority Tigrayan ethnicity, has been particularly savage in the Ogaden region, where it faces an armed uprising. When Jeffrey Gettleman, a colleague at The New York Times, went to the Ogaden in 2007, he found a pattern of torture and rape. The government then arrested Gettleman and two colleagues, detaining them for five days in harsh conditions.
The two Swedish reporters illegally entered the Ogaden and met a rebel group to examine that human rights wasteland. In December, they were sentenced to 11-year terms.
Steiner, Schibbye’s wife, said of the harsh conditions: “Eleven years in an Ethiopian prison is equal to life, because you do not survive that long.”
Amnesty International says that in the last 11 months, the government has arrested at least 114 Ethiopian journalists and opposition politicians. It described this as “the most far-reaching crackdown on freedom of expression seen in many years in Ethiopia.”
Prime Minister Meles, you may have dodged me in Davos, but your brutality toward Swedish, American and Ethiopian journalists will not silence the world’s media. You’re just inviting more scrutiny."
The Public Eye Awards...to corporate villians
There are villians out there - and they aren't necessarily human. Corporations can be too. The Public Eye Awards have been given and are reported on here on CommonDreams.
"Brazilian mining giant Vale and UK-based Barclays bank were given the dubious honor of being the top vote-getters in this year's survey asking participants to name the world's most destructive international corporations. The results of the survey are gathered by The Public Eye, an effort organized jointly by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland, and announced annually at an awards ceremony held during the World Economic Forums's gathering in the Swiss town of Davos.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University, speaks during the 'Public Eye Awards' on the sideline of the 42nd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland. "With these nominations," he said, "Some of the worst examples of corporate irresponsibility in the last year have been identified."
The purpose of the awards, according to the The Public Eye website, are to highlight "the particularly flagrant human rights abuses and environmental harm by corporations."
"The deregulation of world markets has greatly expanded the range of transnational corporations. This change has come about at such a rapid pace that national laws have long lost their ability to impose an orderly framework. The voluntary restraint or social/environmental commitment pledged by companies is often not worth the glossy paper it is printed on. Patents that price life-saving drugs out of reach of poor populations, natural resources exploited without regard for the local environment, or workers exploited ruthlessly in a race to the bottom, you name it – there is nothing that the global players assembled in Davos will not do to improve their bottom line. It is more important than ever to remind corporations of their social and environmental responsibility. We want a legal framework that will hold them accountable for their practices."
"Brazilian mining giant Vale and UK-based Barclays bank were given the dubious honor of being the top vote-getters in this year's survey asking participants to name the world's most destructive international corporations. The results of the survey are gathered by The Public Eye, an effort organized jointly by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland, and announced annually at an awards ceremony held during the World Economic Forums's gathering in the Swiss town of Davos.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University, speaks during the 'Public Eye Awards' on the sideline of the 42nd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland. "With these nominations," he said, "Some of the worst examples of corporate irresponsibility in the last year have been identified."
The purpose of the awards, according to the The Public Eye website, are to highlight "the particularly flagrant human rights abuses and environmental harm by corporations."
"The deregulation of world markets has greatly expanded the range of transnational corporations. This change has come about at such a rapid pace that national laws have long lost their ability to impose an orderly framework. The voluntary restraint or social/environmental commitment pledged by companies is often not worth the glossy paper it is printed on. Patents that price life-saving drugs out of reach of poor populations, natural resources exploited without regard for the local environment, or workers exploited ruthlessly in a race to the bottom, you name it – there is nothing that the global players assembled in Davos will not do to improve their bottom line. It is more important than ever to remind corporations of their social and environmental responsibility. We want a legal framework that will hold them accountable for their practices."
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Michael Hastings on his new book
Michael Hastings, now a veteran author at his young age, speaks to Harper's Magazine in a Q & A about his latest book, "The Operators".
4. Your book pays at least as much attention to the Pentagon press corps and its relationship with power as it does to Stanley McChrystal and his team, and you write that after your article ran, you found that you had few problems dealing with military and political figures, but your relations with many of your fellow journalists had been poisoned. Why?
The original article contained an implicit criticism of a few of my colleagues, so I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the backlash. They would have ignored the implicit criticisms if they could have, but the story garnered too much attention. All of a sudden Jon Stewart is on the Daily Show saying, “Hey, you other guys suck.” I think that embarrassed a number of folks who weren’t used to being embarrassed. They are accustomed to being the unquestioned journalistic authorities of these wars. And, as a general rule, war correspondents are a competitive and catty breed. Put ten war reporters at a dinner table and one of them leaves the room, seven others at the table will tell you the guy is a dick, she misbehaves with sources, he’s a sketchy womanizer, he can’t be trusted, he makes stuff up, she doesn’t deserve this or that. Usually—it’s such a small, tight-knit community—that kind of dirty laundry is kept secret among the “luckless tribe,” as one reporter once described us. That’s the micro level.
On the macro level, there was something much larger than myself, or Rolling Stone, or McChrystal. It had to do with how the media, as a whole, had been covering these wars. And despite the best efforts of a number of excellent journalists, on stories from WMDs to the escalation in Afghanistan, we’ve done a pretty spotty job, I think. I also came to consider the Pentagon press corps not as a watchdog of the Pentagon, but an extension of the Pentagon. This was a critical insight for me.
The accountant....who, er, can't count!
Puzzling indeed! truthdig poses a valid question.....
Why the Republicans chose Mitch Daniels—the Indiana governor who once thrilled right-wing pundits as a 2012 hopeful—to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address is puzzling. His uninspiring remarks surely killed the Daniels fad, revived lately as Republicans fret over the unappetizing choices available in their primaries.
By shining the spotlight on Daniels, the Republicans risked losing much more than a political rescue fantasy. He isn’t merely a politician who looks like an accountant; he actually was an accountant—or at least he played one during the Bush years, when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Listening to him drone on about fiscal rectitude just might have reminded voters of the true source of our national problems.
“Mitch Daniels ... Isn’t he the former Bush budget director who said the Iraq War would cost $50 billion when it ended up costing $3 trillion? The bureaucrat who promoted the Bush tax cuts when we were fighting two wars? The one whose budget projections were so fraudulent that he predicted federal surpluses in 2004 and 2005? Why the hell should we listen to him criticize Obama?”
Gingrich: This man for president?
No comment called for - other than to ponder how anyone can even remotely consider Gingrich a contender for president of the USA let alone take the man seriously. AlterNet reports:
Sometimes a political story comes along that is so bananas that even a blogger who trades in snark is rendered speechless. To wit, I present without comment Newt Gingrich's latest campaign promise: to colonize the moon. For America.
Via the Miami Herald blog (emphasis added):
Gingrich is delivering a speech heavy on space and acknowledged at the outset to being a space geek: "I'm old enough that I used to read missiles and rockets magazine," he said. He's mentioned Romney just once, to say that Romney has poked fun at him for dreaming big about space.
He pledged to be a president who would deliver "relentless pressure to be faster... more innovative" in the space industry.
"By the end of my second term," he said to laughter and cheers. "We will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American."
"Does that mean I'm a visionary? You betcha," he said to applause.
He noted he was "attacked the other night for being grandiose," and noted that the Wright Brothers dreaming of winged flight were grandiose, as was John F. Kennedy for wanting to get a man on the moon.
"Americans are instinctively grandiose," he said to applause.
There you have it, folks. This is your GOP presidential frontrunner.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
ACTA? It will probably affect you.....
Never heard of ACTA? Most people haven't, but its implications and the effect on how we all use the internet could be both widespread and detrimental. CommonDreams reports:
While there was massive attention last week to online anti-piracy bills -- SOPA in the House and the PIPA in the Senate -- ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has received scant media attention yet poses a tremendous threat to online freedom.
RT reports on how the ACTA treaty will work:
Under this new treaty, Internet Service Providers will police all data passing through them, making them legally responsible for what their users do online. And should you do something considered "breach of copyright" like, for instance, getting a tattoo of a brand logo, taking a photo and posting it somewhere, you may be disconnected from the Internet, fined or even jailed.
This, of course, threatens the entire founding idea of the Internet – the free sharing of information. But ACTA doesn't stop there. It goes beyond the Internet, bearing down on generic drugs and food patents. If passed, ACTA will enforce a global standard for seed patenting, which would wipe out independent, local farmers and make the world completely dependent on the patent owners (read "big corporations") for supplies.
America: No equal justice before the law
Glenn Greenwald, constitutional lawyers and writer / blogger on Salon often writes on legal issues. He does so again in his latest piece and concludes that this basically what so-called justice in the US comes down to:
The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:
(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.
(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.
(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.
(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.
So, which country has the greatest press freedom?
Many will be surprised to learn that despite what Americans might think, according to a Report just out from Reporters Without Borders freedom of the press is not the best in the USA. To the contrary? So, what does the Report find?
So much for the land of the free: the U.S. fell more than two dozen slots in the annual Reporters Without Borders press-freedom index, down from 20th in 2010 to 47th in 2012. Finland and Norway topped the list for the second year in a row as other European nations and the U.S. took hits for their brutal treatment of reporters covering global protests. The U.S.’s long fall was primarily related to the 25 journalists being arrested and, in some cases, beaten by police while covering Occupy Wall Street. The report also mentioned the Obama administration’s intense efforts to keep large amounts of government information secret. But the U.S. wasn't the only target: RWB chided the U.K. for its protection of law-breakers in the News of the World scandal and for its “surreal law” allowing the world to sue British media outlets in British courts.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Hey! Haven't we been here before?
AS always Robert Fisk right on the money in his latest op-ed piece in The Independent.
Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.
Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But ...
Let's take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel's intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria's, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.
In fact, we don't know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it's amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because "the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs" and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator's wish. Siemens – not Russia – built the Bushehr nuclear facility.
And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was "the work of the Devil". Only when Saddam invaded Iran – with our Western encouragement – and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.
All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West's survival, for democracy, etc, etc.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad – here again, I quote Netanyahu – is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads – all too real and now numbering almost 300 – disappear from the story. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are helping the Syrian regime destroy its opponents; they might like to – but there is no proof of this.
Iran: The real beneficary of sanctions. The Revolutionary Guards
The West may think it smart to impose sanctions on Iran because it continues to develop a nuclear capability, but as this piece in SpiegelOnLin points out the real beneficiaries of the embargo are Iran's Revolutionary Guards. That aside, if Israel and other countries can have nuclear weapons - and in the case of Israel keep on threatening Iran - why shouldn't the Iranians be allowed to have nuclear capacity? In any event there is still no evidence to contradict the Iranians who keep on saying they are developing their nuclear capacity for peaceful purposes.
The EU has banned oil imports from Iran to try and pressure the regime into making concessions over its controversial nuclear program. But even though the Iranian economy is suffering, Tehran is refusing to give ground. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guards are profiting from the sanctions.,/blockquote>The so-called oil weapon has been part of the arsenal of international power politics ever since the 1970s. In 1973, the oil-exporting countries in the Middle East cut back daily production in a bid to force the West to abandon its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Iran was among the states involved in that embargo. Now, almost four decades later, oil is again being used as a weapon -- with the roles reversed.On Monday, European Union foreign ministers agreed to ban the import of petroleum and petrochemical products from Iran from July 1, 2012. New investments in Iranian oil companies will no longer be permitted, nor can equipment and technology necessary for the oil industry be exported to Iran any more. Financial sanctions will also be strengthened, and a large chunk of the assets of the Iranian Central Bank will be frozen. In addition, the US Treasury has put the Iranian Tejarat Bank on its blacklist. The bank was "one of Iran's few remaining access points to the international financial system," according to the department. The embargo is designed to force Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. Negotiations between Iran on one side and the group of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China on the other have been on hold for a year. Tehran's chief negotiator, Saeed Jalili, has made recognizing Iran's right to enrich uranium a precondition for a resumption of the talks.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Gingrich isn't a debater! He is a racist pure and simple
Forget about Gingrich being a debater. He is no more than a racist pandering to the lowest common denominator. He is also a man withour scruples or a sense of propriety. And let's not forget the inabilty to be truthful. Counterpunch puts things into context about Gingrich and the GOP.
South Carolina. It’s going to be the state that keeps on giving to President Barack Obama. I’m not talking votes; I’m talking hate. Newt Gingrich’s primary win has the pundits praising his “debating skills,” but the less prudish among us can be clear: Gingrich’s skills aren’t rhetorical; they’re racial. He’s feeble at striking down his opponents’ arguments; what he’s great at is digging up his audience’s racial rage. It worked for the former Speaker in South Carolina; it’ll work against the Democrats all year.,
War with Washington, the “best food stamp president,” a slap down of the one African American moderator (“First, Juan…) Newt Gingrich had the GOP crowd on its feet in Myrtle Beach last Monday with exactly the same linguistic bombast that worked so well to end federal income support for poor people when he was speaker of the House. For the Republican candidates it’s all about looking presidential and Newt Gingrich was so confident about what activists of the South Carolina GOP want in the White House that he re-cut his joust with Juan Williams for a campaign ad as if to say “Vote Newt! He Can Beat Up A Black Man!” Cap that with his attack on CNN’s John King and you have vintage Gingrich: beating up the straw black man – and the straw liberal broadcaster who coddles him too.
As I wrote in At The Tea Party… it’s sick but satisfying for Democrats to be reminded just how much racial resentment and flat-out racism remains, especially if it remains someplace else – far from where they are. Tea Party hate was never anything super special; its roots lay in the same old dirt that the GOP’s drawn on for decades, and not just the GOP, either.
The GOP’s racism is inexcusable, and let’s face it, no one on the stage with Newt muttered a peep to hush him. But it’s not only the Right that keeps alive the good ol’ boy idea that America is special, stand-alone, white and Christian. As a nation we keep our racist bombast warm because it’s just so convenient when it comes to cutting help for the poor, ending affirmative action, even waging war. (“Fight them over there, so they don’t fight us over here” and so on.)
Iraq: "Mission Accomplished". Definitely Not!
If the West had some sort of pipe-dream of deposing Saddam in Iraq to then see the country stabilised, the were way of the mark and track. It is barely a month since the main contingents of military pulled out of Iraq - and the country is seemingly falling apart in all manner of ways. CommonDreams reports........
The human rights situation in Iraq is worse now than it was a year ago, Human Rights Watch argues in a new report out Sunday.
Human Rights Watch says it uncovered a secret Iraqi prison where detainees were beaten, hung upside down and given electric shocks to sensitive parts of their bodies. The group based its claims on the testimony of detainees themselves. The group says the forces who control the facility report to the military office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
From the report:
BAGHDAD – Iraq cracked down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2012.
In February, Human Rights Watch uncovered a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to the military office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity.
“Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state.” [...]
Monday, January 23, 2012
Attacking Iran: The drums are sounding louder and louder
With an election year in the USA and the GOP candidates for President falling over themselves to be seen as arch supporters of Israel and the need to attack Iran, this report from Israel National News,whilst not surprising, should be of concern to all right-thinking people. All the indications are that Israel under "cover" of the politics in the USA will attack Iran sooner rather than later. Some pundits suggest next month as most likely for a variety of reasons. The fall-out, in all manner of ways, from any sort of attack on Iran cannot begin to be evaluated.
Israeli officials told visiting USS Chief Joint of Staffs Martin Dempsey that it would give President Barack Obama no more than 12 hours notice if and when it attacks Iran, The London Times reported Sunday.
The Netanyahu government also will not coordinate with the United States an attack on the Islamic Republic, according to the report, the latest in a number of suposed scenarios concerning cooperation or lack of it between Jerusalem and Washington.
It is left to speculation whether the rumors are based on facts or are leaked by officials to mask the possibility of secret military coordination.
The London Times said its sources explained that that Israel fears that President Obama would try to torpedo an Israel attack if more notice were given because he is concerned that Iran will respond by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, sparking a rise in the price of oil that could cripple Western economies. If the attack were to occur in the next 10 months, it would put President Obama in a tight spot on the eve of his bid for re-election.
President Shimon Peres told Dempsey, "I am sure that in this fight [against Iran] we will emerge victorious. It is a fight that does not belong exclusively to the United States or Israel, but a global struggle to create a safe world for all peoples.”
Waste of a precious resource.....food!
Travelling in the USA it is more than dismaying to see the waste of food. Waste of water - huge glasses of water which are, in the main, not drunk, or at least very little, when served with meals - and piles of food left on plates. The meals themselves are, in the first place, far too large. It is no wonder that obsesity is rife.
It is distressing to think that whilst people in many places around the world are dying of starvation, or go to bed each day hungry, the world is generally wasting an enormous amount of food.....as this piece from the IHT so clearly details.
Last week, the British retailer Marks & Spencer introduced a new packaging strip aimed at making strawberries shipped in from overseas last two days longer. Eventually, the company hopes to use the technology on all types of berries. Marks & Spencer says that because its strawberries will stay fresh longer, consumers can reduce food waste at home.
This is a modest initiative, but it is the latest in a difficult global battle against food waste. Around the world, a staggering one-third of food — or about 1.3 billion tons each year — is wasted, a study commissioned by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated last year.
Environmentalists have campaigned aggressively against the waste of water and energy, but little attention is paid to the squandering of a product, food, that uses plenty of both.
The Food and Agriculture research, which was carried out at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, estimated that in Europe and North America, 280 to 300 kilograms of food, or 620 to 660 pounds, per person are wasted each year. That is more than twice the figure for developing regions like sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
In the developed world, consumers account for about one-third of the waste, discarding even food that is still edible.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
An anniversary of a shameful and horrific decision
Lest we forget and as was said at the end of WW2 "never again". Sad to say carnage, the ravages of war and genocide continue, unabated, to this day.
From Spiegel International:
Germany somberly marked the 70th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference on Friday, with the country's president saying the meeting that laid out plans for the Holocaust still caused "anger and shame."
At the same villa on the shore of Berlin's Wannsee lake where the original meeting took place, now a museum, President Christian Wulff told an audience that even though many years have passed, Germany should never be allowed to forget its responsibility for the genocide of some 6 million European Jews. "Therefore it is important and a national task to keep the memory alive," he said.
On Jan. 20, 1942, high-level members of the Nazi party and other bureaucrats met at the villa to orchestrate large-scale plans for the extermination of Jews. At the time, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered, but many historians believe that the conference was the point at which Adolf Hitler's plans for their industrialized killing were laid out explicitly for his top officials.
These men included Nazi party members and members of the SS, the party's military force, which was to oversee the plans.
"This place and the name 'Wannsee' has become a symbol for the bureaucratically organized decision between life worth living and life not worth living, for state-organized extermination, for the planned and official systematic killing of Europe's Jews," Wulff said.
No marriage made in heaven in Afghanistan
The writing has been on the wall for some time - at least for those observers of what is really going on in Afghanistan - but it now seems that there are real tensions between the administration in Afghanistan and NATO forces, as this report in The Guardian so clearly spells out.
Mutual mistrust and contempt between local and foreign forces in Afghanistan that often borders on hatred is one of the main reasons why Afghan troops increasingly turn their guns on their Nato comrades, a damning report has found.
The research, commissioned by the US military, said American soldiers enrage their Afghan colleagues with what the report describes as extreme arrogance, bullying and "crude behaviour".
It also heavily criticised as "profoundly intellectually dishonest" the Nato claims that the killing of alliance troops by Afghan soldiers is extremely rare.
The data suggests incidents such as the killing on Friday of four French soldiers "reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between 'allies' in modern military history)".
It warned that the problem is now so serious that it is "provoking a crisis of confidence and trust among westerners training and working with Afghan National Security Forces" (ANSFs).
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Call for Israel to be pressured, not Iran
Writing on CommonDreams a professor of law suggests that it is Israel, not Iran, which ought to be pressured from its seeming intent to attack Iran.
Iran is not a threat to Israel’s security. Iran has not attacked any country in some 200 years. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup that replaced a democratic government in Iran with the vicious Shah. He ruled Iran with an iron hand for 25 years, wreaking torture and terror on Iranians while keeping Iran open to Western investment. When I visited Iran in 1978 as a human rights observer, there were dozens of U.S. corporations in downtown Tehran. One year later, the chickens came home to roost. The Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah, replacing him with a tyrannical theocracy that continues to violate the rights of the Iranian people. But that does not mean that Iran, if it does obtain nuclear weapons, will attack Israel. The Iranian government knows that Israel and the United States would retaliate with unimaginable military force that would devastate Iran and much of the Middle East.
Article 2 of the United Nations Charter requires the peaceful settlement of international disputes between Iran and the United States. Both the U.S. and Iran are signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, which states, “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.” Yet the United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran, dating back to the administration of President George W. Bush.
Security Council Resolution 687, that ended the first Gulf War, requires a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East. Israel, which reportedly has an arsenal of 200-300 nuclear weapons, stands in violation of that resolution. Israel refuses to sign the NPT, thus avoiding inspections by the IAEA. As Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull advocate in a recent op-ed in the Times, we should work toward a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, and that includes Israel. They cite a poll in which 65 percent of Israeli Jews think it would be best if neither Israel nor Iran had the bomb, even if that means Israel giving up its nukes.
AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Israel lobby in the United States, has tremendous support in the U.S. Congress. Even Zionist Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times last month that the standing ovation Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got in Congress “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” AIPAC also exerts considerable pressure on Obama to be tough on Iran. When the new Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff and the new head of CENTCOM told Obama late last year they were disappointed that he was not firmly opposing an Israeli strike on Iran, Obama replied that he “had no say over Israel” because “it is a sovereign country.”
Obama does indeed have a say – a strong say – over Israel. The United States has pledged $30 billion to Israel over the next 10 years. Obama should inform his counterparts in Israel that if it launches a military attack on Iran, the U.S. will withhold foreign aid from Israel. Although pressure from the neocons to support an Israeli attack on Iran will increase as the presidential elections draws near, Obama has a legal duty to refrain from actions that will lead to war with Iran.
Additionally, the U.N. Security Council, which has the duty to prevent threats to international peace and security, should order Israel and the United States to cease their aggressive provocation against Iran.
The same voices who brought us the illegal, tragic, and ill-advised war with Iraq will continue to try to dominate the national conversation with battle cries against Iran. It is up to us to prevail upon our elected officials to avoid a tragic conflagration in Iran by pressuring Israel to cease and desist.
Web darkness
The "protest" presently underway by various webs sites, such as Wikipedia, by going offline for 24 hours is to be both commended and supported. The legislation under consideration by the US Congress has consequences for all users of the www. The latest would seem to be that some legislators are backing off from their initial support for the legislation. Perhaps people-power can work!
Electronic Frontier explains what it is all about:
In addition to going after websites allegedly directly involved in copyright infringement, a proposal in SOPA will allow the government to target sites that simply provide information that could help users get around the bills’ censorship mechanisms. Such a provision would not only amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint against protected speech, but would severely damage online innovation. And contrary to claims by SOPA’s supporters, this provision—at least what’s been proposed so far—applies to all websites, even those in the U.S.
As First Amendment expert Marvin Ammori points out, “The language is pretty vague, but it appears all these companies must monitor their sites for anti-circumvention so they are not subject to court actions ‘enjoining’ them from continuing to provide ‘such product or service.’” That means social media sites like Facebook or YouTube—basically any site with user generated content—would have to police their own sites, forcing huge liability costs onto countless Internet companies. This is exactly why venture capitalists have said en masse they won’t invest in online startups if PIPA and SOPA pass. Websites would be forced to block anything from a user post about browser add-ons like DeSopa, to a simple list of IP addresses of already-blocked sites.
Perhaps worse, EFF has detailed how this provision would also decimate the open source software community. Anyone who writes or distributes Virtual Private Network, proxy, privacy or anonymization software would be negatively affected. This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around authoritarian regimes’ online censorship mechanisms. Ironically, SOPA would not only institute the same practices as these regimes, but would essentially outlaw the tools used by activists to circumvent censorship in countries like Iran and China as well.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
It's State-sponsored terrorism! Period!
Call it an assassination if you want, but the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists is State-sponsored terrorism by Israel, the USA or whichever country was involved. Period! The Guardian's op-piece puts the killings of Iranian's scientists into proper context.
On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.
Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.
"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."
These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.
Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").
Thus western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".
Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad.
Reality check! Facts on the ground......
Anyone who thought a 2 State solution was still possible between the Israelis and Palestinians has been oblivious to facts on the ground in the West Bank. As this piece from Tikun Olam clearly shows the realities are that the expansion of the so-called settlements makes a 2 State solution well-nigh impossible.
Yisrael HaYom published today one of the more stark and telling statistics about the ‘success’ of the Occupation: in 2011, 722,000 Israelis lived beyond the Green Line, including in settlements and East Jerusalem. This was a 5% increase over 2010. That means that 1 in every seven Israelis lives outside of 1967 borders and explains why the country is rapidly becoming a unitary state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Bibiton and the settlers themselves are overjoyed with this development because it means they can continue pursuing their Apartheid Jews-only State.
In that case, it becomes critical to begin thinking, indeed demanding that if Israel refuses to end the Occupation and cede almost all territory outside the 1967 borders to a Palestinian state, then it must accord all individuals living in “greater” Israel full citizenship and rights. We must stop talking about this as a possibility or eventuality, but as a reality. Israel must be given a stark choice. Either it’s one state from river to sea in the old Jabotinskyean anthem or the Occupation must end now.
Monday, January 16, 2012
America.....not so much the land of the free
Perhaps it's government hype, or what was at one time in the past, but as this piece on Information Clearing House so clearly shows, the USA is not a land with as much freedom as its citizens might think.
Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.
Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
War!
A blunt and very direct piece from CommonDreams:
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls the video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Afghans "utterly deplorable"; a Marine commander calls it "wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history."
But Gawker's Hamilton Nolan calls it a crock.
In a furious screed, he blasts the "outrage contest" underway, the "unceasing industrial strength violence being carried out in our names" that most of us ignore most of the time, and the hypocrisy of politicians who "sit in office chairs and start wars and wave flags as young men and women go off to kill and die" - and are never brought to account for their "monstrous, monstrous crime against humanity."
"Do you know what is worse than having your dead body urinated upon? Being killed. Being shot. Being bombed. Having your limbs blown off. Having your house incinerated by a drone-fired missile that you don't see until it explodes. Having your children blown up in their beds. Having your spouse killed. Having your hometown destroyed. Being displaced. Becoming a refugee. Having your entire life destroyed as a consequence of political forces far, far beyond your control."
Journalists. Reporters, commentators or merely stenographers?
Perhaps unwittingly, the Public Editor of The New York Times has opened out a question which has exercised many critical of the media for quite some time now. Are journalists "reporting" or merely stenographers of what they are told - often by Governments more than willing to manipulate the "news" or what the public wants to know? One thing is for certain. The public, who are entitled to be informed, need the likes of WikiLeaks - because you certainly can't governments, nor journalists for that matter, to tell us what we clearly are entiteld to know.
Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon takes up the issue.....
The New York Times‘ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered — as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma — whether news reporters “should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” That’s basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being “truth vigilantes”) is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory. Subsequent attempts to explain what he meant, along with a response from the NYT‘s Executive Editor, Jill Abramson, will only add fuel to the fire.
Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky both have excellent analyses of the Brisbane controversy — which, as they point out, sparked such intense reaction because it captured and inflamed long-standing anger toward media outlets for mindlessly amplifying statements without examining whether they’re true. As Stephen Colbert put it in his still-extraordinary 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home.” While reporters typically react with fury over the suggestion that they are stenographers, Brisbane was essentially posting that this is all they are, and then earnestly wondering aloud whether they should be anything more than that, as though it was some sort of exotic or edgy suggestion.
That most reporters faithfully follow the stenographer model — uncritically writing down what people say and then leaving it at that — is so obvious that it’s hardly worth the effort to demonstrate it. There are important exceptions to this practice even at the most establishment media outlets, where diligent and intrepid investigative journalism exposes the secret corruption of the most powerful. But by and large, most establishment news coverage consists of announcing that someone or other has made some claim, then (at most) adding that someone else has made a conflicting claim, and then walking away. This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).
Saturday, January 14, 2012
The manifold ramifications and layers to Gitmo 10 years on
Harper's Magazine publishes a piece by Scott Horton on the manifold ramifications of Gitmo 10 years on from its establishment. It is re-published here, in full, as the impact of Gitmo cannot be over-emphasised. Of course, there is now the explosive video of US marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters. Great for building any sort of rapport with Muslim nations, notably Afghanistan.
On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners from the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” were landed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a forty-five-square-mile enclave at the eastern end of Cuba that America secured in a 1903 treaty and has held ever since. Today marks the tenth anniversary of U.S. detention operations there. In the intervening years, the prison population swelled, with a total of 779 prisoners having been held there at some point. Some 600 were released (mostly by the Bush Administration), and of the 171 still held there, a majority have actually been cleared for release. These eighty-nine men are something of a political ping-pong ball between Republicans, who continue to do everything in their power to keep Gitmo open and to block the prisoners’ release, and the Obama White House, which seems intent on keeping questions surrounding Gitmo out of the headlines. Obama pledged during his campaign to close Gitmo within his first year as president, but this pledge has gone unfulfilled—in part because he was slow to act, but largely as a result of congressional obstruction.
Most of the discussion about Gitmo continues to focus on prisoner abuse, though it is clear that conditions for prisoners improved somewhat during the Bush Administration’s final two years, and that under the Obama Administration, the physical condition of the facilities and the day-to-day treatment of prisoners have prompted a decrease in questions from human rights advocates.
What lessons can be drawn from the American experiment at Guantánamo? Two have consistently garnered less media attention than they merit. The first is that, ten years out, the United States still has not tried any Gitmo detainees as high-profile leaders of the 9/11 plot. Five of the prisoners have been charged, and the evidence assembled against some of them seems impressive. But the failure of the United States to act quickly against the instigators of 9/11 by charging them with crimes, presenting clear and persuasive evidence of their involvement, and convicting them is an inexcusable one, shared by the Bush and Obama administrations. Plenty of excuses have been offered, including the need to extract intelligence from prisoners, the need to conduct thorough investigations, the complications created by the use of torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” on key witnesses, and legal issues surrounding military commissions. Most of these problems are of the government’s own making, and none of them adequately explains the shameful loss of time in bringing justice to the victims and the country as a whole. Gitmo will forever be associated with the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied.
The second underreported lesson of Gitmo relates to the poisonous effect of partisan politics. No one expected matters as deeply felt as 9/11 to remain entirely outside of partisan politics, but the idea of Gitmo was cast soon after the attack, amid a political campaign. Republicans made it an issue in the midterm elections of 2002, marketing it as a “robust” or “proactive” approach to defending the nation against terrorists. The message worked marvelously, scoring enormous gains for the G.O.P.
Unknown to most Americans, though, just before the fall vote, representatives of the CIA and FBI went to the White House to break the bad news: Gitmo had been filled not with dangerous Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but with a bunch of nobodies. Political considerations plainly dictated the response. The government would not review the prisoners’ cases or grant releases, we were told; instead, “the president has determined that they are all enemy combatants.” Not only did this approach deny facts later borne out in case reviews and habeas petitions, it aggressively demonized the Gitmo population in order to create a sort of political insurance policy.
The Bush Administration’s shameful response continues to distort the domestic political dialogue about Guantánamo, which amounts to an extended effort to avoid accountability for a series of stupid political mistakes. In the end, it has been effective domestic politics. But it has cost America enormously on the global stage, diminishing the country’s influence and degrading its moral image to an unprecedented degree. This, more than any other reason, is why Obama’s pledge to close Gitmo was fundamentally wise, and why Obama should be reminded of that pledge and pressed to bring it to fruition.
Newt condemns Romney for speaking......French?
That the candidates for the GOP nomination as candidate in America's presidential election later this year are a diverse and unimpressive bunch with few credentials, if any, to have them "installed" in the White House, has only been confirmed, yet again, with ths jibe by Newt Gringich about Mick Romney - as The Daily Beast reports:
Well, Newt just lost the French vote. In a bizarre online ad titled “The French Connection” that’s sure to go viral—for all the wrong reasons—Gingrich’s campaign emphasizes the similarities between Massachusetts politicians Mitt Romney and John Kerry. The ad hits on Romney’s record as a governor who donated to Democrats, as a moderate, and then suddenly shifts gears in its final moment. “He’ll say anything to win,” the narrator says. “And just like John Kerry, he speaks French too.” What follows is not for the faint of heart—a 2002 video of Romney speaking about the Winter Olympics in French.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Aah, the French!
MPS is travelling and enjoying wonderful unseasonal winter weather - days of sun and people in the parks and even eating outdoors at restaurants - in the ever-enchanting city, Paris. Yes, the French do how to "do" things with style and flair. However, their politics are another thing altogether, as John Vinocur details in his op-ed piece for The International Herald Tribune.
What kind of country would France be if it abandoned its 35-hour work week (it actually kills jobs), set up an affirmative action program for its Muslim immigrants (featuring a zero-tolerance framework for their assimilation), and scaled back its ambitions for Europe as a global political force to more attainable goals?
Roughly 100 days before voting in an elimination round April 22, and then in a final ballot on May 6, the French presidential election campaign so far involves back and forth on possible variations in French comfort — tinkering with, adjusting and applying new coats of paint to familiar and nonthreatening aspects of national life.
There’s something surreal here. Neither Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been a brash president for the last five years, or the presumedly bland François Hollande, named Socialist candidate on Oct. 16, is talking about the perspective for painful change.
You can’t argue about its necessity. In 2012, France lives with:
•An unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, a looming recession, and a likely loss of its triple-AAA credit rating.
•A report last year that detailed the emergence of Muslim immigrant communities resembling parallel societies, while a Le Monde poll showed that 61 percent of the French regard Muslim integration as failed because of its refusal by the immigrants themselves.
•A hardened notion among the French that, with the E.U. debt crisis, their country has clearly become a subordinate player to Germany.
For all of France’s accomplishments and uniqueness, a sense of lost identity and decline resonates.
Iran: Dumb "diplomacy" [!]
Where to begin? Do the Israelis and Americans really think that bumping-off Iranian nuclear scientists is the path to restraining or inhibiting the Iranians from having their own nuclear capability? If so, it's plain dumb and the consequences for everyone in the world, not only in the Middle East, far from positive. Apart from possible military action, a blockade of the Strait of Hommus would send oil prices skyward. Just what the world needs as economies teeter in all manner of ways. Mondonweiss takes up the issue.....
Does the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist on the streets of Tehran earlier today endanger a former Marine who was lately convicted in Tehran of spying? Even the Washington Post's Tehran bureau chief, Thomas Erdbrink, is reporting that it does.
And if it turns out that Israel killed that scientist, as its officials have hinted triumphantly, what does this mean about the danger to American lives flowing from Israeli militarism? What does this say about Israel's concern for American lives?
Maybe most important: What does this killing do to international efforts to try and cool the Iranian issue before it boils over? Did Israel just spike those efforts?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
The Mama of all Big Brothers
Forget about 1984! The project the FBI presently has underway will dwarf any thoughts of 1984. AlterNet reports on what should be concern to all those "caught" in what the FBI is doing - and proud of it! And this under a so called "liberal" US President.
The FBI claims that their fingerprint database (IAFIS) is the "largest biometric database in the world," containing records for over a hundred million people. But that's nothing compared to the agency's plans for Next Generation Identification (NGI), a massive, billion-dollar upgrade that will hold iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.
Ambitions for the final product are candidly spelled out in an agency report: "The FBI recognizes a need to collect as much biometric data as possible within information technology systems, and to make this information accessible to all levels of law enforcement, including International agencies." (A stack of documents related to NGI was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights and others after a FOIA lawsuit.)
It'll be "Bigger -- Better -- Faster," the FBI brags on their Web site. Unsurprisingly, civil libertarians have concerns about the privacy ramifications of a bigger, better, faster way to track Americans using their body parts.
The people "on the other side" the Americans ignore
Anyone reading American newspapers or viewing its TV news - in itself an oxymoron! - will have seen that any reporting on wars, be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever, only record things from an American perspective. Like, how many casualties or deaths the US suffered. Those on the "other side" of the conflict? Rarely, if ever, mentioned. It's a subject, somewhat surprisingly published in The Washington Post taken up in this piece:
As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another,” and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq. He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.
This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Iraq. There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam. These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.
The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 millioncivilians and soldiers.
Our lack of acknowledgment is less oversight than habit, a self-reflective reaction to the horrors of war and an American tradition that goes back decades. We consider ourselves a generous and compassionate nation, and often we are. From the Asian tsunami in 2004 toHurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Americans have been quick to open their pocketbooks and their hearts.
However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops. When concern for the native populations is expressed, it tends to be more strategic than empathetic, as with Gen. David H. Petraeus’s acknowledgment in late 2006 that harsh U.S. tactics were alienating Iraqi civilians and undermining Operation Iraqi Freedom. The switch to counterinsurgency, which involves more restraint by the military, was billed as a change that would save the U.S. mission, not primarily as a strategy to reduce civilian deaths.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Dumb and dumber
To claim that the US is really "great" on foreign policy is an oxymoron. Often driven by ignorance and expediency, or vested interests, in most situations the interests of the USA are, in the end, poorly served. The latest idiocy follows from Congress having embargoed aid to the Palestinians. Why? Because they had the temerity to seek Statehood at the UN. The fallout is reflected in this report from Yahoo News.
Ramallah: It's quiet time on Palestinian Sesame Street.
The iconic children's program, known as "Sharaa Simsim" in Arabic, has been put on hold for the 2012 season because of a funding freeze by the U.S. Congress.
Sharaa Simsim is one of many U.S.-funded Palestinian programs suffering after Congress froze the transfer of nearly $200 million to the U.S. Agency for International Development in October. The suspension aimed to punish the Palestinians for appealing to the United Nations for statehood.
The funding suspension — affecting hospitals, education, and government ministries that all rely on American aid — is breeding resentment and frustration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even among the most progressive organizations.
In the Ramallah offices of Sharaa Simsim on Thursday, the writing workshop room was empty and the set was closed.
"If we had funding, we would be writing scripts, we would be reviewing scripts, we would be hiring filmmakers to produce the videos," said executive producer Daoud Kuttab.Even as the freeze put Palestinian Sesame Street on hold, the State Department is investing $750,000 in the Israeli version of the show, which is now filming its newest season with an emphasis on teaching children the value of fairness.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
The Coalition of the Willing's deplorable "legacy" in Fallujah
There may be a certain degree of satisfaction all round that most military are now out of Iraq - and totally misplaced boasting about the success achieved in going into the country - but there is a legacy and dark side to the war, as AlJazeerareports:
While the US military has formally withdrawn from Iraq, doctors and residents of Fallujah are blaming weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorous used during two devastating US attacks on Fallujah in 2004 for what are being described as "catastrophic" levels of birth defects and abnormalities.
Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005.
"We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine," Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.
As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
The appalling state in which Afghanistan finds itself
The Americans, and their Allies, may be withdrawing from Afghanistan, but as this piece from CounterPunch so graphically details, they are leaving behind a country which can only best be described as a basket case.
Kabul sprawls like an injured lion. Its population has increased four-fold to 4.5 million over the past ten years. War refugees, fleeing the countryside for the relative safety of the citadel, find themselves in permanent slums (“Kabul Informal Settlements” in the bureaucratic argot). These slums (such as Chamane Babrack, Bagrami, Parwan Du, and Charahi Qambar) sit on hillsides or on the edges of Kabul, bursting with people whose lives have been measurably worsened by the ongoing conflict. The UN’s High Commission on Refugees and the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation squabble over definitions: which family has been displaced by war, and who is an economic migrant. These distinctions mean little to the 5.7 million people who have been displaced by the insecurity occasioned by the ten-year war. A friend who works in one of the UN agencies in Kabul tells me that matters have reached a crisis point. He has used the term “crisis” four times over the past few years.****
That disregard has become catastrophic in itself. The UN reports that most of the 7.3 million Afghans who now rely on emergency food assistance will not be able to access it (largely because pledges to the World Food Program have declined as a consequence of the world.****
The habits of imperialism forestall a genuine dialogue with and about Afghanistan. The United States will exit Afghanistan in the next few years. None of its promises of health and well-being, democracy and women’s rights will be realized. These failures cannot be placed on the culture of Afghanistan, for the country had been far along the road to its own kind of modernity by the 1960s. Fingers of blame for the catastrophe of Afghanistan in its most recent phase must point directly to the capitals of the G7, with the longest finger vibrating toward Washington, DC.
Oops! The Dome of the Rock just "disappeared"
FromCommonDreams:
Israel’s military rabbinate recently gave out educational packets to soldiers in honor of Hanukkah, or “The Festival of Jewish Heroism,” in which Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is shown bathed in holy light, but miraculously scrubbed clean of the Dome of the Rock, a major Islamic holy site. The IDF called criticism of the editing "ridiculous and biased." How do you make a people disappear? Let us count the ways.
Declaring war! On Harry Potter?
One ought not underestimate the intelligence of the Chinese, but to try and censor, as the authorities now want to do, whatever in this day and age of widespread technology - and with so many people to "cover" - just seems plain dumb. Surely restricting this or that will come to no good in the end. Yet, the Chinese now want to restrict so-called Western influences creeping into the country. Stephen Walt comments on FP:
Chinese President Hu Jintao waded into the culture wars yesterday, but not the same culture war that has distorted American politics. No, Hu's worried that Western powers are waging a cultural war against China, and that advanced Western weaponry like Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, and the Transformers franchise are eating away at the cultural foundations of Chinese unity. According to various news sources, he has called upon Communist Party leaders to expand China's own cultural output and achieve a global cultural influence "commensurate with its international status."
Forgive me, but China's leader sounds a lot like a stodgy high school principal trying to stop teenagers from wearing gangsta rap T-shirts, and telling the Music Department to get more kids into the marching band instead. More importantly, this campaign is a losing game. It's not that I think the Chinese people couldn't cast a larger cultural shadow both at home and abroad, it's that this goal is not something that a bunch of middle-aged Communist Party (CCP) bureaucrats can mandate and control, especially in an era where culture spreads via decentralized mechanisms like YouTube and file-sharing software. Government leaders don't create new and innovative art; it springs up from unfettered human beings, and often from fringe elements in society. And as Hu surely knows, some of the most creative artists are dissidents. Oops.
Friday, January 06, 2012
What money can buy! Politicians to start with......
Perhaps not surprising, but the figures revealed in this piece by Tom Dispacth on TomDispacth.com.au.com.au - a blog well worth following and supporting - clearly confirm the money being poured into Congress by large corporations and vested interests, let alone the effect and outcome of such grand largesse. Of course, as always, it's the average American citizen who "pays" and is the loser.....
Startling numbers of Americans are “underwater” -- homeowners and students alike -- and so, for that matter, is Congress, even if in quite a different way. In these last years, it’s been flooded with money. Millionaires, including at least 10 centimillionaires, now make up nearly half of our representatives there, and as a group, they have been growing ever richer as Americans grow ever poorer. Bad times? Never heard of them. Congress’s median net worth rose by 15% between 2004 and 2010 -- and this news, in a recent front-page New York Times piece, hardly caused a stir.
Of course, everything is relative. Compared to the giant energy companies, ours is a Congress of paupers. After all, the Big Five oil outfits (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell) announced a combined $36 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2011. Exxon alone pulled in $10.7 billion (and spent more than half of those profits simply to buy back its own stock). In the third quarter, the same five companies returned for an encore. They made another $32.6 billion in profits, with Exxon at $10.3 billion (about half of which it again spent on stock buybacks).
Out of a deep sense of civic-mindedness, they and other oil and gas companies have, in turn, showered Congress with their pocket change. From 1989 through 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, oil and gas companies gave Republicans in Congress $126 million and Democrats $42 million. Throw in a few hundred thousand dollars for the odd “independent,” and you’ve got $169 million dollars of pure oil and gas generosity over that period, which for them, as Jackie Gleason might once have said, is a “mere bag of shells.”
In case you’re interested, you, the American taxpayer, through Congressional subsidies for the oil and gas industry, reach deep into your own pockets and pony up billions every year to support those poor dears. And they turn around and pour what is, in essence, your money into the American electoral process to achieve the usual noble oil-and-gas ends. And just how well does all of that work? Here’s a little surprise: oil company political action committees (PACs) handed out $1.2 million to members of the House of Representatives in the first six months of 2011 and let’s not say “in return,” but -- consider it an unrelated fact -- 94% of the House members who received such funds voted to keep those industry subsidies flowing.
Then, of course, there’s the presidential race where, thus far, Rick Perry has raised $1.2 million from the energy sector, Mitt Romney $532,000, and Barack Obama $395,000. (If you’re talking just oil and gas, the figures are: Perry $648,000, Romney $274,000, and Obama $83,000.) And that’s just the beginning. After all, we’re officially only five days into presidential campaign 2012! And here’s the thing: you can’t always tell just where oil and gas money is likely to pop up. It might even, for instance, turn out to be behind the energy questions people have been asking in Iowa recently.
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