From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Oct 1 05:08:06 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 20:08:06 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Our Oil Addiction Is About to Make Life a Lot Nastier Message-ID: <20091001200806.ee55ecca.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Michael T Klare, Tomdispatch.com AlterNet (September 24 2009) The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world's principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives - especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves - will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride under extreme conditions. It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil's final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting "unconventional" hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices. There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, "We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work". Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation's electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that twenty percent of US electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020. But here's the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man's-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as - to give it a label - the Era of Extreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time. An Oil Field as Deep as Mount Everest Is High Don't be fooled by the fact that this grim new era will surely witness the arrival of many more wind turbines, solar arrays, and hybrid vehicles. Most new buildings will perhaps come equipped with solar panels, and more light-rail systems will be built. Despite all this, however, our civilization is likely to remain remarkably dependent on oil-fueled cars, trucks, ships, and planes for most transportation purposes, as well as on coal for electricity generation. Much of the existing infrastructure for producing and distributing our energy supply will also remain intact, even as many existing sources of oil, coal, and natural gas become exhausted, forcing us to rely on previously untouched, far more undesirable (and often far less accessible) sources of these fuels. Some indication of the likely fuel mix in this new era can be seen in the most recent projections of the Department of Energy (DoE) on future US energy consumption. According to the department's Annual Energy Outlook for 2009, the United States will consume an estimated 114 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of energy in 2030, of which 37% will be supplied by oil and other petroleum liquids, 23% by coal, 22% by natural gas, eight percent by nuclear power, three percent by hydropower, and only seven percent by wind, solar, biomass, and other renewable sources. Clearly, this does not yet suggest a dramatic shift away from oil and other fossil fuels. On the basis of current trends, the DoE also predicts that even two decades from now, in 2030, oil, natural gas, and coal will still make up 82% of America's primary energy supply, only two percentage points less than in 2009. (It is of course conceivable that a dramatic shift in national and international priorities will lead to a greater increase in renewable energy in the next two decades, but at this point that remains a dim hope rather than a sure thing.) While fossil fuels will remain dominant in 2030, the nature of these fuels, and the ways in which we acquire them, will undergo profound change. Today, most of our oil and natural gas come from "conventional" sources of supply: large underground reservoirs found mainly in relatively accessible sites on land or in shallow coastal areas. These are the reserves that can be easily exploited using familiar technology, most notably modern versions of the towering oil rigs made famous most recently in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. Ever more of these fields will, however, be depleted as global consumption soars, forcing the energy industry to increasingly rely on deep offshore oil and gas, Canadian oil sands, oil and gas from a climate-altered but still hard to reach and exploit Arctic, and gas extracted from shale rock using costly, environmentally threatening techniques. In 2030, says the DoE, such unconventional liquids will provide thirteen percent of world oil supply (up from a mere four percent in 2007). A similar pattern holds for natural gas, especially in the United States where the share of energy supplied by unconventional but nonrenewable sources is expected to rise from 47% to 56% in the same two decades. Just how important these supplies have become is evident to anyone who follows the oil industry's trade journals or simply regularly checks out the business pages of the Wall Street Journal. Absent from them have been announcements of major discoveries of giant new oil and gas reserves in any parts of the world accessible to familiar drilling techniques and connected to key markets by existing pipelines or trade routes (or located outside active war zones such as Iraq and the Niger Delta region of Nigeria). The announcements are there, but virtually all of them have been of reserves in the Arctic, Siberia, or the very deep waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Recently the press has been abuzz with major discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and far off Brazil's coast that might give the impression of adding time to the Age of Petroleum. On September 2nd, for example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that it had found a giant oil field in the Gulf of Mexico about 250 miles southeast of Houston. Dubbed Tiber, it is expected to produce hundreds of thousands of barrels per day when production begins some years from now, giving a boost to BP's status as a major offshore producer. "This is big", commented Chris Ruppel, a senior energy analyst at Execution LLC, a London investment bank. "It says we're seeing that improved technology is unlocking resources that were before either undiscovered or too costly to exploit because of economics". As it happens, though, anyone who jumped to the conclusion that this field could quickly or easily add to the nation's oil supply would be woefully mistaken. As a start, it's located at a depth of 35,000 feet - greater than the height of Mount Everest, as a reporter from the New York Times noted - and well below the Gulf's floor. To get to the oil, BP's engineers will have to drill through miles of rock, salt, and compressed sand using costly and sophisticated equipment. To make matters worse, Tiber is located smack in the middle of the area in the Gulf regularly hit by massive storms in hurricane season, so any drills operating there must be designed to withstand hurricane-strength waves and winds, as well as sit idle for weeks at a time when operating personnel are forced to evacuate. A similar picture prevails in the case of Brazil's Tupi field, the other giant discovery of recent years. Located about 200 miles east of Rio de Janeiro in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Tupi has regularly been described as the biggest field to be found in forty years. Thought to contain some five to eight billion barrels of recoverable oil, it will surely push Brazil into the front ranks of major oil producers once the Brazilians have overcome their own series of staggering hurdles: the Tupi field is located below one-and-a-half miles of ocean water and another two-and-a-half miles of rock, sand, and salt and so accessible only to cutting edge, super-sophisticated drilling technologies. It will cost an estimated $70 to $120 billion to develop the field and require many years of dedicated effort. Extreme Acts of Energy Recovery Given the potentially soaring costs involved in recovering these last tough-oil reserves, it's no wonder that Canadian oil sands, also called tar sands, are the other big "play" in the oil business these days. Not oil as conventionally understood, the oil sands are a mixture of rock, sand, and bitumen (a very heavy, dense form of petroleum) that must be extracted from the ground using mining, rather than oil-drilling, techniques. They must also be extensively processed before being converted into a usable liquid fuel. Only because the big energy firms have themselves become convinced that we are running out of conventional oil of an easily accessible sort have they been tripping over each other in the race to buy up leases to mine bitumen in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta. The mining of oil sands and their conversion into useful liquids is a costly and difficult process, and so the urge to do so tells us a great deal about our particular state of energy dependency. Deposits near the surface can be strip-mined, but those deeper underground can only be exploited by pumping in steam to separate the bitumen from the sand and then pumping the bitumen to the surface - a process that consumes vast amounts of water and energy in the form of natural gas (to heat that water into steam). Much of the water used to produce steam is collected at the site and used over again, but some is returned to the local water supply in northern Alberta, causing environmentalists to worry about the risk of large-scale contamination. The clearing of enormous tracts of virgin forest to allow strip-mining and the consumption of valuable natural gas to extract the bitumen are other sources of concern. Nevertheless, such is the need of our civilization for petroleum products that Canadian oil sands are expected to generate 4.2 million barrels of fuel per day in 2030 - three times the amount being produced today - even as they devastate huge parts of Alberta, consume staggering amounts of natural gas, cause potentially extensive pollution, and sabotage Canada's efforts to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions. North of Alberta lies another source of extreme energy: Arctic oil and gas. Once largely neglected because of the difficulty of simply surviving, no less producing energy, in the region, the Arctic is now the site of a major "oil rush" as global warming makes it easier for energy firms to operate in northern latitudes. Norway's state-owned energy company, StatoilHydro, is now running the world's first natural gas facility above the Arctic Circle, and companies from around the world are making plans to develop oil and gas fields in the Artic territories of Canada, Greenland (administered by Denmark), Russia, and the United States, where offshore drilling in northern Alaskan waters may soon be the order of the day. It will not, however, be easy to obtain oil and natural gas from the Arctic. Even if global warming raises average temperatures and reduces the extent of the polar ice cap, winter conditions will still make oil production extremely difficult and hazardous. Fierce storms and plunging temperatures will remain common, posing great risk to any humans not hunkered down in secure facilities and making the transport of energy a major undertaking. Given fears of dwindling oil supplies, none of this has been enough to deter energy-craving companies from plunging into the icy waters. "Despite grueling conditions, interest in oil and gas reserves in the far north is heating up", Brian Baskin reported in the Wall Street Journal. "Virtually every major producer is looking to the Arctic sea floor as the next - some say last - great resource play". What is true of oil generally is also true of natural gas and coal: most easy-to-reach conventional deposits are quickly being depleted. What remains are largely the "unconventional" supplies. US producers of natural gas, for example, are reporting a significant increase in domestic output, producing a dramatic reduction in prices. According to the DoE, US gas production is projected to increase from about twenty trillion cubic feet in 2009 to 24 trillion in 2030, a real boon for US consumers, who rely to a significant degree on natural gas for home heating and electricity generation. As noted by the Energy Department however, "Unconventional natural gas is the largest contributor to the growth in US natural gas production, as rising prices and improvements in drilling technology provide the economic incentives necessary for exploitation of more costly resources". Most of the unconventional gas in the United States is currently obtained from tight-sand formations (or sandstone), but a growing percentage is acquired from shale rock through a process known as hydraulic fracturing. In this method, water is forced into the underground shale formations to crack the rock open and release the gas. Huge amounts of water are employed in the process, and environmentalists fear that some of this water, laced with pollutants, will find its ways into the nation's drinking supply. In many areas, moreover, water itself is a scarce resource, and the diversion of crucial supplies to gas extraction may diminish the amounts available for farming, habitat preservation, and human consumption. Nonetheless, production of shale gas is projected to jump from two trillion cubic feet per year in 2009 to four trillion in 2030. Coal presents a somewhat similar picture. Although many environmentalists object to the burning of coal because it releases far more climate-altering greenhouse gases than other fossil fuels for each BTU produced, the nation's electric-power industry continues to rely on coal because it remains relatively cheap and plentiful. Yet many of the country's most productive sources of anthracite and bituminous coal - the types with the greatest energy potential - have been depleted, leaving (as with oil) less productive sources of these types, along with large deposits of less desirable, more heavily polluting sub-bituminous coal, much of it located in Wyoming. To get at what remains of the more valuable bituminous coal in Appalachia, mining companies increasingly rely on a technique known as mountaintop removal, described by John M Broder of the New York Times as "blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams". Long opposed by environmentalists and residents of rural Kentucky and West Virginia, whose water supplies are endangered by the dumping of excess rock, dirt, and a variety of contaminants, mountaintop removal received a strong endorsement from the Bush administration, which in December 2008 approved a regulation allowing for a vast expansion of the practice. President Obama has vowed to reverse this regulation, but he favors the use of "clean coal" as part of a transitional energy strategy. It remains to be seen how far he will go in reining in the coal industry. Extreme Conflict So let's be blunt: we are not (yet) entering the much-heralded Age of Renewables. That bright day will undoubtedly arrive eventually, but not until we have moved much closer to the middle of this century and potentially staggering amounts of damage has been done to this planet in a fevered search for older forms of energy. In the meantime, the Era of Extreme Energy will be characterized by an ever deepening reliance on the least accessible, least desirable sources of oil, coal, and natural gas. This period will surely involve an intense struggle over the environmental consequences of reliance on such unappealing sources of energy. In this way, Big Oil and Big Coal - the major energy firms - may grow even larger, while the relatively moderate fuel and energy prices of the present moment will be on the rise, especially given the high cost of extracting oil, gas, and coal from less accessible and more challenging locations. One other thing is, unfortunately, guaranteed: the Era of Extreme Energy will also involve intense geopolitical struggle as major energy consumers and producers like the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, and Japan vie with one another for control of the remaining supplies. Russia and Norway, for example, are already sparring over their maritime boundary in the Barents Sea, a promising source of natural gas in the far north, while China and Japan have tussled over a similar boundary dispute in the East China Sea, the site of another large gas field. All of the Arctic nations - Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States - have laid claim to large, sometimes overlapping, slices of the Arctic Ocean, generating fresh boundary disputes in these energy-rich areas. None of these disputes has yet resulted in violent conflict, but warships and planes have been deployed on some occasions and the potential exists for future escalation as tensions rise and the perceived value of these assets grows. And while we're at it, don't forget today's energy hotspots like Nigeria, the Middle East, and the Caspian Basin. In the Extreme era to come, they are no less likely to generate conflicts of every sort over the ever more precious supplies of more easily accessible energy. For most of us, life in the Era of Extreme Energy will not be easy. Energy prices will rise, environmental perils will multiply, ever more carbon dioxide will pour into the atmosphere, and the risk of conflict will grow. We possess just two options for shortening this difficult era and mitigating its impact. They are both perfectly obvious - which, unfortunately, makes them no easier to bring about: drastically speed up the development of renewable sources of energy and greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by reorganizing our lives and our civilization so that we might consume less of them in everything we do. That may sound easy enough, but tell that to governments around the world. Tell that to Big Energy. Hope for it, work for it, but in the meantime, keep your seatbelts buckled. This roller-coaster ride is about to begin. _____ Michael T Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (2004). (c) 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved. http://www.alternet.org/story/142834/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From intnsred at golgotha.net Thu Oct 1 05:52:52 2009 From: intnsred at golgotha.net (Intense Red) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 07:52:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Ahmadinejad's Opponents Fear Sanctions May Hurt Ordinary Iranians In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <200910010752.53027.intnsred@golgotha.net> > Ahmadinejad's Opponents Fear Sanctions May Hurt Ordinary Iranians But isn't it worth a half-million dead Iranian children to have a good regime of sanctions on Iran? Oh wait! That was Iraq. Yes, I remember. We put sanctions based on complete lies on Iraq, bombed them for a decade, and the sanctions resulted in the deaths of over a half-million children and the US Secretary of State explicitly said the deaths were an acceptable trade-off. Sorry, I got my "US foreign policy lies" mixed up there... -- "It's done differently in El Salvador. There they send in the death squads. Here what they do is try to hook you on sitcoms. It's true that both are techniques of control, but they are rather different techniques." -- MIT professor Noam Chomsky. From critical.montages at gmail.com Thu Oct 1 06:27:27 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 08:27:27 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Honduras in State of Siege Message-ID: Late September and early October turn out to be the time when a lot of things come to a head at the same time. The ruling classes of the West (buoyed by jobless recovery) see an opportunity to strengthen the sanctions against Iran (they hope to exploit the political division in Iran and see a chance of winning over Russia). The coup leaders of Honduras have plunged the nation in a state of siege. In both cases Lula has been very good, helping Zelaya return to Honduras and rejecting the coup regime's ultimatum, talking to Ahmadinejad at the UN and rejecting pressures to isolate Iran. As long as China and Russia continue to stand by Iran, the Iranians can probably defend themselves.* The Hondurans can use stepped-up international pressures on the US to stop supporting the coup regime. * Can Iran beat gasoline sanctions? The answer seems to be yes. On the front page of the Financial Times on 23 September 2009 (Javier Blas and Carola Hoyos, "Chinese Begin Petrol Supplies to Iran"): Chinese state companies this month began supplying petrol to Iran and now provide up to one-third of its imports in a development that threatens to undermine US-led efforts to shut off the supply of fuel on which its economy depends. Moreover, Iran apparently has been making progress in becoming less dependent on gasoline import, according to Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and publisher of the Journal of Energy Security ("The New Iran Sanctions: Worse Than the Old Ones," Foreign Policy, 11 August 2009): The little-known reason is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has imposed dramatic measures to eliminate this strategic vulnerability. He has massively expanded the country's refinery infrastructure. Seven of Iran's nine existing refineries are undergoing expansion projects; seven new refineries are on the drawing board or already under construction. In three to five years, these projects will double Iran's refining capacity, putting it on par with Saudi Arabia. These efforts, in addition to an effective petrol rationing scheme, have slashed Iran's need to import petroleum products. As of this fall, Iran's daily gasoline dependence will stand below 25 percent. This figure is expected to decline even further to roughly 15 percent over the next year as new refining capacity comes online. By 2012 Iran is projected to be gasoline self-sufficient; shortly after that, the Islamic Republic is likely to become a net gasoline exporter. In expanding its refining capacity, Iran worked with French, British, German, Swiss, Korean, Romanian, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Chinese, and even American firms (working through shell companies set up overseas). Vigorous enforcement of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act might cause some of these companies to reconsider their relations with Iran. But the idea that the new U.S. sanctions on gasoline imports -- widely thought in Washington to be a "drastic" measure -- would derail Iran's progress toward energy independence or inflict more than a pin prick on the mullahs' regime is overly optimistic. First, the foreign companies that have been involved in Iran's refinery expansion projects have done so in the early phases of licensing, consulting, financing, design and engineering. For the most part these services have already been performed; the Iranians do the construction themselves. Even if the foreign partners responded to the sanctions, it would have little impact on the projects. Second, Iran is becoming increasingly reliant on China for its refinery expansion program -- and Beijing has shown little interest in abiding by any sanctions regime initiated by the United States. In recent months, Chinese companies have greatly expanded their presence in Iran's oil sector. In the coming months, Sinopec, the state-owned Chinese oil company, is scheduled to complete the expansion of the Tabriz and Shazand refineries -- adding 3.3 million gallons of gasoline per day. Iran has also secured agreements to take part in three overseas refining joint ventures, in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Syria. The chances those governments would annul these projects are nil. Simultaneously, Iran is ambitiously pushing alternative fuels to reduce its gasoline consumption. Three years ago, Ahmadinejad initiated a program to convert Iran's vehicles to run on natural gas rather than gasoline. Iran has the world's third-largest natural gas reserves (around 16 percent of the world's total). Now, the government is subsidizing retrofitting cars for natural gas; an Iranian version of "cash for clunkers" is phasing out old gas guzzlers; and domestic automakers now must enable all new cars to run on natural gas, which hundreds of refueling stations are being renovated to serve. The government also provides financial incentives for drivers to prefer natural gas over gasoline. A gallon of gasoline costs 53 cents while the natural gas equivalent only costs 15 cents. Since the initiation of the program, gas has replaced 10 percent of Iran's total gasoline consumption for transport fuel. Furthermore, Iran is one of the world's largest producers of methanol -- a cousin to ethanol that can be made from not just agricultural products, but also coal and natural gas. The country has four major methanol plants and is building two massive new ones, among the largest in the world, which will increase Iran's production capacity by more than 60 percent. These factories, built with the aid of a Danish company, will enable Iran to blend alcohol into its fuel, just as the United States does with gas and ethanol, and lower its gasoline consumption by at least 5 percent without any need for vehicle retrofitting. Finally, the Iranian government is encouraging its citizens to use public buses by subsidizing diesel. All of these measures show that the chance a U.S. sanctions policy will inflict economic pain and trigger a change in the regime's behavior is slim. Will the Obama administration and Congress reconsider their idea of gasoline sanctions, in light of the above? Yoshie From critical.montages at gmail.com Thu Oct 1 06:29:45 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 08:29:45 -0400 Subject: [R-G] General Strike of Arab Citizens of Israel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Today there is supposed to be a general strike of Arab citizens of Israel. Join Our General Strike on October 1, 2009 by the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel We would like to bring to your attention the decision of the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel, the National Committee of Local Authorities, all parties, movements and institutions of civil society of the Palestinian minority in Israel, to declare a general strike on October 1, 2009 to mark the 9th anniversary of the Jerusalem and AlAqsa Day (October 2000) when 13 of Palestinian Arab citizens were killed, and their case is still waiting for justice. This year we decided to commemorate the memory with a strike. ?The strike is part of the struggle of the Palestinian minority inside Israel for equal rights as we continue to face home demolitions in the Triangle and the Naqab (Negev); changing of the demography through Judaization of the Galilee and the Triangle; an increase in racial incitement; discrimination against our local authorities; new racist laws, such as the new Nakba law; hebraicizing the Arabic names of our towns and villages, with ultimate disregard of the common and historical Arabic names of these places; selling of Palestinian refugees' properties; and an intensification of the intimidation campaigns and distortion of our national consciousness. As representatives of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, we want to stress our opposition to racism, incitement and discrimination . . . and we want to affirm our desire to live in our homeland in dignity. With our declaration for a general strike, we want to emphasize our stand against the escalating racism and fascist incitement against our Arab population; we want to defend our existence, our rights and our dignity in our homeland which we have no other. ?We want to make a stand against the denial of our national and historical rights, while calling for the realization of our national and civil rights, our right to remain steadfast and rooted in the land of our forefathers. We call for an end to the policy of expropriation, privatization of land and demolition of our homes. We assert our need for fundamental equality for the Palestinian Arab minority and equal allocation for the Arab local authorities. ?We remain resolute against the arrests and investigation campaign of our young people and the systematic attempts to intimidate them and distort their national identity. The declaration of the general strike also comes to affirm our position regarding the continuing occupation of the Palestinian people in the Palestinian Territory; in support of the Palestinian national cause, an end to occupation including the siege on the Gaza Strip and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. The one day general strike will be highlighted with a main public national march in Arabbeh, which will commence from the Mahmoud Darwish roundabout in Arabbeh (the western roundabout -- in the direction of Sakhnin) at two in the afternoon (14:00) towards the municipal market square (Wadi Salameh Road). We want to take this opportunity to invite you to join us or send a representative and participate in the march. ?Your presence is of utmost importance; with the current atmosphere of increased racism and the various statements made by government officials, there is a great fear of a repetition of the scenario of October 2000. ?We want to avoid this situation, but at the same time, it is time to raise our united voice against racism and discrimination. ?We ask you to join us in making our just cause known, in order to achieve equality, civil and human rights. ?Our men were killed and we will not relent and will not rest until justice is served and the truth is revealed and those responsible are punished. With our sincere hope that you will join us in this important event, Yours respectfully, Muhammad Zidan Chairperson High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel Contact: Email: ; Tel: 04 601 3323; Fax: 04 601 3322 From tchilds at resist.ca Thu Oct 1 17:22:05 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 16:22:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back - Naomi Klein Message-ID: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/copenhagen-obama-better-g_b_306688.html Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back by Naomi Klein When Obama arrives in Copenhagen tomorrow to support Chicago's Olympic bid, he will be showing the world that he is willing to schlep to Scandinavia for an event he considers important. The big question now is: will he do it again on December 7, when Copenhagen plays host to the United Nations summit on climate change, the highest-stakes environmental negotiations in history? British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has already pledged to be there, characterizing the summit as a last chance to pull the planet back from the brink. "I will go to Copenhagen to conclude the deal," Brown told the UN General Assembly. "This is too important an agreement -- for the global economy, and for the future of every nation represented here -- to leave to our official negotiators. So I urge my fellow leaders to commit themselves to going to Copenhagen too." No word so far on whether Obama will heed the call (remember that George Bush Sr. went to the Rio Earth Summit...). Considering the Obama administration's paltry proposals on emissions cuts, and the total absence of a U.S. plan to help developing countries meet the massive costs associated with a climate crisis they did not create (ask the residents of flooded-out Manila), it's not surprising that the president might want to avoid what promises to be a angry showdown in Copenhagen. Already U.S. negotiators are trying to lower expectations for what the summit can accomplish, an ominous sign. One thing is certain: if Obama skips Copenhagen in December, after making time to go there to promote the Olympics in October, he will be saying something chilling about his administration's commitment to battling global warming. Now is the time to tell Obama: you'd better go back to Copenhagen. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Thu Oct 1 20:37:16 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 19:37:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back - Naomi Klein In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <541406.17219.qm@web43514.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Reading her book "Shock Doctrine". It is excellent. ________________________________ From: "tchilds at resist.ca" To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Thu, October 1, 2009 4:22:05 PM Subject: [R-G] Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back - Naomi Klein http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/copenhagen-obama-better-g_b_306688.html Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back by Naomi Klein When Obama arrives in Copenhagen tomorrow to support Chicago's Olympic bid, he will be showing the world that he is willing to schlep to Scandinavia for an event he considers important. The big question now is: will he do it again on December 7, when Copenhagen plays host to the United Nations summit on climate change, the highest-stakes environmental negotiations in history? British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has already pledged to be there, characterizing the summit as a last chance to pull the planet back from the brink. "I will go to Copenhagen to conclude the deal," Brown told the UN General Assembly. "This is too important an agreement -- for the global economy, and for the future of every nation represented here -- to leave to our official negotiators. So I urge my fellow leaders to commit themselves to going to Copenhagen too." No word so far on whether Obama will heed the call (remember that George Bush Sr. went to the Rio Earth Summit...). Considering the Obama administration's paltry proposals on emissions cuts, and the total absence of a U.S. plan to help developing countries meet the massive costs associated with a climate crisis they did not create (ask the residents of flooded-out Manila), it's not surprising that the president might want to avoid what promises to be a angry showdown in Copenhagen. Already U.S. negotiators are trying to lower expectations for what the summit can accomplish, an ominous sign. One thing is certain: if Obama skips Copenhagen in December, after making time to go there to promote the Olympics in October, he will be saying something chilling about his administration's commitment to battling global warming. Now is the time to tell Obama: you'd better go back to Copenhagen. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Thu Oct 1 22:44:55 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 21:44:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] De Mint Supports Coup, Obama In Copenhagen, Iran warned. Chinese 60th Message-ID: <246913.36419.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> De Mint Supports Honduras Coup, China?s 60th, Pawlenty Throws In, Copenhagen Cover For What? Senator De Mint wants to go to Honduras to encourage the Coup members to continue in their efforts despite the US Governments attempts to return the ousted President. Senator Kerry blocked his trip as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, but Senator De Mint was able to go to the Defense Appropriations Committee where Senator Mitch McConnell gave him permission to go. The US Government has joined the rest of the world in boycotting relations with Honduras until the Coup is ended. There is an act called the Logan Act that calls it treason to do business with a government that the USA is in conflict with. Although we are not at war with Honduras, we do not recognise its government. The actions of Senator De Mint are those typical of a Republican Party willing to undermine US policy if that is what it takes to destroy the Obama administration. It just shows how out of touch with the world the Republicans are. It looks like Pawlenty is running for President. The Governor of Minnesota has filed with the government to register his PAC. He is the first official Republican candidate. Pawlenty has not done anything blatantly stupid yet. But the election is a long way off. He is hiring Bush era operatives who are known for dirty tactics. Sara Taylor was involved with the scandal around firing liberal Federal Prosecutors. Terry Nelson is famed for being involved in the swift boating of candidate Kerry. Way to go Pawlenty. He and I have something in common. Both our dads were in the Teamsters union. China did a bang up job today in its 60th anniversary celebrations. They had mini skirted marching females armed with sub-machine guns. Pretty wild. Almost as good as the famed female body guards that Muammar Khadaffy used to sport. They had colorful floats and lots of weapons and jets flying. But the people were not there. The government is so paranoid that someone might do or say something embarrassing that they decided to tell the people to stay home and watch the events on TV. Pretty absurd, a nation of over a billion persons and they are afraid of their own people. One of the guys I work with got fired today. Actually I would say he was laid off. It made me wonder when my turn will come again. The guy had worked for the same company for 14 years. The company was owned by his father in law. The company was sold to someone else. The new owner realized that the company was not profitable and sold it to the company I work for. The owner became a sales man and this guy became a customer service rep. Six months later, he is out on the street. The volume of business was not enough to justify a customer service rep. Too bad for him. That is capitalism. That is exactly how it works. Instead of spreading the work around it is all about the bottom line and who is higher up on the totem pole. Meanwhile the President is in Copenhagen checking out the scene and he is advocating for his city, Chicago to win the Olympics in 2016. I also suspect this is cover for something else. The President didn?t go there for only that. But it is a good cover. Iran has been given 2 weeks to own up by the President. I wonder what his or else might be? Is he simply playing tough for domestic consumption or is he doing something serious here? We should all understand that the only reason we are in Afghanistan is to look tough for the American public and to give cover for the withdrawal from Iraq. By distracting the Republicans and getting them focused on the goings on in Afghanistan, the President can pull out of Iraq without getting too much criticism. Even McCain is focused on that mountain waste land. What exactly are our vital interests there? We could pay each member of the Taliban enough to put them on the Government payroll and bring our troops home for about the same cost. But we insist on supporting a corrupt heroin exporting regime. There is no reason other than for cover. It has no strategic value. Period. Getting Al Qaeda? Not that way. You don?t go after cockroaches with tanks. You go in with Boric acid spread out near the entrances to their layers. Bringing in the tanks and the troops only warns them to scurry away and hide. If you are serious about getting the terrorists you use stealth. Done for tonight. Enjoy. Tags: De Mint a Traitor? Mini skirted Chinese Marchers, Iran gets Warning, Obama in Copenhagen From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Oct 2 03:00:03 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 18:00:03 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <20091002180003.7ec6e91f.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Blum www.killinghope.org (September 29 2009) Ridding the world of the sickness of pacifism Picture the scene: Afghanistan, two hijacked tankers filled with highly inflammable fuel, surrounded by a crowd of Afghans eager to syphon off some for free ... What's the last thing you want to do? Right - drop bombs on the tankers. That's what a German military commander signaled an American drone airplane to do September 4. Kaboom!! At least 100 human beings incinerated. This incident has led to a lot of controversy in Germany, for Article 26 of Germany's post-war Grundgesetz (Basic Law/Constitution) states: "Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense." But NATO (aka the United States) can take satisfaction in the fact that the Germans have put their silly pacifism aside and acted like real men, trained military killers; although prior to this incident the Germans had engaged in some aerial and ground combat, there hadn't been such a dramatic and publicized taking of civilian lives. Deutschland now has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent in the country after the US and Britain, and at home they've just finished building a monument to fallen members of the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces), founded in 1955; 38 members (so far) have surrendered their young lives in Afghanistan. In January 2007 I wrote in this report about how the US was pushing Germany in this direction; that circumstances at that time indicated that Washington might be losing patience with the pace of Germany's submission to the empire's needs. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon warriors and their NATO allies. Germany's leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, reported the following: At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: "You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us" ... "The Germans have to learn to kill". A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: "Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets". Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said "some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives". A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that "the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban". And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: "We have the dead, you drink beer" {1} Ironically, in many other contexts since the end of World War Two the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters. Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by "the Free World" for living in peace? The United States has also engaged in a decades-long effort to wean Japan away from its post World War Two pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path of again being a military power, only this time acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs. "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. "In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized." -- Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, 1947, words long cherished by a large majority of the Japanese people. In the triumphalism of the end of the Second World War, the American occupation of Japan, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, played a major role in the creation of this constitution. But after the communists came to power in China in 1949, the United States opted for a strong Japan safely ensconced in the anti-communist camp. It's been all downhill since then. Step by step ... MacArthur himself ordered the creation of a "national police reserve", which became the embryo of the future Japanese military ... Visiting Tokyo in 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Japanese officials: "In the past, Japan had demonstrated her superiority over the Russians and over China. It was time for Japan to think again of being and acting like a Great Power." {2} ... various US-Japanese security and defense cooperation treaties, which, for example, called on Japan to integrate its military technology with that of the US and NATO ... the US supplying new sophisticated military aircraft and destroyers ... all manner of Japanese logistical assistance to the US in its frequent military operations in Asia ... repeated US pressure on Japan to increase its military budget and the size of its armed forces ... more than a hundred US military bases in Japan, protected by Japanese armed forces ... US-Japanese joint military exercises and joint research on a missile defense system ... the US Ambassador to Japan, 2001: "I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9" {3} ... under pressure from Washington, Japan sent several naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to refuel US and British warships as part of the Afghanistan campaign in 2002, then sent non-combat forces to Iraq to assist the American war as well as to East Timor, another made-in-America war scenario ... Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2004: "If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light" {4} ... One outcome or symptom of all this can perhaps be seen in the 2005 case of Kimiko Nezu, a 54-year-old Japanese teacher, who was punished by being transferred from school to school, by suspensions, salary cuts, and threats of dismissal because of her refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem, a World War Two song chosen as the anthem in 1999. She opposed the song because it was the same one sung as the Imperial Army set forth from Japan calling for an "eternal reign" of the emperor. At graduation ceremonies in 2004, 198 teachers refused to stand for the song. After a series of fines and disciplinary actions, Nezu and nine other teachers were the only protesters the following year. Nezu was then allowed to teach only when another teacher was present. {5} Which brings us to Italy, the remaining member of the World War Two Tripartite, or Axis. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution says in part: "Italy rejects war as a means for settling international controversies and as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples" {6} But Washington laid claim early to Italy's post-war soul. In 1948 the United States all but took over the Italian election campaign to insure the Christian Democrats (CD) defeat of the Communist-Socialist candidate. (And the US remained an electoral force in Italy for the next three decades maintaining the CD in power. The Christian Democrats, in turn, were loyal Cold-War partners.) {7} In 1949, the US saw to it that Italy became a founding member of NATO. This was not seen as a threat to Article 11 because NATO has always painted itself as a "defensive" organization, even in 1999 when it carried out a 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia as both Italy and Germany supplied military aircraft and a NATO air base at Aviano, Italy served as the main hub for the daily bombing runs. For decades, Italy has been the home of US military bases and airfields used by Washington in one military adventure after another from Europe to Asia. There are now some 3,000 Italian soldiers in Afghanistan performing a variety of services which enables the United States and NATO to engage in their bloody warfare. And fifteen Italian soldiers have also lost their lives in that woeful land. The pressure on Italy, as on Germany, to become full-fledged combatants in Afghanistan and elsewhere is unrelenting from their NATO comrades. {8} The Berlin Wall - Another Cold War Myth Within a few weeks many of the Western media can be expected to turn on their propaganda machines to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, November 9 1989. All the Cold War cliches about The Free World vs Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don't like people to be free, to learn the "truth". What other reason could there have been? First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returned to the East in the evening. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. The wall was built primarily for two reasons: 1. The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: "West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin". {9} 2. During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country's economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad. It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, et cetera; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned twelve cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, et cetera; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions ... all this and much more. {10} Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets' erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West. Let's not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union and wipe out Bolshevism forever. After the war, the Soviets were determined to close down the highway. In 1999, USA Today reported: "When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism." {11} About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: "Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth". Health care: ignoring the huge red elephant in the room In the frenzied search of recent months for a better way of delivering health care to the American people, the American media has often discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. Usually, little, if anything, is mentioned about Cuba's system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything; that is, nothing at all. The reason the Cuban system is seldom mentioned in the mass media is probably that it's kind of embarrassing that this otherwise poor country, laboring under the awful yoke of (choke, gasp) socialism, can deliver health care that most Americans can only dream of. Now we have a new book by T R Reid, former correspondent for the Washington Post and commentator for National Public Radio. It's called The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009). Reid does not avoid giving some credit to the Cuban system, but he makes sure that the reader knows that he's not taken in by any commie propaganda. He refers to the Cuban government as "a totalitarian Communist fiefdom", and adds: "In every country (except, perhaps, a police state like Cuba) there is one group of citizens who are not bound by the unified health care system: the rich" {12}. Thus, the fact that Cuba has an egalitarian health care system is made to seem like something negative, something one could expect to find only in a police state. In discussing the World Health Organization's giving Cuba high marks for fairness in its system, Reid points out: "Of course, fairness and equal treatment extend only so far; when Fidel Castro himself fell ill in 2007, medical experts were flown in from Europe to treat him." {13} Aha! I knew it! Americans, and not just the right-wing crazies, would never accept a medical system where everyone got completely free care for all ailments if the president ever got any kind of special treatment. Would they? We could at least ask them. Speaking of the right-wing crazies, there was a report in the New York Times which said: "Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle," the president will "carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech" fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as "socialized medicine" and "an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government". The president was John F Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964. {14} And speaking of the totalitarian communist socialist fascist Cuban police-state dictatorship, Mr Reid and others might be interested in an article {15} I wrote which demonstrates that during the period of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America. But how to get past a lifetime of conditioning and reach the American mind with that message? At the recent convention of the AFL-CIO, the country's leading labor organization, there was a very progressive resolution put forth calling for the right of all Americans to travel to Cuba and for an end to the US embargo against the island nation. But at the end of the resolution the authors reminded us that they're Americans, calling upon Cuba "to release all political prisoners". {16} To appreciate what's wrong with that resolution one must understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the United States Interests Section. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents' ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba's "political prisoners" are such dissidents. Notes 1. Der Spiegel (Germany), November 20 2006, page 24 2. Los Angeles Times, September 23 1994 3. Washington Post, July 18 2001 4. BBC, August 14 2004 5. Washington Post, August 30 2005 6. Wikipedia: "Article 11 of Italian Constitution" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Italy#Article_11_of_Italian_Constitution 7. William Blum, Killing Hope (1995), chapters 2 and 18 8. For further discussion of US opposition to Post-World War Two Axis pacifism, see "Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions" http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/former-axis-nations-abandon-post-world-war-ii-military-restrictions/ 9. New York Times, June 27 1963, page 12 10. See Killing Hope (1995), page 400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion 11. USA Today, October 11 1999, page 1 12. page 234 of Reid's book 13. Ibid, pages 150-151 14. Washington Post, September 09 2009 15. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/democ.htm 16. http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/convention/2009/upload/res_43.pdf William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer74.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Fri Oct 2 15:39:48 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 14:39:48 -0700 Subject: [R-G] 'No credible evidence' of Iranian nukes; There Are Only Two Choices Left on Iran; Should we be so afraid of Iran?; Pakistan warns US against drone attacks Message-ID: <83904d240910021439k1eedde9em61c5157de647e4b5@mail.gmail.com> *'No credible evidence' of Iranian nuclear weapons, says chief UN inspector **There Are Only Two Choices Left on Iran* *Should we be so afraid of Iran?* *Pakistan warns United States against drone attacks* * * ------------------------------------------- 'No credible evidence' of Iranian nuclear weapons, says chief UN inspector The UN's chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he had seen "no credible evidence" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, rejecting British intelligence allegations that a weapons programme has been going on for at least four years. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/30/iranian-nuclear-weapons-mohamed-elbaradei --------------------------------------------------------- *There Are Only Two Choices Left on Iran ** An Israeli or U.S. military strike now, or a nuclear Tehran soon. * By ELIOT A. COHEN If, as is most likely, President Obama presides over the emergence of a nuclear Iran, he had best prepare for storms that will make the squawks of protest against his health-care plans look like the merest showers on a sunny day. (Mr. Cohen teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He served as counselor of the State Department from 2007 to 2009.) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574420641457091318.html#printMode ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Should we be so afraid of Iran? Pop Quiz: Which Asian country recently said it should consider adopting a ?first use? nuclear strike policy against its regional enemy, refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is playing a key role in driving a dangerous arms race? Here?s a clue: It isn?t Iran, which has signed the NPT, and it isn?t China which has given strong support to disarmament proposals. It is, in fact, India, the world?s largest democracy, which despite bringing the world closer to a nuclear confrontation than any other world power in recent years, has been feted for its position by our global policeman, the United States. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/deannelson/100012055/should-we-be-so-afraid-of-iran/ --------------------------------------------------------- Daily Telegraph October 1, 2009 Pakistan warns United States against drone attacks Tensions between Washington and Islamabad increased earlier this week after American Ambassador Anne Patterson said the 'Quetta Shura' was now high on its list of priority targets. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/6247905/Pakistan-warns-United-States-against-drone-attacks.html --------------------------------------------------------- From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Oct 2 18:05:30 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 20:05:30 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Geneva: Victory for Everyone? Message-ID: The Geneva meeting turned out to be, for once, a happy surprise: it's an agreement that all sides can hail as a victory for them: Iran claims that it has valiantly defended its right to enrichment (the hard-line Kayhan says "Geneva was not just a win for Iran ; it was a victory for all countries with aspirations to utilize peaceful nuclear energy in order to secure their future renewable energy requirements" ); the West claims that Iran has made a concession of shipping the already enriched uranium for further enrichment by Russia, thus allaying the fear of weaponization; and China and Russia can pat themselves on the back, thinking that they have moderated both sides! Even reformists and their supporters got something: "Members of the Iranian-American community are particularly pleased that the issue of human rights in Iran was also raised during the talks" (at ). (The only unhappy camp appears to be the regime-change-obsessed US neo-con types: e.g., "Blinking on Iran," .) This happy surprise may be only temporary -- the West can block the path to detente by continuing to push for a "freeze for freeze" instead of offering a concession of its own in return for Iran's concession or, worse, return to W's path of using the conflict over enrichment as a pretext for "regime change" -- but it buys time for all sides to think through the costs and benefits of confrontation and detente. The General Strike of Palestinian citizens of Israel, held on the same day, apparently went well, too: . A rare good day for the prospects of Middle East peace! Yoshie From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Oct 2 18:47:09 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:47:09 -0700 Subject: [R-G] All in 4:28 minutes - Everything you ever wanted to know about Globalization, Media Concentration and Corporate Personhood Message-ID: <4AC69F0D.3080905@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iol5X2I-NS8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKxp8JAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysmcEH/3QV5G5osqLjIrtV6NXl0bDU v/E0gaxn7cKa8vMd/N6p/VBAL63nnwwEwBp0vbjI7OnLxoenGJXA7qwx8MOIUZI2 ScWVzuz4S/LqyDhoa520clnqjZ814dZTJBmHDjkv0n3MXE7zhi36Z4vo6YMtnMOz 9/3Y648pNdVk3xEV62bG7tZF+TzKD8ly6TKXhhF2h3lm0id7nf9IYci/ML3obpnP IZEbG0mNzTju76xv/qSv1lD3e3X+aord4T1PpvOowR4EBficViGPf0iZ1YW4IQdN KWKGi2JUHR6pXcjtQOGIirLg1Rh+5qMxeRJMqqqaRLZ3XGAgw4UVvOmXGwHPkfU= =WCJL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Fri Oct 2 20:03:54 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 19:03:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] North Coast Earth First! Remembers David "Gypsy" Chain In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <269079.22452.qm@web111507.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> These Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) Indigenous + Native Americans?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/indigenous_native_americans http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions ? North Coast Earth First! September 17th, 2009 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Greetings! Sorry for the lack of updates recently, basic survival has taken over a lot of my time lately, and it's been very challenging. Also, there hasn't been a whole lot going on lately, so there hasn't been much to report. I'm still maintaining a dedicated phone line for North Coast Earth First!, and still get calls from media and others interested in the movement, as well as responding to comments on our YouTube channel. We still have t-shirts available, which I'm still chipping away at paying for, and have recently discontinued service on our pagers, since they are no longer needed and to further reduce our expenses. Please take a moment to remember David "Gypsy" Chain on this day.... Forever Wild, Shunka Wakan North Coast Earth First! & NCEF! Media ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David "Gypsy" Chain, 11-Year Memorial Day Earth Fist T-shrit [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102713869980&s=1181&e=001KFerk2Fdf727siPmkzhBaXkAbEERKpEc-DNj1JiClJa1HeTnYRXLAywuHlne0iuTDIfi-XfoIVTg4Hd1QTSQUlU4G7YqLCpvcg7nD0HHxpKJDUDqT_Hch8w8pm7HJNtKcwE_qe-AT0ydzS7HnKnjKQ== ] ??? On September 17th, 1998, Earth First! activist David "Gypsy" Chain was killed when an enraged Maxxam/Pacific Lumber logger began intentionally falling trees towards a group of protestors.? The intention that day was to have dialogue with the workers, determine whether or not the California Department of Forestry had been out to investigate possible violations (as they had promised the day before), and stall clearcut deforestation with a physical presence and conversation.? Things didn't go as planned, however, when the activists were met with a very angry logger, who threatened and attacked the group of activists, first with words and then with a chainsaw and large second-growth redwood trees. Even though the logger's threats were captured on video [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102713869980&s=1181&e=001KFerk2Fdf7090jcuw-ueQXqtDMR6UfsJCU49aU9ftxUv3blTXfMrS4PdP6R6y-6YOJXSskxIDOf6Jt-64xW0WlLt--TjDVu41v0RohOvOyoFm1-8J0dgDp6go2L12n4zBUEM1DPVoH5vNKfssACQ7w== ], he was never considered a suspect in the investigation by the Humboldt County District Attorney's office; in fact, the only real suspects were the Earth First!ers, displaying the deep corruption of local law enforcement at that time.? Gypsy's family sued Maxxam and Pacific Lumber in civil court, and won their wrongful death lawsuit in an out-of-court settlement. Please take a moment to remember Gypsy and all the lives forever altered on this day, eleven years ago. It was an event that brought the movement together for the "Gypsy Mountain Free State," and caused some to give up everything to dedicate their lives to the forest. You can watch the entire series of documentary videos, all 32 of them, by going to our YouTube channel [ http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102713869980&s=1181&e=001KFerk2Fdf71BYDkgYBIMk7DkfE2mpmt5Gr8zDSPlh2BHurLKqBgnq3UfJen4O9M6L0Nsq7W-IXljm21QtHDZtp8nOgQn0Yanxpi0BisuuQ9_ISOd6bmF4B98X06s1CrZ ]. Thanks so much for your time...Earth First! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ About North Coast Earth First! Thanks so much for all your love and support, and we look forward to hearing from you soon!? Earth First! North Coast Earth First! is a bio-centric movement, using non-violent civil disobedience, direct action, outreach, and education, to change the destructive practices of the corporate industrial timber industry in Humboldt County, California.? Earth First! is an international movement focused on preserving what's left of wild nature threatened by exploitation and development worldwide.? Our local North Coast Earth First! chapter does not engage in property destruction, and seeks to build bridges with workers and industry bosses, to form coalitions aimed at standing up for the rights of workers and implementing the sustainable management of natural resources. We're more non-profit than traditional 501(c)3 organizations, since none of us pay ourselves for the work we do; this is part of what sets Earth First! apart from other groups, and we are proud to say that we do what we do out of love for nature and non-violent revolution. North Coast Earth First! | P.O. Box 4646 | Arcata | CA | 95518 From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Fri Oct 2 20:10:33 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 19:10:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] You Can Help Didipio People Defend their Lands + their Rights In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <629463.4382.qm@web111506.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> These Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) Indigenous + Native Americans?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/indigenous_native_americans http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions ? Promoting the rights, voices, and visions of the world's Indigenous Peoples September 2009 Cultural Survival E-newsletter? ? This Month in Indigenous Culture? ? In Otovalo, Ecuador, September is the season for Yamor, or Kaya Raimi, the Kichwa equinox festival that marks the beginning of planting season. In addition to rituals related to planting and hopes for a prosperous season, there are parades,? competitions, and performances of traditional dancing and music. The festival also features chica de jora, a special fermented drink made from seven kinds of dried corn. It is only drunk twice during the year as part of special ceremonies, and it is also offered to the earth to ensure good harvests. ? Donate Now? ? Cultural Survival Quarterly ? ?The Other Brazil?Performing Dreams ?The Tractor Invasion ?My Cerrado Subscribe today! Become a member. ? For nearly 30 years, the U.S. oil giant Texaco contaminated Indigenous lands in Ecuador's Amazon jungle. CRUDE tells the David and Goliath story of the Indigenous People's efforts to obtain justice and repair their environment. Don't miss this important film! ? ? What's new at Cultural Survival? ? Global Response becomes a part of Cultural Survival Cultural Survival has just announced its merging with Global Response, a 20-year-old international advocacy organization that coordinates letter-writing campaigns to support Indigenous communities whose environment is threatened by mining, logging, and other activities. The merger adds a powerful advocacy capability to Cultural Survival and expands Global Response's reach and effectiveness. Click here to learn more about the merger. ? Your Letter Can Help Didipio People Defend their Lands and their Rights? http://www.culturalsurvival.org/node/8465 ? For 10 years the Indigenous community of Didipio in the Philippines has been trying to stop the construction of a giant gold mine that threatens their valley homeland, and right now, because of a recent UN finding (see below), they have a real chance to succeed -- with your help. A simple letter from you to the president of the Philippines can make the difference between destruction and cultural survival. Learn more. ? Intense Lobbying Efforts to Legalize Community Radio Continue in Guatemala In August, a bill that was introduced to the Guatemalan Congress to legalize community radio. The bill, which was the product of months of work by Cultural Survival staff and radio station volunteers, has now been assigned to two committees. Read more. ? Support for the bill is still needed. Please send a letter to the president of Guatemala urging him to support the bill to legalize community radio stations. http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/news/article/intense-lobbying-efforts-legalize-community-radio-continue-guatemala ? Panama Dam Campaign Takes Another Step Forward We just received word that our petition with the Ngobe people of Panama has passed another hurdle at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Last week the commission found that the Ngobe's case was "admissible," which means that the evidence supporting their claims of human rights violations is valid and that if the parties cannot reach a "friendly settlement," the commission can send the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Read more. ? New Cherokee School to Open The grand opening of the Eastern Band of Cherokee's language immersion school, New Kituwah Academy, will take place on October 7 near Cherokee, North Carolina. New Kituwah Academy will house Cherokee language preschool and kindergarten classrooms, serving 2 - 5 year olds. Read more. http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/news/article/new-cherokee-school-open ? ? International News? ? Aw? Communities Faced with More Massacres in Colombia Twelve members of the Aw? Indigenous community are reported to have been killed by armed men in camouflage on August 26, 2009 in El Rosario, Tumaco, in the southern border state of Nari?o, Colombia.? Eleven people were shot and killed, including four children and three teenagers, and three more were wounded. The massacre occurred after the killing of Gonzalo Rodr?guez (Aw?), which occurred on August 23, allegedly by members of the Colombian Army. Read more. ? Colombia, Peru, and the Philippines Reprimanded by UN Committee for Treatment of Indigenous Peoples In August, during the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's 75th Session, Colombia, Peru, and the Philippines were among the states which were reviewed for their adherence to and implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. CERD raised many concerns about ongoing discrimination against Indigenous Peoples and made concrete recommendations on how the three states can improve their record in its Concluding Observations. Read more. ? UNPFII Reports on Forced Labor and Indigenous Peoples of Paraguay and Bolivia The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has just issued a report from a first-of-its-kind mission to the Chaco regions of Paraguay and Bolivia to address the issue of forced labor of Indigenous Peoples. Findings of the mission and recommendations can be found here and will be used throughout the UN system in an effort to eliminate of forced labor practices. ? ? Thank you for your ongoing support and generosity. ? Sincerely, ? Ellen L. Lutz Executive Director ? As always, we welcome your comments. Please send your feedback and suggestions to agnes at cs.org.? ? ?Cultural Survival is a global leader in the fight to protect Indigenous lands, languages, and cultures around the world. In partnership with Indigenous Peoples, we advocate for Native communities whose rights, cultures, and dignity are under threat.? Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we are a membership organization whose board of directors includes some of the world's preeminent Indigenous leaders, as well as lawyers, anthropologists, business leaders, and philanthropists. For more information go to www.cs.org Cultural Survival | 215 Prospect St | Cambridge | MA | 02139 From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Fri Oct 2 20:37:06 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 19:37:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Hamas Brings Home The Bacon, Obama Returns To 10% Unemployment, Indonesian Corruption Message-ID: <990909.36624.qm@web43509.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> WhateverOctober 2nd, 2009 Not much to say. Life sucks without lots of drugs to keep the libido down and the brain focused on boring survival. Instead I have bleak sobriety. I don?t know what people like so much about it. I find it to be distinctly uninspiring. Places like Indonesia are suffering from too much reality. What with the Earthquake blues and over 1000 deaths from the last quake. Capitalism in action with a corrupt government being bought off by housing developers too cheap to build quake resistant housing. This is reprehensible, but since there are no penalties for this crime it continues and thousands die. Indonesian people should have these contractors shot. Perhaps that will teach the next ones to do the right thing and build housing that is safe. The Philippines is being hit with another Typhoon after a big one hid Manila last week. Samoa is a mess from the tsunami with over 150 dead there. The Palestinian government has been pressured by the US Government to drop the charges against Israel for crimes against Humanity last winter when they attacked Gaza. 19 female prisoners were released from captivity in Israel in exchange for a tape of the one Israeli soldier being held by Hamas. It seems that Hamas is gaining popularity in Palestine as Fatah loses more credibility. David Letterman was subject to blackmail for having affairs with employees and he managed to turn it around in front of his Thursday night audience. The blackmailer is facing charges after getting a fake check from Letterman. Pretty hard to out fox the Indiana slickster. Unemployment is increasing and is almost 10% officially which means that in reality it must be around 20%. If America stays at 10% for more than a few months then perhaps we will finally get the revolution we so richly deserve. Obama came off as a fool in Europe today with Chicago being rejected on the first round for the Olympics. It is a slap in the face. America, the police man of the world is no longer the nation others fear and respect. America is the bumbling giant, like a drunk that people watch out for, not like a respected leader or a feared enemy. The world is simply waiting for the USA to fall. Tags: Hamas Brings Home 19, Obama plays the Fool in Copenhagen, Philippines Braces for Typhoon. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Oct 3 03:28:00 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 05:28:00 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Beijing, Sochi, and Rio Message-ID: Beijing (Summer 2008), Sochi (Winter 2014), Rio (Summer 2016 ). More and more Olympics seem to be going to emerging powers. Brazil planned the capital spending of $11.1 billion on facilities, in contrast to Madrid's 3.4 billion, Tokyo's $3.1 billion, and Chicago's $1 billion: . Where's India? I suppose it's too busy making war on Maoists (deploying over 100,000 troops! ) to bid for one. Yoshie From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Oct 3 11:47:51 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 13:47:51 -0400 Subject: [R-G] The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Message-ID: The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Some foreign analyses of the post-election events made the argument that the factions and politicians associated with the Mousavi campaign, especially Hashemi Rafsanjani, were planning to rush through a privatization of Iran?s state-owned companies and assets if they had won. The usual epithet of the left ? neoliberal ? was hurled at Mousavi and his circle. A quick aside: two words are used quite often in left leaning writing these days: neoliberalism and imperialism. The former often stands in for plain old capitalism, the latter for almost everything else the left does not like ? a far distance from Hobson and Lenin [LINK: ]. I rarely read anyone claiming himself or herself as a neoliberal or an imperialist. They are ad hominem terms, which make them excellent for politics, but not very helpful for social science. Back to Iran. Only a few years ago I recall a particular book [LINK: ] on Iran that argued the Ahmadinejad administration was the true neoliberal b?te noire. Again, the privatization of state assets and their ?tunneling? to shadowy figures was the accusation. As usual, the reality is not so simple. Assuredly, many Iranian economists would love a huge private sector in Iran, since the public sector ranges between 60 and 70% of Iran?s GDP. The quasi-governmental sector, where the state still provides funds, staff, and has either majority or minority control, ranges around 10-20% of GDP. The word privatization has been uttered in Iranian politics since the late 1980s, when Iran emerged from the war and entered its ?reconstruction? phase. The zeitgeist of the time was ?shock therapy.? The idea was to rapidly sell off state assets to private hands without much planning, and it was implemented with gusto in many Latin American countries and, most infamously, in Russia. The market would sort it out, and even if the market failed it could not be any worse than state failures in provisions of goods and services. In Iran, there was a brief but rapid liberalization of the economy under Rafsanjani in 1992-3. Here, just like in Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and other cases of induced ?transition,? there were austerity protests due to the rapid rise in costs of living. Unlike Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and many other cases, however, Iran backed off of its liberalization plan (to the dismay of many Western-trained economists inside Iran). If Iran was supposed to be run by neoliberals who did not care for the economic consequences of their policies on the population, then they must be still in hiding after Rafsanjani performed a volte-face. Since then, Iran?s economy has performed in the middle range of developing countries in the world economy (the subject of an upcoming post, I promise). Also, since then, whenever anyone is asked how the sclerotic economy can be made better, all Iranian politicians throw forward the word privatization. Just recently, Etemaad-e Melli interviewed Hamid Fooladghar [LINK: ], the head of the Parliament?s Special Commission on the implementation of Article 44 of the Iranian Constitution. Article 44 lays out which sectors of Iran?s economy are to remain in public hands and which should either be in the private or cooperative economic sectors, and it is a buzzword for privatization. He said that the privatization efforts have not been very successful, and that government capital which is theoretically supposed to be moving into the private sector is instead ?circulating? within the government itself. There are many reasons why privatization moves so slowly in Iran, which I might discuss in the future, but for now I just want to point to the original text of Article 44. Here is what is says [LINK: ]: The state sector is to include all large-scale and mother industries, foreign trade, major minerals, banking, insurance, power generation, dams and large-scale irrigation networks, radio and television, post, telegraph and telephone services, aviation, shipping, roads, railroads and the like; all these will be publicly owned and administered by the State. The cooperative sector is to include co-operative companies and ententes concerned with production and distribution, in urban and rural areas, in accordance with Islamic criteria. The private sector consists of those activities concerned with agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, trade, and services that supplement the economic activities of the state and cooperative sectors. In 2004, while Khatami was still president, Iran amended article 44, part of a long-term project to join the World Trade Organization (the US has continually blocked Iran?s application). As with China?s entry to the WTO in the late 1990s, the regulatory environment of Iran needs to legally conform to the standards set by the WTO to gain entry. Some of the main points of Khamenei?s exective order on the subject are [LINK: ]: The government shall not be allowed to engage in economic activities that fall outside those envisioned in Article 44. Moreover, it is obliged to relinquish any activity, including continuation and operation of previous activities that are covered under Article 44, and cede them (at least 20 percent annually) to the private and cooperative sectors by the end of the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan. Also, some other goals: ?Increasing the share of the cooperative sector in the national economy to 25 percent by the end of the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan. ?Support by the government of the cooperatives, proportionate to the number of members?.Establishment of nationwide cooperatives to cover the three lowest deciles of the population with a view to poverty alleviation?.Change in the role of government from direct ownership and management of enterprises to policy-making, guidance and overseeing?.Economic empowerment of the private and cooperative sectors, and enabling them to enhance competitiveness of their products in international markets?.Preparing Iranian enterprises to apply global trading rules intelligently and in a gradual and target-oriented manner. And, finally, the privatization amendment to article 44: Eighty percent of the shares of State-owned enterprises, covered under Article 44, shall be ceded to the private sector, joint stock cooperative companies and non-state publicly-held companies as follows: 1. State-owned enterprises engaged in large mining activity, large-scale and mother industries (including large downstream oil and gas industries), except the National Iranian Oil Company and companies involved in extraction and production of oil and gas. 2. State-owned banks, except the Central Bank of Iran, Bank Melli of Iran, Bank Sepah, Bank of Industry and Mines, Bank of Agriculture, Housing Bank (Bank Maskan), and Export Development Bank. 3. State-owned insurance companies, except Bimeh Marakazi and Iran Insurance. 4. Airline and shipping companies, except the Civil Aviation Organization and Ports and Shipping Organization. 5. Power supply companies, except the main electricity transmission grid. 6. Postal and telecommunication companies, except the main telecommunication networks, frequency assignment services and the main and basic postal services. 7. Industries affiliated to the armed forces, except defense and security products and services that are deemed essential by the Commander-in-Chief. This is supposed to be done by pricing the assets through the stock market, and then holding companies will sell off the shares. Ahmadinejad?s administration got involved when it began to distribute shares of privatized companies to low income families and named them ?justice shares? [LINK: ] (seham-e edalat). Last year each justice share supposedly paid out around $70 as a dividend (probably not from the actual ?profits? of these companies). Note that the amendment says nothing about discriminating for or against foreign capital. Is this neoliberalism? Certainly not right now. The main problem Fooladghar describes is that the shares of public companies are simply being bought up by other public or semi-public agencies - the Social Security Administration, the various Religious Foundations, the Army, the Revolutionary Guards. This may not be as nefarious as some commentators claim, though. All of these organizations possess built-up pension programs, which contain huge pools of capital that cannot be invested outside the country very easily. This actually resembles the same form of pension financialization that occurred in Brazil, Argentina, and of course, the US (the California Nurses and Health Workers Union, for example). Given that the entire state apparatus is ?all on board? for this process, and the result is currently very little 100% privatization of anything, it is doubtful that this is shock therapy round two. In reality, no faction wants full and rapid privatization of the state sector, nor would that be a very good idea given the failures of rapid privatization in other countries. They all say (Ahmadinejad waffles on it, but Khamene?i brings it up at every opportunity) that privatization will be the key to economic success, but they are not very specific about the process. Fooladghar said that these quasi-public pools of capital easy outcompete private sector capital when obtaining state assets. If anything, Iran?s private sector still needs a ?leg-up? from the government. Instead, Iran?s state-business relations look much more like China?s in the early 1990s rather than Russia?s ? a slow and gradual subjection of some state enterprises to market pressures coupled with the use of the national market to lure in foreign investment (including diaspora capital). I am not sure if the government meant to enact such a gradualist industrial policy, but that is what has happened. Given the track record of the Chinese vs. Russian economies over the last 20 years (and the absolute declines in Russian welfare indicators due to its economic collapse), it was probably a preferable path. In a way, platitudes on privatization are probably leftover from the 1990s and the ?magic of the market.? Given the political turn in the global political economy, though, the talk seems rather hollow. That is not to say that privatization of certain state assets could be a positive development in Iran, only that the salvation that economic privatization represents is likely a dying discourse that will hopefully be replaced with sound and historically proven [LINK: ] economic and industrial policy. From critical.montages at gmail.com Sat Oct 3 11:51:52 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 13:51:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Message-ID: Aside from geopolitical reasons, the West doesn't like Iran's political economy. The West would be eager help rather than hinder Iran's nuclear and other energy development if Iran had pursued "full and rapid privatization of the state sector." -- Yoshie The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Some foreign analyses of the post-election events made the argument that the factions and politicians associated with the Mousavi campaign, especially Hashemi Rafsanjani, were planning to rush through a privatization of Iran?s state-owned companies and assets if they had won. The usual epithet of the left ? neoliberal ? was hurled at Mousavi and his circle. A quick aside: two words are used quite often in left leaning writing these days: neoliberalism and imperialism. The former often stands in for plain old capitalism, the latter for almost everything else the left does not like ? a far distance from Hobson and Lenin [LINK: ]. I rarely read anyone claiming himself or herself as a neoliberal or an imperialist. They are ad hominem terms, which make them excellent for politics, but not very helpful for social science. Back to Iran. Only a few years ago I recall a particular book [LINK: ] on Iran that argued the Ahmadinejad administration was the true neoliberal b?te noire. Again, the privatization of state assets and their ?tunneling? to shadowy figures was the accusation. As usual, the reality is not so simple. Assuredly, many Iranian economists would love a huge private sector in Iran, since the public sector ranges between 60 and 70% of Iran?s GDP. The quasi-governmental sector, where the state still provides funds, staff, and has either majority or minority control, ranges around 10-20% of GDP. The word privatization has been uttered in Iranian politics since the late 1980s, when Iran emerged from the war and entered its ?reconstruction? phase. The zeitgeist of the time was ?shock therapy.? The idea was to rapidly sell off state assets to private hands without much planning, and it was implemented with gusto in many Latin American countries and, most infamously, in Russia. The market would sort it out, and even if the market failed it could not be any worse than state failures in provisions of goods and services. In Iran, there was a brief but rapid liberalization of the economy under Rafsanjani in 1992-3. Here, just like in Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and other cases of induced ?transition,? there were austerity protests due to the rapid rise in costs of living. Unlike Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and many other cases, however, Iran backed off of its liberalization plan (to the dismay of many Western-trained economists inside Iran). If Iran was supposed to be run by neoliberals who did not care for the economic consequences of their policies on the population, then they must be still in hiding after Rafsanjani performed a volte-face. Since then, Iran?s economy has performed in the middle range of developing countries in the world economy (the subject of an upcoming post, I promise). Also, since then, whenever anyone is asked how the sclerotic economy can be made better, all Iranian politicians throw forward the word privatization. Just recently, Etemaad-e Melli interviewed Hamid Fooladghar [LINK: ], the head of the Parliament?s Special Commission on the implementation of Article 44 of the Iranian Constitution. Article 44 lays out which sectors of Iran?s economy are to remain in public hands and which should either be in the private or cooperative economic sectors, and it is a buzzword for privatization. He said that the privatization efforts have not been very successful, and that government capital which is theoretically supposed to be moving into the private sector is instead ?circulating? within the government itself. There are many reasons why privatization moves so slowly in Iran, which I might discuss in the future, but for now I just want to point to the original text of Article 44. Here is what is says [LINK: ]: The state sector is to include all large-scale and mother industries, foreign trade, major minerals, banking, insurance, power generation, dams and large-scale irrigation networks, radio and television, post, telegraph and telephone services, aviation, shipping, roads, railroads and the like; all these will be publicly owned and administered by the State. The cooperative sector is to include co-operative companies and ententes concerned with production and distribution, in urban and rural areas, in accordance with Islamic criteria. The private sector consists of those activities concerned with agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, trade, and services that supplement the economic activities of the state and cooperative sectors. In 2004, while Khatami was still president, Iran amended article 44, part of a long-term project to join the World Trade Organization (the US has continually blocked Iran?s application). As with China?s entry to the WTO in the late 1990s, the regulatory environment of Iran needs to legally conform to the standards set by the WTO to gain entry. Some of the main points of Khamenei?s exective order on the subject are [LINK: ]: The government shall not be allowed to engage in economic activities that fall outside those envisioned in Article 44. Moreover, it is obliged to relinquish any activity, including continuation and operation of previous activities that are covered under Article 44, and cede them (at least 20 percent annually) to the private and cooperative sectors by the end of the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan. Also, some other goals: ?Increasing the share of the cooperative sector in the national economy to 25 percent by the end of the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan. ?Support by the government of the cooperatives, proportionate to the number of members?.Establishment of nationwide cooperatives to cover the three lowest deciles of the population with a view to poverty alleviation?.Change in the role of government from direct ownership and management of enterprises to policy-making, guidance and overseeing?.Economic empowerment of the private and cooperative sectors, and enabling them to enhance competitiveness of their products in international markets?.Preparing Iranian enterprises to apply global trading rules intelligently and in a gradual and target-oriented manner. And, finally, the privatization amendment to article 44: Eighty percent of the shares of State-owned enterprises, covered under Article 44, shall be ceded to the private sector, joint stock cooperative companies and non-state publicly-held companies as follows: 1. State-owned enterprises engaged in large mining activity, large-scale and mother industries (including large downstream oil and gas industries), except the National Iranian Oil Company and companies involved in extraction and production of oil and gas. 2. State-owned banks, except the Central Bank of Iran, Bank Melli of Iran, Bank Sepah, Bank of Industry and Mines, Bank of Agriculture, Housing Bank (Bank Maskan), and Export Development Bank. 3. State-owned insurance companies, except Bimeh Marakazi and Iran Insurance. 4. Airline and shipping companies, except the Civil Aviation Organization and Ports and Shipping Organization. 5. Power supply companies, except the main electricity transmission grid. 6. Postal and telecommunication companies, except the main telecommunication networks, frequency assignment services and the main and basic postal services. 7. Industries affiliated to the armed forces, except defense and security products and services that are deemed essential by the Commander-in-Chief. This is supposed to be done by pricing the assets through the stock market, and then holding companies will sell off the shares. Ahmadinejad?s administration got involved when it began to distribute shares of privatized companies to low income families and named them ?justice shares? [LINK: ] (seham-e edalat). Last year each justice share supposedly paid out around $70 as a dividend (probably not from the actual ?profits? of these companies). Note that the amendment says nothing about discriminating for or against foreign capital. Is this neoliberalism? Certainly not right now. The main problem Fooladghar describes is that the shares of public companies are simply being bought up by other public or semi-public agencies - the Social Security Administration, the various Religious Foundations, the Army, the Revolutionary Guards. This may not be as nefarious as some commentators claim, though. All of these organizations possess built-up pension programs, which contain huge pools of capital that cannot be invested outside the country very easily. This actually resembles the same form of pension financialization that occurred in Brazil, Argentina, and of course, the US (the California Nurses and Health Workers Union, for example). Given that the entire state apparatus is ?all on board? for this process, and the result is currently very little 100% privatization of anything, it is doubtful that this is shock therapy round two. In reality, no faction wants full and rapid privatization of the state sector, nor would that be a very good idea given the failures of rapid privatization in other countries. They all say (Ahmadinejad waffles on it, but Khamene?i brings it up at every opportunity) that privatization will be the key to economic success, but they are not very specific about the process. Fooladghar said that these quasi-public pools of capital easy outcompete private sector capital when obtaining state assets. If anything, Iran?s private sector still needs a ?leg-up? from the government. Instead, Iran?s state-business relations look much more like China?s in the early 1990s rather than Russia?s ? a slow and gradual subjection of some state enterprises to market pressures coupled with the use of the national market to lure in foreign investment (including diaspora capital). I am not sure if the government meant to enact such a gradualist industrial policy, but that is what has happened. Given the track record of the Chinese vs. Russian economies over the last 20 years (and the absolute declines in Russian welfare indicators due to its economic collapse), it was probably a preferable path. In a way, platitudes on privatization are probably leftover from the 1990s and the ?magic of the market.? Given the political turn in the global political economy, though, the talk seems rather hollow. That is not to say that privatization of certain state assets could be a positive development in Iran, only that the salvation that economic privatization represents is likely a dying discourse that will hopefully be replaced with sound and historically proven [LINK: ] economic and industrial policy. From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sat Oct 3 12:55:05 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 11:55:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <660490.58639.qm@web43510.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Capitalism with its insatiable appetite for every resource in the world it constantly seeking new lands to plunder. When it ran out of physical frontiers it determined that the public sector was the next frontier to plunder. Having that done I wonder what it will seek next? Water already, I think air. ________________________________ From: Yoshie Furuhashi To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Sat, October 3, 2009 10:51:52 AM Subject: [R-G] The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Aside from geopolitical reasons, the West doesn't like Iran's political economy.? The West would be eager help rather than hinder Iran's nuclear and other energy development if Iran had pursued "full and rapid privatization of the state sector." -- Yoshie The Privatization Panacea in Iranian Politics Some foreign analyses of the post-election events made the argument that the factions and politicians associated with the Mousavi campaign, especially Hashemi Rafsanjani, were planning to rush through a privatization of Iran?s state-owned companies and assets if they had won.? The usual epithet of the left ? neoliberal ? was hurled at Mousavi and his circle. A quick aside: two words are used quite often in left leaning writing these days: neoliberalism and imperialism.? The former often stands in for plain old capitalism, the latter for almost everything else the left does not like ? a far distance from Hobson and Lenin [LINK: ].? I rarely read anyone claiming himself or herself as a neoliberal or an imperialist. They are ad hominem terms, which make them excellent for politics, but not very helpful for social science. Back to Iran.? Only a few years ago I recall a particular book [LINK: ] on Iran that argued the Ahmadinejad administration was the true neoliberal b?te noire.? Again, the privatization of state assets and their ?tunneling? to shadowy figures was the accusation.? As usual, the reality is not so simple. Assuredly, many Iranian economists would love a huge private sector in Iran, since the public sector ranges between 60 and 70% of Iran?s GDP. The quasi-governmental sector, where the state still provides funds, staff, and has either majority or minority control, ranges around 10-20% of GDP. The word privatization has been uttered in Iranian politics since the late 1980s, when Iran emerged from the war and entered its ?reconstruction? phase.? The zeitgeist of the time was ?shock therapy.?? The idea was to rapidly sell off state assets to private hands without much planning, and it was implemented with gusto in many Latin American countries and, most infamously, in Russia.? The market would sort it out, and even if the market failed it could not be any worse than state failures in provisions of goods and services. In Iran, there was a brief but rapid liberalization of the economy under Rafsanjani in 1992-3.? Here, just like in Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and other cases of induced ?transition,? there were austerity protests due to the rapid rise in costs of living.? Unlike Russia, Bolivia, Argentina, and many other cases, however, Iran backed off of its liberalization plan (to the dismay of many Western-trained economists inside Iran).? If Iran was supposed to be run by neoliberals who did not care for the economic consequences of their policies on the population, then they must be still in hiding after Rafsanjani performed a volte-face. Since then, Iran?s economy has performed in the middle range of developing countries in the world economy (the subject of an upcoming post, I promise).? Also, since then, whenever anyone is asked how the sclerotic economy can be made better, all Iranian politicians throw forward the word privatization. Just recently, Etemaad-e Melli interviewed Hamid Fooladghar [LINK: ], the head of the Parliament?s Special Commission on the implementation of Article 44 of the Iranian Constitution.? Article 44 lays out which sectors of Iran?s economy are to remain in public hands and which should either be in the private or cooperative economic sectors, and it is a buzzword for privatization.? He said that the privatization efforts have not been very successful, and that government capital which is theoretically supposed to be moving into the private sector is instead ?circulating? within the government itself.? There are many reasons why privatization moves so slowly in Iran, which I might discuss in the future, but for now I just want to point to the original text of Article 44. Here is what is says [LINK: ]: The state sector is to include all large-scale and mother industries, foreign trade, major minerals, banking, insurance, power generation, dams and large-scale irrigation networks, radio and television, post, telegraph and telephone services, aviation, shipping, roads, railroads and the like; all these will be publicly owned and administered by the State. The cooperative sector is to include co-operative companies and ententes concerned with production and distribution, in urban and rural areas, in accordance with Islamic criteria. The private sector consists of those activities concerned with agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, trade, and services that supplement the economic activities of the state and cooperative sectors. In 2004, while Khatami was still president, Iran amended article 44, part of a long-term project to join the World Trade Organization (the US has continually blocked Iran?s application).? As with China?s entry to the WTO in the late 1990s, the regulatory environment of Iran needs to legally conform to the standards set by the WTO to gain entry. Some of the main points of Khamenei?s exective order on the subject are [LINK: ]: The government shall not be allowed to engage in economic activities that fall outside those envisioned in Article 44. Moreover, it is obliged to relinquish any activity, including continuation and operation of previous activities that are covered under Article 44, and cede them (at least 20 percent annually) to the private and cooperative sectors by the end of the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan. Also, some other goals: ?Increasing the share of the cooperative sector in the national economy to 25 percent by the end of the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan. ?Support by the government of the cooperatives, proportionate to the number of members?.Establishment of nationwide cooperatives to cover the three lowest deciles of the population with a view to poverty alleviation?.Change in the role of government from direct ownership and management of enterprises to policy-making, guidance and overseeing?.Economic empowerment of the private and cooperative sectors, and enabling them to enhance competitiveness of their products in international markets?.Preparing Iranian enterprises to apply global trading rules intelligently and in a gradual and target-oriented manner. And, finally, the privatization amendment to article 44: Eighty percent of the shares of State-owned enterprises, covered under Article 44, shall be ceded to the private sector, joint stock cooperative companies and non-state publicly-held companies as follows: 1. State-owned enterprises engaged in large mining activity, large-scale and mother industries (including large downstream oil and gas industries), except the National Iranian Oil Company and companies involved in extraction and production of oil and gas. 2. State-owned banks, except the Central Bank of Iran, Bank Melli of Iran, Bank Sepah, Bank of Industry and Mines, Bank of Agriculture, Housing Bank (Bank Maskan), and Export Development Bank. 3. State-owned insurance companies, except Bimeh Marakazi and Iran Insurance. 4. Airline and shipping companies, except the Civil Aviation Organization and Ports and Shipping Organization. 5. Power supply companies, except the main electricity transmission grid. 6. Postal and telecommunication companies, except the main telecommunication networks, frequency assignment services and the main and basic postal services. 7. Industries affiliated to the armed forces, except defense and security products and services that are deemed essential by the Commander-in-Chief. This is supposed to be done by pricing the assets through the stock market, and then holding companies will sell off the shares. Ahmadinejad?s administration got involved when it began to distribute shares of privatized companies to low income families and named them ?justice shares? [LINK: ] (seham-e edalat).? Last year each justice share supposedly paid out around $70 as a dividend (probably not from the actual ?profits? of these companies).? Note that the amendment says nothing about discriminating for or against foreign capital. Is this neoliberalism?? Certainly not right now.? The main problem Fooladghar describes is that the shares of public companies are simply being bought up by other public or semi-public agencies - the Social Security Administration, the various Religious Foundations, the Army, the Revolutionary Guards.? This may not be as nefarious as some commentators claim, though.? All of these organizations possess built-up pension programs, which contain huge pools of capital that cannot be invested outside the country very easily.? This actually resembles the same form of pension financialization that occurred in Brazil, Argentina, and of course, the US (the California Nurses and Health Workers Union, for example).? Given that the entire state apparatus is ?all on board? for this process, and the result is currently very little 100% privatization of anything, it is doubtful that this is shock therapy round two. In reality, no faction wants full and rapid privatization of the state sector, nor would that be a very good idea given the failures of rapid privatization in other countries.? They all say (Ahmadinejad waffles on it, but Khamene?i brings it up at every opportunity) that privatization will be the key to economic success, but they are not very specific about the process.? Fooladghar said that these quasi-public pools of capital easy outcompete private sector capital when obtaining state assets.? If anything, Iran?s private sector still needs a ?leg-up? from the government. Instead, Iran?s state-business relations look much more like China?s in the early 1990s rather than Russia?s ? a slow and gradual subjection of some state enterprises to market pressures coupled with the use of the national market to lure in foreign investment (including diaspora capital).? I am not sure if the government meant to enact such a gradualist industrial policy, but that is what has happened.? Given the track record of the Chinese vs. Russian economies over the last 20 years (and the absolute declines in Russian welfare indicators due to its economic collapse), it was probably a preferable path. In a way, platitudes on privatization are probably leftover from the 1990s and the ?magic of the market.?? Given the political turn in the global political economy, though, the talk seems rather hollow.? That is not to say that privatization of certain state assets could be a positive development in Iran, only that the salvation that economic privatization represents is likely a dying discourse that will hopefully be replaced with sound and historically proven [LINK: ] economic and industrial policy. _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From lcm95060 at gmail.com Sat Oct 3 14:14:51 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:14:51 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Wicked Words For The Day Message-ID: <4AC7B0BB.8080902@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Everyday. - From the students, until today occupying UCSC's Student Center and other facilities > Older strategies of political action and involvement have proven > themselves entirely incapable of enacting change. We do not live in > the ?60s anymore, and we cannot return to them. Those were times of > the deep plenitude of capital, its golden years of global profit and > proliferation. And those were times in which mass protest appeared > capable of effecting changes in the social, economic, and political > structure of capitalism. > > Those days are over: the very nature and events of those times have > produced this very different situation. Capitalism bleeds out, > desperate for horizons it cannot find. In these days of crisis and > the urgency of our interventions, the older modes of protest and > resistance most remembered and repeated are useless. We are expected > to let a few protestors represent us, do a sanctioned march for a > day, and then return home, knowing both that we ?did all that we > could? and that nothing will be different tomorrow. > > We drive a stake through the dead heart of that past moment, > More: http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/a-stake-in-the-dead-heart/ Backgrounders: The SJ Merc-News spun it this way: > A group of demonstrators protesting state budget cuts to higher > education is refusing to leave a student center on the University of > California, Santa Cruz campus. > http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_13444892 But it's more than that: > As a bus driver on the UCSC campus, I fully support this action. > After watching the despicable ?work? of Tom Vanni, Larry Pageler and > Alisson Johnson attempt to destroy the campus transportation over > the last year and a half, I am convinced that Blumencrawl is in deep > with these corporate stooges. The only way to impress upon these > cowards to show some integrity and grit is to show them that the > majority of students and workers will have their voices heard. > Bloomy?s voice box, Jim Burns, will tell you it?s for the survival > of the UC system in an attempt to strike fear in voters minds. > Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, UC has billions in > assets and this is the rainy day it was meant for. The > kickbacks/influence peddlers have, for too long, been a parasitic > influence on UCSC decisions. The city gets millions in revenue > through a badly orchestrated contract with Metro where they double > dip on student passenger fees and agreements between the city and > the college are blatantly incestuous with UCSC keeping any stores, > movie theaters, restaurants off campus in order to get the students > into town to spend their money. They force freshman to be on a meal > plan that is frequently unavailable. They have forced this situation > through their blind ambitious greed and lies. If students hadn?t > occupied McHenry Library in 1984, Nelson Mandela would still be in > jail or dead. We forced UC to divest from South Africa helping to > bring down Botha?s evil regime. Stand up and be counted. Stand with > these students in solidarity. Stand up for the best public > university in the world and support your friends, your peers, your > courageous fellow students. You can be assured that myself and my > fellow drivers here in Slugland are with you. Come on my bus and > hand out flyers or just converse and get this conversation going. It > is necessary. In Solidarity, Ken Keegan > http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/community-support-from-indybay/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKx7C5AAoJEK0+v1xoBEysc4AH/j2ovLN4Ul6OHo468UGb0vJ8 XlFVWsNEH4HIrMR3wVwblflpKbIElZ5U4thp52HLe9o5yp51V55rO9INgEv+WtvI aEJX02dhHvX6NsPkbSOsnVB3vx/3xPzTEMcaRgX86b7gyFg977BaLrgwTbLFi40T 5vjZiLIqHA3uvDGdZ1jXDP8RKZtnDWeje/YsvRLKMT5uM3vfW2Hcb3cM77b6KHhy ihM6eNpseJ3irPhTuWCEU15yUjcba9tNqS8BWo2b8fu0rU/1L0/Qczgb7rlawhlX rR6kNuiM+YCYZaUyZvFatKwtPPMZlj58/fGI6lnNe+31oSrKxIWnTfSWqJ9W8zE= =lbeS -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Oct 4 00:29:45 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 08:29:45 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past In-Reply-To: References: <8CC1286A037D5AD-34CC-2D451@webmail-m091.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Suzanne de Kuyper Date: Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:29 AM Subject: Re: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past To: kcourtenay at aol.com Interesting but astonishing, no! I doubt this explains anything at all. Just another way for the West to sociologically dismember him as a normal, far-sighted leader who has the guts to stare the crazed atomic elephant in the eye and say "No!".. Islam, as was true of Jesus of Nazareth, Jew, teaches to speak to power, rather than cave to it. The Holocoust as a myth is a belief of maybe a billion in the Middle East, not a psychiatric aberration. He is an elected representative, not of himself, but of a country of sixty million ...and related countries. S. On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:21 PM, wrote: > Explains a lot..... > > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6256173/Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-revealed-to-have-Jewish-past.html > > Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's > vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence > uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows. > By Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat > Published: 7:30AM BST 03 Oct 2009 > > A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during > elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. > A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian ? > a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. > The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to > Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. > The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's > birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for > the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved > names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior. > Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled > attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. > Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This > aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him. > "Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity > by condemning their old faith. > "By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspici ons > about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia > society." > A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name > specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. > "He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents > had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known > Jewish name in Iran." > A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said it would not be drawn on > Mr Ahmadinejad's background. "It's not something we'd talk about," said Ron > Gidor, a spokesman. > The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family > moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change > from or directly addressed the reason for the switch. > Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic > pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad > was aged four. > The Iranian president grew up to be a qualified engineer with a doctorate > in traffic management. He served in the Revolutionary Guards militia before > going on to make his name in hardline politics in the capital. > During this year's presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit > that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe. > However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation > of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer. > Mr Ahmadinejad has regularly levelled bitter criticism at Israel, > questioned its right to exist and denied the Holocaust. British diplomats > walked out of a UN meeting last month after the Iranian president denounced > Israel's 'genocide, barbarism and racism.' > Benjamin Netanyahu made an impassioned denunciation of the Iranian leader > at the same UN summit. "Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie > spoke from this podium," he said. "A mere six decades after the Holocaust, > you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews while > promising to wipe out the State of Israel, the State of the Jews. What a > disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations." > Mr Ahmadinejad has been consistently outspoken about the Nazi attempt to > wipe out the Jewish race. "They have created a myth today that they call the > massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and > the prophets," he declared at a conference on the holocaust staged in Tehran > in 2006. > > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Oct 4 04:53:24 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 19:53:24 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Strange Rebirth of a Forgotten Idea Message-ID: <20091004195324.f00c230c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Why is the country so short of money that we can't even rebuild the London Tube? Because we allow the banks a monopoly to create it, and they charge the earth. by David Boyle New Statesman (April 07 2003) As Gordon Brown struggles, on the eve of his Budget, to balance the unbalanceable - a job that was difficult enough even before we went to war with Iraq - a glimmer of an idea is emerging about how to pay for railways, postal services and all the other public service demands that crowd in upon him. It sounds like the search for Atlantis or for zero-point energy - and conventional economists say it's even more mythical than that - but there is a flurry of interest among backbenchers about a proposal for a new source of public finance. The proposal is very simple - and heretical. It is that the government - or rather the Bank of England - creates the money to pay for hospitals or the London Tube but charges no interest for it. The only requirement is that it be paid back. Having done its work, the money is withdrawn from circulation. There is then no need either for the private finance initiative - the controversial PFI, with its vast payments to financial intermediaries - or for government borrowing, with its debt burdens to future generations. An outlandish idea? "If the government can create a dollar bond, it can create a dollar bill", said Henry Ford in 1921, proposing a scheme of this sort to finance dams in the Tennessee Valley. In 1914, David Lloyd George, then chancellor, issued Treasury notes to stave off a banking collapse. In 1933, the Yale University economist Irving Fisher - who invented inflation indices - proposed that money should no longer be based on debt. The Labour MP David Chaytor - who has put down an early day motion on the subject - points out that as recently as 1964, twenty per cent of the money in circulation was interest-free, government-issued notes and coins. The equivalent figure today is three per cent. Interest payments account for a third of the cost of some major projects, and they are the biggest single item of national spending after pensions. To create interest-free cash, therefore - today in electronic form, rather than as old-fashioned notes and coins - is a chancellor's equivalent of alchemy. The traditional economist's objection is that when governments create money in this way, inflation inevitably ensues. But is this true? The answer goes to the heart of an issue that - strangely, given the vast sums we spend on economic research - almost nobody talks about. Where does money come from in the first place? This hangs on obscure definitions - most of us dimly remember them from the early Thatcher era - that have become the 20th-century equivalent of angels on a pinhead. Some money is created in the form of notes and coins (known as M0) issued without interest by the government via the Bank of England. This is dwindling fast because it is so inconvenient. One UK bank recently found itself saddled with six million fifty-pence pieces it didn't need, and seriously debated putting them in landfill. The rest depends on what you include; but most is created by banks in the form of mortgages and loans - including loans to the government - which eventually have to be paid back plus interest. Banks can lend many times over the money that is deposited with them - as long as they observe the rules set by the Bank for International Settlements in Basle about how much they need to keep on deposit. In other words, banks create money all the time. And the process by which they do so, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed in 1975, "is so simple that the mind is repelled". Galbraith added: "Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent". But there is no deeper mystery. The banks just do it and make a handsome profit out of it - about GBP 21 billion a year, according to the former Inter-bank Research director James Robertson. Issuing interest-free cash would only be inflationary if money were a finite resource. As it is not, replacing interest-bearing loans with free money might even cut inflation. "The share of interest-free money - cash and coin or M0 - has fallen dramatically compared with the total amount of money in circulation as a proportion of GDP", says Austin Mitchell, the Grimsby MP who also tabled a Commons motion on the subject. "The power to issue credit", he adds, "has effectively been privatised to the advantage of the banks, but to the detriment of the economy". These ideas come not just from rebel Labour backbenchers but also from campaign groups, websites and books on both sides of the Atlantic. They are all driven partly by an awareness of the debt crisis but also by frustration with both private and public borrowing as a source of funds for public projects. More than twenty MPs - Labour, Liberal Democrat and Plaid Cymru - signed the Mitchell motion. In the US, Congress has before it a draft bill proposing that the Federal Reserve creates $72 billion a year as interest-free loans for local infrastructure projects. The draft was tabled by a Republican congressman from Illinois, Ray LaHood, and was backed by more than 3,300 local authorities and four states, mostly from the Midwest - the region traditionally associated with money reform agitation a century ago. The Forum for Stable Currencies has been meeting monthly in the House of Lords for two years now, attracting leading figures from the world of small business and across the political spectrum - and presided over by the pipe-smoking Lord Sudeley, chairman of the Monday Club. Other reformers meet at an annual jamboree in the Midlands known as the Bromsgrove Group. The Green Party's economic policy is based on similar ideas. We have been here before. The issue of who creates money lay behind the rise of social credit, following the book Economic Democracy by Major C H Douglas, published in 1920. Despite the opposition of the Fabians at the New Statesman, Douglas by the 1930s was able to command stadiums full of supporters in Australia and Canada, as well as in the UK. An estimated ninety million tuned in to his radio broadcasts in the US, and two Canadian states elected social credit administrations. One stayed in power in Alberta until 1971, prevented only by the courts from pushing through its promise to give a monthly dividend of $25 to every citizen. In the UK, a breakaway wing of the Boy Scouts formed itself in the 1930s into the Social Credit Party - much to Douglas's horror - and marched, in those Blackshirt days, as the Greenshirts. The man behind the party, John Hargrave, became notorious just before the war when a green arrow was fired into the door of No 10 Downing Street. When he lost his deposit in Stoke Newington in the 1950 general election, he did a David Owen and wound the party up. Social credit petered out in anti-Semitism and paranoia: for some reason, those who believe there is a conspiracy of bankers seem to be only a hair's breadth away from believing that it's a Jewish one. The conspiracies are still there on the internet: both Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy are supposed to have died because they were poised to take on the banks. But the Social Credit Secretariat, which still exists, based in West Yorkshire, has rejected anti-Semitism and is now undergoing a revival. Social credit proposes the complete centralisation of the money supply. It is hard to see how this would ever be enacted, even if it was desirable, but what's the problem with putting more interest-free government money into circulation? The conventional answer is that the requirement to borrow and to pay interest provides a discipline on governments and big public sector projects. Without this discipline, governments simply delude themselves about how much money it is wise to create. But it's an expensive discipline: investors in the London Underground expect to make about GBP 2.7 billion over the life of the public-private partnership, in return for investments of just GBP 530 million - and a third of that will go to financial intermediaries. Nobody could possibly argue that that is financially efficient. It is quite easy to imagine something like the Bank of England's independent monetary policy committee - which at present decides on interest rates - applying some kind of discipline on the government's creation of money, at far lower cost. "New money" may be an idea whose time has come. It could provide a rallying point for radicals desperate to come up with anything to prop up their struggling ideals of public infrastructure. At the very least, it is healthy that the fundamentals of the money system should be open to debate again. "The world is full, on the one hand, of monetary cranks each with a patent panacea for setting all our ills to rights", wrote the influential New Statesman economist G D H Cole. "And, on the other, of orthodox economists, so alarmed at the cranks' proposals as to be wholly unwilling to make any new discoveries at all, for fear of appearing to sanction some of their notions". After half a century of silence, new discoveries are now rather badly needed. _____ David Boyle, editor of The Money Changers (Earthscan 2003), is a senior associate at the New Economics Foundation http://www.newstatesman.com/200304070021 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From critical.montages at gmail.com Sun Oct 4 05:26:16 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 07:26:16 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past Message-ID: The Telegraph story, as usual, is based on an unconfirmed rumor: Ahmadinejad secretly Jewish....oi vey!! LOL! The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior. - The Telegraph, Oct 3 2009 Not so, says Iranian-born Israeli Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar: "As someone who wrote his biography, I can tell you that this claim is inaccurate and would be happy to go on the record to say so. Saborjiyan are people who paint carpet threads. Also, in Iran many Muslims and Jews share the same surname." Psy-ops? - Politico.com Oct 3 2009 The name Saborjhian derives from thread painter -- sabor in Farsi -- a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan Province, where Aradan is situated. - The Guardian, Saturday 2 July 2005 Ahmadinejdad: 'Some people think if they accuse me of being anti-Jew they can solve the problem. No, I am not anti-Jew,' he said. 'I respect them very much.' - BBC News, 21 Sep 2006 As if the Telegraph wasn't already a joke having repeately promoted total bullshit about Iran's nuclear program that the IAEA has debunked, and being the home of (Neo-)Con Coughlin, today they fell to new lows with a story claiming essenially that Ahmadinejad is secretly a self-hating Jew which of course is more of the "Ahmadinejad-is-Hitler" theme promoted by the pro-Israeli Right which the Telegraph represents. (It is widely claimed that Hitler had Jewish ancestors.) The really funny part of the claim in the Telegraph is that "-jian" is a name suffix that is exclusively preserved for Jews. I wonder if someone explained that to former California governor George Deukmajian, who is of Armenian extraction. I have to wonder why the Telegraph decided that today was a good time to promote this claim about Ahmadinejad secretly being a Jew when the whole story goes back about a year ago when one of his detractor's sons posted it onto his blog (posted, incidentally, as a way of discrediting AN. See? You people who are promoting this lie are relying on the word of someone who thinks being Jewish is a taint)? Perhaps the Telegraph wants to undermine Ahmadinejad's appeal to the anti-Zionist elements and the Arab street? I can't help but notice that Mohammad Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister who was ousted by a CIA-coup in 1953, was similarly accuse of secretly being Jewish (and Bahai, and Communist, and a homosexual.) Supposedly a "close up" of his Iranian identity card "proved" that his name had been changed from Sabourjian -- which is exactly what every biographer has written about his family, and so hardly a secret that requires close-up shots of his identity papers. But apart from having a chuckle at the rubbish that makes into the news, this would be a good opprotunity to remind all that Ahmadinejad does himself come from a poor, solidly working-class and devout background, who rose up from that background and got a PhD in a very competitive environment at Tehran University (only a very small percentage of applicants can make it into tehran U) and became the mayor of tehran etc etc, and so it is really no wonder that, much to the chagrin of his detractors, yes, he does have social and political backing of a very substantial portion of Iranians who look up to him, like it or not, as polls have shown -- even though the media in the US like to portray him as some crazy madman. Here are some facts from a Fasi-speaker about the rubbish written in the Telegraph: First of all, Iranian Jews have been around longer than there have been Jews in most of Europe. There are really no such things as "Jewish-only" names --Sarah, David, Abraham are all pretty common names in Iran. Moslems believe Judaism and Christinianity to be valid religions and precursors of Islam, and they believe in the divinity of the Torah and the Bible and all the prophets in there. In fact, much of Judaism was deeply affected by Iran and Persian cultures and religions, such as Zoroastrianism (though I've run into some "purists" Jews who are offended by this idea that Judaism, like any other religion, evolved and adopted things from other cultures.) So the idea that somehow Iranians would hate to have Jewish roots is quite funny. Iran isn't racist Germany under Hitler with ideas of "blood purity." Ahmadinejad's FATHER changed his family's last name when they migrated from the provinces to Tehran. See, until about 1900, people weren't required to have last names so people were referred to by their profession (Just like in the West -- "Smith", "Porter" etc.) Sabourjian -- the original "last name" of the Ahmadinejad family -- simply means "producer of painted cloths" which is a trade in Iran's vast and ancient carpet weaving industry. The sufix "-jian" is not exclusively reserved for Jews, as the Telegraph article claims. It simlply means "maker" or "producer" (or the son of the maker or producer) Ahmadinejad's father actually worked as a barber and a grocer in the village of Ardalan. When Ahamadinejad's father moved to the big city of Tehran in pursuit of economic opporunities, he wanted to disassociate himself from his peasant roots, and so he changed his name to Ahmadinejad and started working as an ironmonger. By all accounts, his father was a very devout person and a regular attendant at the mosque in the impovrished Narmak district of south Tehran. While Ahmadinejad is certainly an opponent of Israel and Zionism, he doesn't particularly "hate Jews" despite the views attributed to him by the far-right pro-Israeli lobbyists who have made monopolization of victim-status and the use of the "Anti-Semite" accusation as their stock-in-trade. Posted on October 03, 2009 at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 6:54 AM, wrote: > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Suzanne de Kuyper > Date: Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:29 AM > Subject: Re: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past > To: kcourtenay at aol.com > > > Interesting but astonishing, no! ? I doubt this explains anything at all. > ?Just another way for the West to sociologically dismember him as a normal, > far-sighted leader who has the guts to stare the crazed atomic elephant in > the eye and say "No!".. ?Islam, as was true of Jesus of Nazareth, Jew, > teaches to speak to power, rather than cave to it. ?The Holocoust as a myth > is a belief of maybe a billion in the Middle East, not a psychiatric > aberration. ? He is an elected representative, not of himself, but of a > country of sixty million ...and related countries. ?S. > > > On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:21 PM, wrote: > >> Explains a lot..... >> >> >> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6256173/Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-revealed-to-have-Jewish-past.html >> >> Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's >> vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence >> uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows. >> By Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat >> Published: 7:30AM BST 03 Oct 2009 >> >> ?A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during >> elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. >> A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian ? >> a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. >> The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to >> Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. >> The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's >> birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for >> the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved >> names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior. >> Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled >> attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. >> Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This >> aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him. >> "Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity >> by condemning their old faith. >> "By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspici ons >> about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia >> society." >> A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name >> specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. >> "He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents >> had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known >> Jewish name in Iran." >> A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said it would not be drawn on >> Mr Ahmadinejad's background. "It's not something we'd talk about," said Ron >> Gidor, a spokesman. >> The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family >> moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change >> from or directly addressed the reason for the switch. >> Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic >> pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad >> was aged four. >> The Iranian president grew up to be a qualified engineer with a doctorate >> in traffic management. He served in the Revolutionary Guards militia before >> going on to make his name in hardline politics in the capital. >> During this year's presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit >> that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe. >> However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation >> of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer. >> Mr Ahmadinejad has regularly levelled bitter criticism at Israel, >> questioned its right to exist and denied the Holocaust. British diplomats >> walked out of a UN meeting last month after the Iranian president denounced >> Israel's 'genocide, barbarism and racism.' >> Benjamin Netanyahu made an impassioned denunciation of the Iranian leader >> at the same UN summit. "Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie >> spoke from this podium," he said. "A mere six decades after the Holocaust, >> you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews while >> promising to wipe out the State of Israel, the State of the Jews. What a >> disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations." >> Mr Ahmadinejad has been consistently outspoken about the Nazi attempt to >> wipe out the Jewish race. "They have created a myth today that they call the >> massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and >> the prophets," he declared at a conference on the holocaust staged in Tehran >> in 2006. From shniad at gmail.com Sun Oct 4 12:14:40 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 11:14:40 -0700 Subject: [R-G] York Faculty Members Pay Fines Imposed on SAIA In-Reply-To: References: <133497.6832.qm@web110214.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <83904d240910041114j354e4c8s94863ef38ce1860b@mail.gmail.com> For Immediate Release *Please Forward Widely* October 1st, 2009 STUDENTS AND FACULTY TAKE UNITED STANCE IN DEFENCE OF FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS: York Faculty Members Rally to Pay Costly Fines Imposed on Students Against Israeli Apartheid We are a concerned group of York faculty members -- concerned for the rights of free speech at York, concerned for the right to dissent, concerned for Palestinian human rights. During the Spring of this year, 40 of us agreed to make personal contributions to help Students Against Israeli Apartheid-York (SAIA-York) defray the cost of a $1000 fine imposed upon the club by the York administration following a February 12th demonstration in Vari Hall. We did so because we see these fines as part of a larger pattern of repression on those who speak out at York in defence of Palestinian human rights on our campus. In recent years, York administrators have attempted to expel a student and to discipline a faculty member for speaking out on campus in support of Palestinian human rights. In addition, they have on numerous occasions disciplined and fined SAIA and its members. Such actions bring discredit to the university, and they create a climate hostile to free speech and legitimate dissent. For this reason, we have chosen to support SAIA with our wallets. And we will do so again, should it be necessary. In the coming weeks and months, we will be informing the York community about further actions in defence of free speech and Palestinian human rights. Sincerely, Concerned Faculty For Palestinian Human Rights -30- Please join us in demanding that York University President Mamdouh Shoukri denounce the use of prohibitory fines and sanctions against student clubs like SAIA-York as an instrument to silence Palestine solidarity activism and free speech on campus. Direct your letters to > and CC SAIA-York as well >. Feel free to use the sample letter provided below, however you are strongly encouraged to write your own. SAMPLE LETTER: President Shoukri, I am writing to you today to strongly denounce the punitive measures taken against Students Against Israeli Apartheid-York (SAIA-York), in which the club was suspended for a total of 30 days and fined $1000 (alongside an additional $250 charged directly to the student acount of one of its members). I find it both shameful and morally reprehensible to sanction SAIA-York so severely simply for organizing a Palestine solidarity rally at a time when the people of Gaza were being indiscriminately bombed by the Israeli military for 22 consecutive days without reprieve, culminating in the deaths of over 1,400 people - most of which were innocent civilians. If York is truly 'open to the world', as its own mission statement proudly claims, the fundamental right of students to legitimate dissent and peaceful assembly on campus must remain paramount. Vari Hall is at the core of student life and activism on campus and its rightful claim as 'student space' must never be compromised or outlawed. As President of York, it is your responsibility to protect free speech on campus, not to sanction and police those who refuse to stay silent on issues of moral consequence. Should such repressive administrative measures as those levied against SAIA-York continue in the future, you will no doubt be hearing from me again! Sincerely, YOUR NAME From shniad at gmail.com Sun Oct 4 12:57:45 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 11:57:45 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Canadian PM on colonialism; Obama's Anti-Stimulus; Only village idiot can remain hopeful in Afghanistan; Intelligence Agencies: No New Nukes in Iran; The Lying Game Message-ID: <83904d240910041157t50b27575t6fbe4f1f41455e1f@mail.gmail.com> *National Chief rejects Canadian PM's position on colonialism Obama's Anti-Stimulus Only village idiot can remain hopeful in Afghanistan Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran The Lying Game * ----------------------------------------------------- *National Chief rejects Canadian PM's position on colonialism * "We ... have no history of colonialism," said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers, but none of the things that threaten or bother them." National Chief Shawn Atleo, the leader of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada's most prominent First Nations organization, rejected Harper's comment. "It is the attitude that fuelled the residential schools, the colonial Indian Act that displaces traditional forms of First Nations governance, the theft of Indian lands and forced relocations of First Nations communities, the criminalization and suppression of First Nations languages and cultural practices, the chronic under-funding of First Nations communities and programs, and the denial of treaty and aboriginal rights, even though they are recognized in Canada's Constitution," he said. Full: http://www.canada.com/Atleo+rejects+explanation+remark+colonialism/2059381/story.html ----------------------------------------------------- Huffington Post October 1, 2009 *Obama's Anti-Stimulus* At the Obama administration's behest, 1800 gainfully employed immigrant workers are out of a job in the midst of a national recession and a complete economic meltdown in California. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leighton-woodhouse/obamas-anti-stimulus_b_306384.html ----------------------------------------------------- Halifax Chronicle Herald 2009-09-21 *Only village idiot can remain hopeful in Afghanistan* By SCOTT TAYLOR On Target ? With reconstruction at a standstill, violence increasing, casualties mounting and the domestic political landscape plunged into a chaotic vacuum as the result of a laughable presidential election, one would require the eternal optimism of the village idiot to remain hopeful under such circumstances. ? Thus, it was with great amusement that I watched Chris Alexander, Canada?s former ambassador to Afghanistan, mount his one-man, countrywide, Don Quixote windmill-tilting tour to convince Canadians that all is not lost in Afghanistan... ( staylor at herald.ca ) Scott Taylor is an author and editor of Esprit de Corps magazine. Full: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1143723.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- *Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran Secret updates to White House challenge European and Israeli assessments. * By Mark Hosenball | Newsweek Web Exclusive Sep 16, 2009 The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003. .... This latest U.S. intelligence-community assessment is potentially controversial for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is at odds with more alarming assessments propounded by key U.S. allies, most notably Israel. Officials of Israel's conservative-led government have been delivering increasingly dire assessments of Iran?s nuclear progress and have leaked shrill threats about a possible Israeli military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. .... An Obama administration official says that top policymakers are being told that there is no significant disagreement among U.S. intelligence agencies and experts about the latest assessments regarding Iran's nuclear effort. That may encourage the White House's efforts to continue to try to engage Iran in diplomatic dialogue, including discussion of Iran's nuclear ambitions. A spokesperson for National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair's office, which is responsible for producing NIEs and updates on Iranian nukes, had no comment. http://www.newsweek.com/id/215529 ---------------------------------------------------------------- *The Lying Game: John Pilger* In 2001, the Observer in London published a series of reports that claimed an ?Iraqi connection? to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths. Something similar is happening over Iran. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23597.htm From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 4 16:15:29 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 15:15:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Irish Pick EU Unity, Dana Beal Busted, TM & Levetation, Krishna Ghost Story Message-ID: <799584.20452.qm@web43513.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Irish Vote Unified EU, Dana Beal Busted Again, Leaping Meditation, Krishna & Ghosts.October 4th, 2009 Yesterday I started writing a post about love. It got king of sappy and then I started watching the IFC channel where there were some cute comedy shows like the Whitest Kids You Will Ever Know and another one with some guy in an ego fest with Jesus battling over who was more manly. It didn?t mix well and I decided to nix the whole idea. With that I went to bed early reading Naomi Klein?s ?The Shock Doctrine? and wondering if she was married. LOL. My girlfreind did not make her threatened comeback and I am a bit down in the dumps over that. I was even contemplating getting high but decided to do the laundry instead and get work done on the car, manly stuff. Enough autobiography. This is an interesting bit about the European Union from the Washington Post. ?Ireland Votes for A Stronger E.U. Former Holdout Approves Lisbon Treaty By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, October 4, 2009 LONDON, Oct. 3 ? Henry Kissinger once famously asked, ?Who do I call if I want to call Europe?? The answer, thanks to the Irish, may soon be the president of Europe. Irish voters have removed the single greatest barrier to region wide adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, which would further integrate the European Union ? the world?s largest political and economic alliance encompassing almost 500 million people in 27 countries. According to official results of a referendum released Saturday, 67 percent of voters supported the charter. The treaty would, among other things, create a full-time E.U. president and secretary of state, more closely linking the region?s foreign policies and affording the alliance new clout on the world stage. Irish voters rejected the treaty in a vote last year. But reassured that the European Union would not demand changes to its antiabortion laws or military neutrality, Ireland switched gears in a second referendum Friday. The results illustrate how the global financial crisis has forced hard-hit nations such as Ireland to find new value in their E.U. membership, re energizing a project in cross-border governance that some said would never work. The about-face, analysts say, appeared to be driven at least in part by fear. Ireland is experiencing one of the worst economic downturns in the industrialized world after an unprecedented boom. It now views the E.U. as a lifeline to larger countries with more stable economies, including Germany and France. A repeat of a no vote, many Irish believed, would have reduced their influence with European partners at precisely the time when their investment, grants and loans are needed most, analysts said. Analysts note that the treaty would not drastically change European politics. It would fortify the power of the European Parliament on regional issues including security, agriculture and transportation, but E.U. nations would largely remain autonomous on the vast majority of issues. Instead, many are pointing to the creation of a new leadership structure and the streamlining of E.U. decision-making, and its corps of diplomats and bureaucrats overseas, as the most important outcome of a ratified treaty. The full-time E.U. president, to be elected by Europe?s leaders for 2 1/2 -year terms, would replace a part-time system that rotates the seat every six months among standing leaders of member nations. The position is envisioned to be filled with a major European statesman, similar to the U.N. secretary general.? Interesting because the integration of Europe means that each country has less autonomy. On the other hand it creates a power block that would be second to none in economic power but it has yet to flex its military might as a unified force. If it did it would easily overcome the current American dominance. China and India are both larger than the EU in terms of population. But Germany alone is the worlds largest exporter, surprisingly larger than China, Japan or the USA. This from the Yippie Blog site. I know Dana Beal and I hope he has a good lawyer. It seems that he is looking for some donations and if you have ever imbibed a mind altering substance or toked on a joint you owe it in some regards to people like Dana who has been out there in the forefront in the Pot Liberation Front. ?DANA BEAL ARRESTED Dana Beal, FOCALIZER FOR THE MILLION POT MARCH and 2 other organizers were busted early Thursday morning in a van in Wahoo,Nebraska ?they are bring charged with among other things allegedly having 150 pounds of pot..see this link that came from a Nebraska TV station (http://www.ketv. com/news/ 21173912/ detail.html) with the pigs version? however Dana needs help with bail and legal defense?please email me via freedanabeal@ gmail.com PAYPAL DONATIONS FOR BAIL AND LEGAL DEFENSE CAN BE SENT VIA DOUGGREENE at EARTHLIN K.NET aron pieman kay http://pieman. org? I am not much of a druggie anymore myself. I have had my day and certainly have tried just about everything that I could get my hands on to alter my consciousness. I find organized religious attempts to blast into space to be more interesting. Although I don?t know how crucial they are to rendering the planet more or less habitable. There are tales of Yogis in the Himalayas holding back the effects of the Kali Yuga for a thousand years by their conscious efforts. That story fascinated me. I heard it from one of the Gurus at the Krisna temple, I think it was at the Temple in San Francisco back in 93. I spent a good portion of the 90?s involved with the whole Krishna thing. Here were these noble ascetics sitting on the bare rocks of some cave in the heights of the mountains presenting a unified psychic field of resistance that blocked the hordes of barbarians who represented the Iron age or the Dark age of the Kali Yuga. I envision it as being some sort of force field. It must have been pretty scary to the nomads on the other side. Or perhaps it simply was a cloak of invisibility, making it impossible for the invaders to see a pathway into the golden lands of Bharat beyond. I wonder if they rotated shifts, did one come in every few days or hours to replace the yogi on duty. Did they look like Jesus, guys in robes with beards and scraggly hair? Were they emaciated from lack of food and sleep or were they like the fat Buddhas all round and laughing? Maybe they were both. I don?t know but why would they do it? If they knew it was the changing of the age, I guess it would be out of a sense of loyalty, or duty. Perhaps they didn?t know the age had changed. Perhaps they only sensed that there were evil forces abroad and that they had to protect what they knew to be the good. Indian mythology has a mass of contradictions that have been turned into lessons for followers of the various deities. Each one is seen as the best by his or her followers. I found the whole Krishna thing to be interesting but I concluded that the Blue Krisna was some kind of alien among the humans. What with 4 to 8 arms and third eyes and being able to morph into different bodies and charming snakes and tigers and all that. It seemed to me that this was no mere mortal. Or mortals have capabilities that we are unaware of. The followers of the Maharishi who died last year at the age of 90, believed in some kind of scientific approach to yoga. They practiced levitation in their yogic classes. What it looked like to me was hoping. And then I personally have had a whole dream series where I can fly or float. Actually that is more like an alternate reality where I float. That is why I am not too worried about this one where I am an overweight ex-druggie. I mean as long as the alternative realities are there and we can still communicate with them. At some point when we leave this one I guess we have to choose another. But there are all sorts of reasons to come back to this one. Sex is a good one, food is another. And there are the comforting repetitions in the workaday life. My job, like the shit shoveling I did as a youth, allows my mind to wander and when it does, it floats in alternate universes. But back to this world. This is from an article about Transcendental Meditation. It is from Americans United For A Separation of Church and State. Most of the article is critical of TM but I thought this bit was interesting. ?TM promoters even claim they can overcome the law of gravity. Supposedly, some practitioners can learn to rise into the air while sitting in a lotus position ? a practice TM boosters call ?yogic flying.? The Maharishi also claimed he could teach people how to become invisible, have super normal powers of vision and hearing and to ?bi-locate,? that is, be in two places at once.? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHwhGUo90jw this is an image of people hopping in the meditative state. I would not call it flying but it is a pretty good bounce. At the Krishna devotional services I have seen people leap pretty darn high. I have seen some people leap 2 or 3 feet in the air from a standing position. This is something you don?t see much in India but you do see in the USA. I thought it was introduced by punk rockers who had been pogoing and slam dancing before and wanted to bring a more physical style of devotion to the Krishna devotee walk. This is good. A ghost story from the Krishna archives. ?Mahavishnu Swami // News Archives - Ghosts versus Hare Krishna This is a true story that took place near Rome, in March 2009 As soon as we entered the apartment we understood we were in for some excitement. We?d heard different stories of how this young woman had been terrorized by a ghost for the last nine years, of how just the other week she had been hospitalized due to a flying chair striking her in the head, and how she was now at the limit of her sanity. We?d been told of knives flying across the room, pictures leaping from the walls and levitating coffee machines. Chairs and other objects independently shaking and smashing into walls was a daily occurrence in this home. ?Hey, but ghosts don?t exist?. Well for many people and cultures they do. Ancient Indian culture explains that a ghost is someone, a soul, who, upon dying is not awarded a new physical body, but painfully lingers around in their subtle body made of mind, intelligence and false ego. Such a situation may occur due to a sudden death or extreme negative acts such as suicide, and is a position of suffering as one has a mind full of desires yet no body to enact them. Ghosts often take advantage of weak minded persons or those under intoxication, entering their physical bodies and attempt to enjoy through this borrowed facility. Many people cannot believe what they have done whilst under intoxication or depression, acts they normally would refrain from. So, such was the situation we found in a quiet village just outside Rome. The woman and her boyfriend had tried everything they knew to free themselves from this terrifying situation. On one occasion they?d lit incense and chanted prayers in order to purify the atmosphere only to find the nearby wardrobe seemingly come to life and violently vibrate, splitting into two equal pieces. Upon moving the ruptured closet they had been horrified to find a swarming mass of bleach-white worms, quite different from the indigenous species, covering the wall and floor. The woman explained that nine years before she had been the object of attraction for one boy in her school. Repeatedly denying his requests for a relationships, she had found herself cursed by the boy?s satanic mother, who was well practiced in the black arts of witchcraft. She was told that she would suffer for the rest of her life for this refusal. That had been nine years before, yet with some incident every evening it already felt like a lifetime. One may ask why they stayed in the same apartment, why not move? Well, theirs was a family home for several generations, and they still lived with her parents. Whilst her mother was very sympathetic to her daughter, the father had been always skeptical. Most of the happenings had been directed only to his daughter, until he also started to experience strange things. Out of desperation, they had once invited the local Catholic monks to come and assist. The monks explained that they could perform an exorcism on the woman but they couldn?t guarantee the ghost would leave the property. ?Anyhow, at least let?s do something?, they decided, although they were not prepared for what they would witness. At one point in the ceremony with the woman white like a sheet, trembling and covered with sweat, they beheld countless 3-inch nails shooting from her mouth, followed by a deep ghastly roar clearly not from such a simple lady. Whilst the couple were completely shocked, the monks explained that it was all quite normal in these situations and that the Vatican was full of such incidents. Seeing no alternative, the boyfriend called upon his parents for help. As they were Vaisnava practitioners, Hare Krishnas, for more than twenty years, they enthusiastically seized the opportunity and organized a troop of devout spiritual followers, we were seven in total. We meditated not only on trying to help the disturbed family but also on helping the ghost who was himself imprisoned in such an agonizing situation. Our strategy would be to perform loud, intense chanting of Krishna ?s names which purify everything and are feared by fear personified. It is said that all negativity flies away when one chants the holy name of Krishna .This would be a chance to see how much we believed in what we had dedicated our lives to, were we really taking our spiritual life seriously or were we just pretenders. We were not sure what to expect but we were certain that we wanted to experience something extraordinary. Were we ready for what was to come? ?Oh no, it?s started?.it?s started!? The expression on the woman?s face changed rapidly as did ours. What we had been expectantly awaiting was now immediately happening. As soon as we crossed the threshold of the apartment our hearts had taken on a new gear, sensing the thick heavy atmosphere. As if to ignite fear within us, two pictures of Christian saints had sprung from the hallway wall and crashed to the floor. Was this a message from our apparently hostile poltergeist suggesting our own immanent destiny? As each devotee individually deepened their soft recital of Krishna?s names, we confidently ventured forward. Within a second a dining chair in the adjoining kitchen seemingly leaped up and smashed to the ground, sending the woman into a state of hysteria, as she frantically moved from room to room. We had been in the apartment for about ten seconds and had already experienced more than we could have imagined. Standing in the centre of the main room we all looked at one another for a moment and then spontaneously erupted into kirtan, the loud calling of the names of Krishna , themselves feared by fear personified. The leader of the chanting requested we all chant in unison with full voice instead of the usual call and response style we are familiar with. What with the accordion sounding, clay drum booming and countless hand symbols chiming, along with the resounding call of a conch shell being blown, overall the effect was quite tumultuous. Placing all of our breath into the chanting we searched to find the protection promised from these all powerful names of the Supreme. What the neighbours were thinking was far from our thoughts as we absorbed our minds in the pure transcendental vibration; Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare One of our party had brought several sacred Narasingha stones called Salagram, and proceeded to bath them with pure water. These transcendental manifestations offer powerful protection as well as removal of inauspicious obstacles on our spiritual path. Spraying the bathing water all around we gradually moved from one room to another ardently chanting the recommended mantra for this age, Hare Krishna. Noticing that the heavy wooden dining chairs had each begun to vibrate, the woman lay them down under the table, all the while rambling through prayers in a frenzied manner. Her mother tried to console her but had little effect. Just then a wooden drawer from a cupboard in an adjacent room came flying across the ceiling and smashed against the wall just behind the woman, spraying its contents everywhere. We instinctively moved closer to the woman and desperately called out the names. Meanwhile, in the kitchen a devotee was offering the bathing water to drink for protection to the family, when a chair rose one metre from the floor and within a split second zoomed across the room colliding with the boyfriend. Seeing no other means to assist, the devotee practically threw the liquid down the boyfriends throat only then to see the coffee machine also begin its levitation. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare We had been hoping to experience something and this local spook was certainly entertaining us. Whilst the dining chairs were continuing to vibrate we moved through to the parents bedroom all the while intensifying our chanting of the all purifying names of Krishna .Vedic scripture explains that these names, the Maha-mantra, being completely spiritual, have the unlimited power of God by which the dirt of our hearts can be cleansed. Just as the sun can cleanse urine and waste from the earth by its scorching rays yet remain unpolluted, similarly the names of Krishna can never be contaminated, yet themselves clean even the reservoir of dirt in our consciousness. As we danced to the sweet sound, the woman along with her Mother and Father was standing in the doorway, nervously chanting to herself. She appeared distant, lost in her racing thoughts. At that moment, seemingly thrust up against the wall, she was pinned by her invisible assaulter. As if held by the throat she was dragged along the wall banging into her parents. Pandemonium arose amongst them as we chased after throwing our weapon of the Maha-mantra in an act of rescue. Again she was released, although severely shaken. We had now been chanting intensely for forty minutes and still the atmosphere seemed thick and heavy with darkness. Although violent events had occurred to the family members, nothing had touched any of us who were taking refuge in the sound incarnation of Krishna?s names. We all felt completely protected and fearless. With such faith in Krishna names as well as the mood of compassion to help both the family and their uninvited phantom, we courageously danced and span around the home. Gradually we managed to involve the family in dancing and chanting with us which brought unlimited heights of bliss as the father of the family smiled for the first time. Then the atmosphere lightened and everyone felt the overwhelming joy of freedom whilst chanting Hare Krishna. It felt like a wonderful sunrise clearing away the darkness and fog of the evening, whilst simultaneously eradicating fear of thieves and dacoits. Carrying on for another fifteen minutes we all tasted the true happiness of the soul as he reawakens his relationship with his long lost friend, Krishna. With the mood considerably transformed we sat together on the floor and recited the twelfth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in both Sanskrit and Italian, entitled Devotional service. We were refreshing ourselves with knowledge of our pure loving relationship with Krishna, whilst also praying that our poltergeist friend be now fully purified and able again to reawaken his own love. We cannot be know what has happened to this ghost, although we are sure that immense purification took place not just for him but also the family and ourselves who came as menial servants of the sweet, all-powerful names of Krishna. By chanting the Maha-mantra we can purify our existence and fully reawaken our dormant love for Krishna and consequently each other. That love is within us all, even ghosts, but due to absorption in material pursuits we forget our real treasure within. Since that day there have been no further disturbances in that home. That night was there first peaceful night in nine years. All glories to the unlimited glorious names of Krishna and all glories to the pure devotee of those names who has compassionately spread them throughout the entire world, Srila Prabhupada. - Written by Sanatana Goswami dasa, Italy? Fact or fiction? Santana Goswami dasa thinks it is true. I have seen the deities move in India and I have been able to get out of jail by chanting. But other than that I could not swear that this was good. I had a lot of crazy stuff happen to me when I was living with a Devotee girl. Her life was total chaos and she took me for a ride that was like nothing I had been on before. It was the only time I lost weight since I put it on in my thirties. Was it a good experience, well not by worldly standards. It was kind of hellish. But it also was full of blissful moments. I appreciated the learning experience. Would I do it again. Not in the same manner but it changed my life for a while. I mean I broke some Vedic rules, I was an anarchist on the beach in Venice when I met her. I was conscious that I was going to meet my new mate this way but I didn?t know what I was getting into. I will tell you all about it if you want. But I expect a request for this story, so get off your lazy butts and ask me to tell it if you want to read about my adventures in the land of the Vedas. That is my meditation for a Sunday afternoon. Not especially political but it is what it is. Tags: Doper Busted, Drugs and Meditation., Two Fisted Tales Of Ghosts And Karma. Levitation From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 4 19:02:21 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 18:02:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Conservative Agenda and A Radical Agenda Message-ID: <817891.6248.qm@web43513.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Four Pillars of Conservative Agenda And Battling For Real Democracy. The right wing has a four fold plan of attack according to Thomas Frank?s ?Wrecking Crew?. One - topple the Trial Lawyers with Tort Reform. Did we not hear Obama offer that in his big health care speech? The Trial lawyers give millions to the Democrats. Two - crush Labor Unions with a paycheck protection legislation plan that would make it illegal to donate a percentage of a paycheck to an Union fund and weaken unions with an expansion of NAFTA and other free trade policies like allowing Mexican truck drivers compete with the Teamsters and destroy them and take away all those phone banks run by unions for Liberals. Three - School vouchers and Charter schools to destroy the teachers unions and National Education Association and thus kill off all those liberal precinct walkers for the Democrats. Four - Reforms in HUD and Department of Education to kill off the remaining big city Political machines and the centers of Democratic power that they represent. That is what Grover Norquist wanted to do in demolishing the pillars of Democratic Party and ultimately liberal control of aspects of the democracy. The ultimate goal is total privatization of all government functions with privatising Social Security and Medicare as the last hold outs of Government power that they want for private industry. Bush almost got there but failed. That is why they are so dead set against government health care options. If they can get the government to spend more money on the war in Afghanistan they know that there will not be enough money left in the budget to fund a public option. Even if there was one it would be so weak and anemic that it would collapse under the weight of the debt load and the Republicans are sure that once they get back in power they could strangle it before it became a viable option. They want the model of the Department of Homeland Security to be followed a totaly outsourced government agency that is mostly in the business of delegating contracts. With Obama elected they have had to put the plan for a total captialist take over of government back a bit. They will try to get him to do their dirty work with tort reform just as they made Clinton do with the destruction of Federal Welfare. Tort Reform is much more important not because of all the money it drains from the economy, that is a pittance, but because of the money the lawyers give to the Democratic Party. If Obama falls for that then the battle is almost won. Then it is simply blocking the Unions from getting any reform that would make it easier to unionize. We can see that with the legislation to make schools meet standardized tests they now have an empirical weapon to use to defeat the teachers unions. These tests are not designed to help the students they are designed to defeat the teachers unions. By creating a school environment that is more like a military barrack or a prison, students will lose the desire to learn and drop out. This will create the desired effect One candidates for private remedial programs, two candidates for the prison and military industrial complexes, and third and most important discourage and demoralize teachers who realize that they are now not educators but simply disciplinarians, clerks and graders. They will lose their desire to teach. The last factor draining the cities of their funding is done by sending money for school vouchers, road repair instead of mass transit and to the suburbs and agribusiness instead of for urban renewal or green jobs. Thus they need to defeat the Democratic plans for environmental legislation or make sure it is all outsourced to private industry. Anyway that is all there in front of us and it is easy enough to see. That is why we need to fight for legislation to make it easier to unionize, fight for public health care and to end tort reform unless we get election reform to go with it and that means public funding of elections and free access to the media for candidates for office. We need to fight for real education reform and that means free college education for all who want it or a technical school and apprenticeship program for those who don?t. We need real environmental legislation that puts emphasis on public transit, efficiency and lowering green house gases. We need to fight for the rights of the people not of the corporations. Most of all we have to end the hollowing out of the government and reinforcing the concept of public service for the general welfare of all. End the military state and dependence on dominating other countries to pay for our lifestyles. This means supporting the forces that work for the people. Especially empowering a third party to the left of the democrats that will fight for the interests of the working people. We need more democracy, and that means mandating time for every citizen to participate in political debate every day. We need the political hour at every workplace every day for issued to be debated and a method for action to be taken by citizens on the job or at the home to bring democracy to each and every citizen. Direct computerized voting by citizenry. Congress should be an advisory body and a legislation initiator. We the people should vote on each bill as it comes up. That should be part of every days agenda at the work place. Anyway that is my political statement for the day. Tags: and Free Education For All., Fight Against Tort Reform. Fight For Election Reform From lcm95060 at gmail.com Sun Oct 4 19:06:05 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:06:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Hey Kids! Want To Be MORE Than A Flunky Drone Operator When You Grow Up? Message-ID: <4AC9467D.2020501@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The NGIA's "Kids Page" Home > Kids Page > Geospatial Intelligence > Introduction to GEOINT Introduction to GEOINT NGA?s vision is ?know the Earth? show the way.? NGA people collect information to describe the Earth and show what?s happening all over the world. When they put all of the information together, it?s called GEOINT. What Is GEOINT? The term ?GEOINT? is short for ?geospatial intelligence.? GEOINT is made of imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial information. Imagery Imagery is a kind of photograph taken with cameras that are operated by people on the ground or mounted in airplanes or in satellites. The image here was taken from a satellite in space. St. Louis, MO Image Imagery Intelligence When we describe what we see on an image, our descriptions are called ?imagery intelligence.? We also write imagery intelligence reports about what we see. These intelligence reports can detail differences from one point in time to the present. Anootated St. Louis, MO image (HA! They mis-spell on M Geospatial Information Geospatial information is information about the Earth and the manmade features on the earth that we can show on maps, navigation charts, and images. Some examples are roads, buildings, lakes, parks, geographic names, and the elevations of features. We also show obstacles, danger areas, and navigation aids. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKyUZ7AAoJEK0+v1xoBEysaA4H/2Wqm4njM5jbyCgpW6JtD5L0 yLLXGSt3CWs6AeoV4jz3ck3Ibx9bktEk2pRuDlNyuLp3thGOjAanKG4GVmmIsukG Eutz6KxJlGXIEx8YbK7pTPM0smC5PgwfOMGr9F6pvV2jpvIN7ewqQ+ZuJeJcGavu lFX67aeJ+/jwATQiAOrJ9t5XzkE00WzIM50tDjkUOT3VAo0B1GHXLaNEHKDTrtZT zrMfPAo+IdqV3GvBlE5XGS1HjM1TMkx17g/uErtRWe9fd+JLI2ymEBrsM6o5xnqf yThvxQH75rPjy7aasLcr3NtYJxezvudR1YiMoAK45gAip2p5p7BTPab0hopHihA= =LZmf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 4 22:35:07 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 21:35:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Innocence is the new CRIME and we are ALL guilty! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <516069.92780.qm@web111515.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> These Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) Indigenous + Native Americans?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/indigenous_native_americans http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions ? Subject: Re: ~^~Something to Share~^~ Dear Harvey, As a supporter of Leonard's release I thank you for sharing this video with me. It was wonderful to view and hear your words and thoughts on each man you have written about and been blessed to know. Humanity has been taught to believe the lies and that only lies are spoken by those who have an agenda, sadly not to hear the truth when it is spoken. I am blessed to know when I hear the truth and to believe when it is in the best interest for all. You are a blessing for all of humanity, and to think you have only just begun is an other blessing. They say we are to wait for the White Buffalo to return. I have thought of this many times and what the return would be about. Where is it said the White Buffalo would return in animal form? I believe he has returned in the form of a man, that man being Leonard Peltier. Just this woman's belief. Thank you again for this gift. Sincerely, Alexandra C ? Harvey answers: Alexandra?If I might extend your metaphor a bit?summed up as ?Leonard can be seen as a human manifestation of the White Buffalo??isn?t it interesting that, were that true, or even if it isn?t true, the Elite has chosen to imprison him for life for the unforgiveable crime of being innocent.? Yes, though he?s as imperfect a human being as any of us, there IS something holy about Leonard?he represents the suppression and oppression of Innocence and Truth by a shadowy beyond-the-law Elite and its servant minions (FBI etc) now strangling the entire human species and all Life itself in its insidious tentacles.?? Innocence is the new CRIME and we are ALL guilty! Blessings, /Harvey ? From: Pat Talley [mailto:pattalley at ...] Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 5:15 PM To: harveyarden at starpower.net Subject: WisdomKeeper Reading Video Dear Mr. Arden, Wado.? Wado.? Thank you for sharing this video.? Your heart filled reading touched me immensely. ?When I first read Noble Red Man I was impressed by the sharing of Mathew King?s forthrightness.? His plain talk made clear the message he intended to share.? His words are timeless.? This video will carry his words to many that might never have the opportunity to read the book. ?Your insights shared during the reading are a treasure.? ?Mr. King?s dream lives on through your sharing of his vision. ?I will certainly share the link to your video with many that I know will also appreciate the words shared. ?Thank you for the gift of preserving and sharing the words of the WisdomKeepers. ?Respectfully, Pat Talley ? Harvey answers: http://www.haveyouthought.com/ ?Pat?Thank you for your kind words.? They warm my old heart.? I was 74 yesterday,,,and, hey, I?m just getting started!? Hope to meet you some day?you ever invite old authors to speaking venues?? I?d be honored. I?ll be in Houston to give some talks sometime this fall, when my new NOBLE RED MAN audio CD (with music) comes out.? Publisher George Blitch of www.haveyouthought.com is bringing me down; maybe have a sidetrip to Corpus Christi??? If you like give him a call at 713-302-2028.?? Blessings, /Harvey. ?PS: Be sure to have folks check out www.haveyouthought.com ?GREAT STUFF THERE! ~ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Oct 5 02:53:45 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:53:45 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Monetary Reform - Making It Happen Message-ID: <20091005175345.2c34e0b1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> extracted from Chapters One and Two of James Robertson & John Bunzl's Monetary Reform - Making It Happen (2003). by Bill Totten Joseph Huber and James Robertson put forth a proposal for mainstream monetary reform put forward by in Creating New Money (2000). {1} Briefly, that proposal is that new official-currency money (pounds, euros, dollars, yen, et cetera) should no longer be created by commercial banks as profit-making loans to their customers. It should be created by central monetary authorities (today's central banks) which should give it as debt-free public revenue to their governments to spend into circulation for public purposes. {1} Joseph Huber and James Robertson, Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age, New Economics Foundation, London, 2000 - summarised in World Review, Vol4, No 2, New European Publications, London, 2000. See http://www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm Their definition of money includes not just coins and banknotes, but also the electronic bank-created money in our current bank accounts. Although some people with pretensions to knowledge of these things say that that is something distinct from money, called credit, it is now clearly recognised to be money, directly and immediately available for spending. {6} That commercial banks still create this official-currency money for private-sector profit has become a glaring anachronism. {6} Today's official monetary statistics accept this, but raise a different problem. They contain alternative definitions of the money stock, based on confusing aggregates called M0, M1, M2, M3, M3 extended, M4, and so on. These are part of the veil of mystery which shrouds the workings of the money system even in "democratic" countries. The reform Huber and Robertson propose will replace them with one clear definition of money, M. Our money system needs to be brought up to date. For over two centuries political democracy has been spreading through the world, but our capacity to control the power of money and harness it to the public good has lagged far behind. So much so that failure to bring the workings of money and finance into line with economic justice and the realities of the Information Age is already damaging confidence in political democracy itself. For those of us in Britain the euro highlights the link between democracy and the money system. In spite of efforts to persuade us that scrapping the pound and replacing it with the euro would be a progressive step, people are increasingly doubtful. Why can't we use the euro as a parallel currency, alongside the pound, rather than a single currency managed by a remote, centralised monetary authority imposing one-size-fits-all interest rates and money supply on millions of diverse people and places? Surely 21st-century pressures to become more globalised and more localised call for a more pluralistic monetary system, allowing different currencies and means of payment to evolve at local to global levels, enabling people and organisations to choose to use whichever currency they find most convenient and useful for different purposes. So - as well as national currencies, continental currencies and a global currency - we should be encouraging currencies issued by local government authorities for local circulation, and non-official payment systems set up by local community groups (like LETSystems), local social service groups (like Time Banks), and local business groups (like the WIR co-operative in Switzerland). In technical terms, whereas paper money could have been accepted as the new basis for the monetary system at one time, electronic money can now make it convenient for us to use different currencies for different purposes. That technical factor also points the way to monetary reform at the national level. Dematerialised non-cash money (that is, electronic bank-created money held in bank accounts and transmitted between them by modern information and telecommunication technology) is now overwhelmingly important. About 97% of this country's (Britain's) money supply is created in that form by commercial banks, and only three percent as banknotes and coins issued by the Bank of England and the Royal Mint. The commercial banks create the non-cash money out of thin air, calling it credit and writing it into their customers' current accounts as profit-making loans. That gives them over GBP 20 billion a year in interest, while the taxpayer gets less than GBP 3 billion a year from the issue of banknotes and coins. Stopping commercial banks creating non-cash money, and transferring to the central bank responsibility for creating it and issuing it debt-free to the government to spend into circulation, will result in extra public revenue of about GBP 45 billion a year. This is the reform with which this book is specifically concerned. {See 1} It will mean that:- 1) Taxation and government debt can be reduced, or public spending can be increased, by up to GBP 45 billion a year. 2) The value of a common resource - the national money supply - will become a source of public revenue rather than private profit. That will remove an economic injustice. 3) Withdrawing the present hidden subsidy to the banks will result in a freer market for money and finance, and a more competitive banking industry. 4) A debt-free money supply will help to reduce present levels of public and private debt, which are partly caused by the fact that nearly all the money we use has been created as debt. 5) The economy will become more stable. Banks inevitably want to lend and their customers want to borrow more at the peaks of the business cycle and less in the troughs. So, when the amount of money in circulation depends on how much the banks are lending, the peaks and troughs - the booms and busts - are automatically amplified. 6) The central bank will be better able to control inflation if it itself decides and directly creates the quantity of new money the economy needs. It now tries to control inflation indirectly, by raising interest rates (that is, the price at which people borrow from banks). But raising costs in that way actually helps to cause inflation. That partly explains why inflation has to be allowed to rise steadily every year - by 2.5% in the UK - in order to avoid deflating the economy. 7) Environmental stress will be reduced. When, as now, almost all the money we use is debt, people have to produce and sell more things in order to service and repay debt than they would if money were put into circulation debt-free. In our proposals for this reform, Joseph Huber and I called it "seigniorage reform". Seigniorage was the profit made by monarchs and local rulers from minting and issuing coins. In democratic societies in the Information Age, the proposed reform will restore the prerogative of the state - now on behalf of the people - to capture as public revenue the value of putting the money supply into circulation. Many people now understand that money is power, and that the institutions of money today negate democracy by using their power to exploit people and keep them dependent. Many people also understand that money is a scoring system - for the game of economic life - and that the way this scoring system works today is systematically perverse: it rewards undesirable activities, penalises desirable ones, and frustrates desirable change in almost every sphere. The Proposed Reform The particular reform we are discussing concerns public currencies. These include the pound, the dollar and the yen that belong to nations, and the euro that belongs to a group of nations. In future they will include a genuine world currency that does not yet exist. National governments are responsible for seeing that national currencies maintain their value and provide an essential public service to the population as a whole. In that respect these currencies differ from the more private kinds of currencies and quasi-currencies used by community groups (like LETS) or groups of businesses (like the Swiss club WIR) for transactions between their members, and loyalty points, Air Miles, et cetera issued by companies to customers or suppliers, who may then use them as a means of exchange. In the more pluralistic multi-level-currency era foreseen (see above), the principles of the proposed national currency reform will apply to other official currencies. These will include local currencies to meet the need of local communities within their particular localities, and a global currency to meet the need of the world community for a means of transnational exchange. One of the principles is that the profit (or 'seigniorage') arising from creating money of this kind should be public revenue, not private profit. Another is that these public currencies should be created debt-free, not as interest-bearing repayable debt. We will return shortly to the implications of this for international monetary reform. Meanwhile, to recapitulate from above, the proposed national monetary reform is as follows: 1) As national monetary authorities, central banks should create non-cash money (that is, bank-account money) as well as cash (that is, banknotes and coins). They should create out of thin air at regular intervals the amounts they decide are needed to increase the money supply. They should give these amounts to their governments as debt-free public revenue. Governments should then put the money into circulation by spending it. 2) It should become illegal for anyone else to create bank-account money denominated in the national currency, just as it is already illegal to forge coins or counterfeit banknotes. This will involve the following changes: 1) The central bank will no longer regulate increases in the money supply by manipulating the interest rates at which commercial banks lend into circulation money they create for that purpose. The central bank will be directly responsible for deciding how much is needed and for creating it and issuing it itself. 2) Commercial banks will be prohibited from creating money. They will have to borrow already existing money in order to lend it, as other financial intermediaries do. This will parallel what happened with banknotes in 19th-century England. Electronic bank-deposit money has now become real money and it is time to stop pretending it is just credit. As the issue of banknotes became subject to seigniorage then, so the creation of bank-account money should become subject to it now. In other words, the profit from creating it should no longer accrue to commercial banks but be collected as public revenue. The best available estimate is that in Britain this would contribute about GBP 45 billion a year to public revenue, and deprive commercial banks of the 'subsidy' - estimated at over GBP 20 billion a year - which they now get from interest on the new money they are allowed to create. The beneficial economic and social effects of this reform have been summarised above. They are very great. Moreover, the reform would be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Since the Second World War the Bank of England has continued to evolve from being a commercial bank with a special relationship to the government, towards becoming a straightforward agency of the state as its central monetary authority. At the same time, the commercial banks have continued to evolve towards being free-market businesses, with fewer public service obligations backed by government subsidies and controls. For both the Bank of England and the commercial banks, the proposed reform is the next step in that process of evolution. Seigniorage and the Global Economy Whoever creates new money can either give it away or benefit from putting it into circulation by spending it or lending it at interest. Just as, under the proposed national reform, the benefit from creating national-currency money would go to the national community as a whole, a comparable change at the international level would benefit the world community as a whole. It would replace the present use of the US dollar and other national currencies like the yen, the euro and the pound as 'reserve currencies', by a world currency issued by a world monetary authority, and channel the profit from issuing it into public revenue to be spent on behalf of the world community. This global reform would clearly need simultaneous support from many national governments. That does not necessarily mean that one country could not undertake national monetary reform on its own. But it would clearly be easier for single nations to do it, if the global version of the same reform was on the global agenda. In 1995 the independent international Commission on Global Governance {12} identified the United States' "unique luxury of being able to borrow in its own currency abroad and then devalue its repayment obligations" as one of the weaknesses of the current international monetary system. It pointed out that "a growing world economy requires constant enlargement of international liquidity", and suggested that issue of the IMF's reserve currency - Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) - should be increased. In Creating New Money (2000), Huber and Robertson suggested that SDRs might develop into a global currency which would eventually replace the US dollar and other national currencies in that role. Following the model they had proposed for national seigniorage reform, they suggested this global money might be issued - perhaps by a new international agency combining some of the functions of the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements - into an operational account which it would hold for the United Nations. The UN would spend this money into circulation, partly as a contribution to financing its own operations, and perhaps partly by distributing it to national governments according to the size of their populations. This new international agency, which would in due course come to be seen as an embryonic world central bank, would have to combine accountability with a high degree of independence in its decisions about how much new international money to create. It might report and be accountable for its performance to a UN body , such as a committee of the General Assembly. In the few years the significance of the 'dollar hegemony' of the United States, and the urgent need for international monetary reform, have become more widely understood. For example, one report calculates that every American citizen owes the rest of the world $7,333, while every citizen of the developing countries owes it only $500. But, while developing country economies must pay debt service repayments totalling more than $300 billion a year, the US must only pay $20 billion a year to service an almost equivalent amount of debt. Americans have been engaged in a consumer binge, which has led to the largest current account deficit in history, a staggering $445 billion or four percent of US GDP. This deficit has been increasing by fifty percent a year in recent years, and economists predict it will rise to $730 billion by 2006. Given this daily deficit of up to GBP 2 billion, plus capital outflow of $2 billion, the US in effect has to borrow $4 billion from the pool of world savings every day. More disturbingly, it is being financed by the poor through capital flight from poor countries and the forced holdings of high levels of dollar reserves. To build up reserves, poor countries have to borrow hard currency from the US at interest rates as high as eighteen percent; and lend it back to the US in the form of Treasury Bonds at three percent interest. {14} {14} Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, The United States as a HIPC (heavily indebted prosperous country) - how the poor are financing the rich, New Economics Foundation, London, 2002; www.neweconomics.org Another report finds that "ever since 1971, when US president Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, the dollar has been a global monetary instrument that the United States, and only the United States, can produce by fiat ... World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world's interlinked economies compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves". {15} {15} Henry C K Liu, US Dollar Hegemony Has Got To Go, Asia Times Online Co Ltd, 2002. A third example: "At the root of this new form of imperialism is the exploitation of governments by a single government, that of the United States via the central banks and multilateral control institutions of inter-governmental capital ... What has turned the older form of imperialism into a super imperialism is that, whereas prior to the 1960s the US government dominated international organisation by virtue of its preeminent creditor status, since that time it has done so by virtue of its debtor position." {16} {16} Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of World Domination, Pluto Press, 2003, pages 23-24. Finally, the researches of Richard Douthwaite and the Irish NGO Feasta {17} confirm that the total annual subsidy (or 'tribute') received by the US from the rest of the world as a result of dollar seigniorage is at least $400 billion a year. This is roughly comparable to the annual US balance of payments deficit. It also explains how the US has been able to maintain its extraordinary scale of annual military expenditure compared with all other countries. The huge dollar seigniorage subsidy has even been justified by some US commentators as a payment by the rest of the world to the US as the 'policeman' on whom the world relies to keep order! However, as Douthwaite notes, "given the policeman's record of destabilising or overthrowing governments with which he has had ideological differences and the fact that he would continue to put his 'particularistic national interests' ahead of those of the rest of the world, I doubt if many countries would be entirely happy with the arrangement". {17} Richard Douthwaite, Defense and the Dollar, 2002 and Feasta, Climate and Currency: Proposals for Global Monetary Reform, 2002, prepared for the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. Details of both from The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, 9 Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6, Republic of Ireland; e-mail: feasta at anu.ie; web: www.feasta.org These analyses show up not only the injustice of the present way of creating money for international and global purposes, but also suggest how distorting and damaging it is to global economic efficiency and financial stability. They clearly point to the need for international monetary reform on a similar basis to the proposed national reform - involving the creation of international debt-free money by an agency which serves the interests of the world community as a whole and provides seigniorage revenue to be spent on global public purposes. As international campaigning grows stronger for international reform on those lines it will reinforce the pressure for comparable national reforms. Dealing with Obstacles and Objections The following are among the obstacles to national monetary reform and the objections put forward against it: 1) powerful opposition from banking and financial interests (and from associated constituencies of professionals, academics and politicians), and threats that even the prospect of monetary reform would destabilise the economy; 2) public ignorance and confusion about the present arrangements; 3) an elitist belief that ignorance about them is positively desirable; 4) ignorance and obfuscation about what the monetary reform proposals actually are; 5) the claim that they would involve a further centralisation of state power; 6) the assumption that the reform would be inflationary; 7) the assumption that it would 'crowd out' investment in the private sector; 8) the argument that depriving banks of the present seigniorage subsidy would increase the costs of borrowing, would raise the costs of payment services, and would force banks to cut costs, close branches and reduce jobs; 9) the argument that it would damage the international competitiveness of British banks and therefore of the British economy as a whole; 10) the argument that no other country has undertaken, or is seriously considering, this reform. So how are these obstacles and objections to be dealt with? And how far will they have to be dealt with internationally? Obstacle/Objection 1. Opposition from powerful banking and financial interests and the threat of economic destabilisation. This obstacle will be overcome only when the arguments for monetary reform are more widely understood, when opposition to it is more widely recognised as mere defence of private privilege, and when its opponents accept that they risk losing more by continuing to oppose it than by losing the present subsidy. National and international advocacy and campaigning will be needed to bring that situation about. Obstacle/Objection 2. Ignorance and confusion about how new money is now created. Many people, even in government and parliament, don't know how new money is now created, and what the consequences are. Most people find it hard to believe, if they think about it at all, that almost all the money in circulation has been created by commercial banks at profit to themselves. In reply to questions, a government spokesman may say that the funds which banks lend to customers "must either be obtained from depositors or the money market, both of which usually require the payment of interest" - thus appearing to deny that banks are allowed to create new money and to profit from doing so. Or that "banks don't print money but create credit". More often, however, the government accepts that banks create money and defends this by saying that "if banks were obliged to bid for funds from lenders in order to make loans to their customers, the costs to banks of extending credit would rise significantly". People who are in any doubt about how money is created might glance at Chapters 22 and 23 of a current 'students' bible' on economics. {22} It explains "how banks create money" and that "bank-created deposit money is much the largest part of the money supply in modern economies". {22} David Begg, Stanley Fischer and Rudiger Dornbusch, Economics, McGraw-Hill, 7th edition, 2003, pages 316 and 318. The action needed is to press Finance/Treasury Ministers and Central Bankers to clarify and publicise * how almost all new money is now created, * who benefits and who suffers thereby, and * whether or not the estimates of an annual hidden subsidy of more than GBP 20 billion to the banks, and a failure to collect more than GBP 40 billion potential public revenue, are broadly correct. This action need not be international to make some impact. But, if individuals and NGOs in other countries were to press the same demand on their finance ministries and central banks, the impact would be greater. Obstacle/Objection 3. The view that ignorance and confusion are positively desirable. It has been suggested that the deflationary crisis in Japan may have reached a depth which requires the government explicitly to create new money. But when a member of the British economic elite wrote publicly on those lines last year, he felt it necessary to accompany it with a warning that that policy should be avoided in Europe if possible, because "ideally we should avoid unconventional approaches. For the conventions of central bank independence, and of non-transparent money creation, are based on well founded fears that governments will abuse direct control of money printing presses." The specific argument that monetary reform would open the way to uncontrollable inflation is dealt with later. Here we have to overcome the more general argument that the present "non-transparent" system of money creation should be maintained; in other words, that citizens and politicians of democratic countries should be kept in the dark about how money is now created and how the present system might be reformed. Again, this points to the need to press the authorities to explain how almost all new money is now created, what are the arguments for and against creating it that way, and how much the present system benefits the commercial banks and reduces potential public revenue. The pressure need not be international in order to make an impact on national thinking, but the impact would be greater if it were. Obstacle/Objection 4. Ignorance and confusion about the actual reform proposal. The proposed reform would not entail that the central bank should be given responsibility and power to decide how new money shall be used, so making it responsible for fiscal policy as well as monetary policy and depriving the elected government of power to manage the economy! The central bank will merely decide what increases are needed in the money supply, create them, and give them to the government as public revenue, leaving the elected government to decide - as with taxes and other public revenue - how the money is to be used. At present, of course, it is the commercial banks who decide both how much new money to create and who shall borrow it for what purposes. Those who propagate this error must be publicly corrected. International support, though helpful, will not be strictly necessary for that. Obstacle/Objection 5. Opposition to supposed increased centralisation of state power. Linked with the misunderstanding at 4 above is the claim that the reform will increase the centralised power of the state. Opposition to reform on this ground comes from two rather different quarters. On the one hand there are members of the mainstream economic and political elite who are happy with the present situation in Britain, with the Big Four multinational banks sharing a virtual monopoly of money creation under the Bank of England's central control of interest rates. On the other hand, there are decentralist monetary reformers who champion the emergence and spread of alternative currency schemes to serve localities, communities, and groups of businesses, and what is sometimes called 'free banking'. Some decentralists doubt "whether it is possible or desirable in the modern day to give the state a monopoly of official currency". If it is unacceptably centralising to treat new national money as a public resource, to collect its value as public revenue, and to distribute it via public spending programmes, the same principle should presumably apply to the state's monopoly of national taxation and public spending. Imagine for a moment that the history of taxation and public spending had led to them being managed now on a profit-making basis by the Big Four banks. Would decentralists be responding to proposals for reform with the objection that it isn't "possible or desirable to give the state a monopoly of national taxation and public spending"? Actually there is no contradiction between mainstream monetary reform and decentralised monetary innovation. Both embody the principle that money should serve the needs of people (not vice versa). If you accept that plural currencies are likely to serve people's needs better than a single one-size-fits-all currency for all purposes, both are desirable. There is no reason why support for alternative currencies should mean continuing to accept the present mainstream arrangements, except a wholly unrealistic hope that the new alternative, community, and other private currencies will grow rapidly enough to replace the mainstream system within the foreseeable future. The practical fact is that in a democratic society, unlike other forms of society, additions to the money supply put into circulation as public revenue will tend to be distributed just as wisely and fairly, if not more so, via increases in public spending and reductions in taxes and public debt than the new money now created by the commercial banks as loans to their customers. To sum up, there should be no sense of conflict between decentralist and mainstream monetary reformers. Both should work together nationally and internationally to spread wider understanding that radical monetary change is urgent and that their approaches are both necessary. Obstacle/Objection 6. Monetary reform will be inflationary. People have learned from history that allowing governments to create new money is a recipe for inflation. So a conventional knee-jerk response to the proposed monetary reform is that it will be inflationary. It is true that money creation by feudal and monarchical governments in the past and by elected governments more recently has led to inflation. But that does not mean inflation will result from giving an operationally independent central bank responsibility for creating new money directly, instead of indirectly influencing by interest-rate changes how much the commercial banks create. Many people don't yet realise that in 1997 the conduct of monetary policy in Britain was changed. The Bank of England was restructured as an operationally independent central monetary authority. It is accountable to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Parliament for achieving the published monetary policy objectives which they have framed and approved. But it now carries out this task free from interference by elected ministers and politicians and their staffs. Monetary reform in those new circumstances will enable the Bank to control inflation more effectively, not less effectively, than at present. The action required to get this more widely understood does not have to be international. But, if it is, the impact may well be greater. Obstacle/Objection 7. The proposed reform would 'crowd out' investment in the private sector. This is another spurious conventional reaction. It argues that creating new money as government revenue will 'crowd out' investment in the wealth-creating private sector and switch it to the wealth-consuming public sector. But of course the proposed reform need not result in allocating resources only to the public sector. Governments could equally well use the new source of revenue to cut taxes and the national debt and so stimulate private investment and consumer spending. Even if new money does circulate via public spending, it will soon reach businesses and citizens who can use it for private sector investment or consumption as they themselves decide. Although action to demolish this particular knee-jerk objection to monetary reform need not be international, an effective international reform campaign could be helpful in this context, as in others. Obstacle/Objection 8. Depriving banks of the present seigniorage subsidy would increase the costs of borrowing, raise the costs of payments services, and force banks to cut costs, close branches and reduce jobs. In fact, this will not necessarily be true. Nor will it be the whole story. The banking industry will become more competitive when it is no longer subsidised, and the oligopoly of lending to small businesses now enjoyed by the largest banks will be more easily challenged by other banks. That will tend to reduce the costs of borrowing. Furthermore, when money is put into circulation debt-free, the costs of servicing and repaying debt that the use of debt-created money now imposes on every economic transaction will be eliminated, with the result that less borrowing will be needed than now because that element in the present cost of all economic activity will no longer have to be met. As regards the costs and efficiency of payments services, it is true that if banks are no longer subsidised by the profit they now get from creating money but have to borrow money at interest to lend to their customers, they will no longer be able to cross-subsidise their payments services as much as at present. Initially, costs to bank customers may rise as they have to meet the full costs of the payments services they use. But, although withdrawing subsidies from any industry initially makes the cost of its products higher, it is generally recognised that this kind of cross-subsidisation between different services is an impediment to competitiveness and economic efficiency. It is also true that withdrawing the present subsidy will encourage banks to cut costs, perhaps involving further closure of branches and loss of banking jobs. Withdrawing subsidies from any subsidised industry, including coal, steel, ship-building and many others, has had effects of that kind. But subsidies have been withdrawn in the knowledge that subsidies to an industry reduce its competitiveness, by making it more difficult for smaller firms to compete with bigger ones and more difficult for new innovative entrants into the industry to establish themselves. So far as the economy as a whole is concerned, subsidies to particular industries tend to hold back innovation and reduce the growth of efficiency and productivity by distorting the allocation of resources. Are there any special reasons why the banking and financial services industry should be sheltered from these facts of economic life, except the mystique and power it now exercises over political decision makers? Campaigning in one country could effectively question whether banking should be treated as a special case in this respect. But international campaigning might have greater impact. Obstacle/Objection 9. Depriving banks of the hidden subsidy will weaken their ability to compete internationally with other countries' banks. This view is a favourite with opponents of reform. For example, one politician said he "would not support proposals that gave the State the monopoly on non-cash money. Legislating against the credit multiplier would lead to the migration from the City of London of the largest collection of banks in the world. It would be a disaster for the British economy." Each part of this statement is questionable. "Giving the state a monopoly of non-cash money" is an exaggerated way of saying that an agency of the state would decide and create the amount of new national money required to meet the objectives of monetary policy, and give it to the government to spend it into circulation, instead of allowing a small group of big commercial banks to create it and put it into circulation as profit-making loans to selected bank customers. See Obstacle/Objections 4 and 5 above for comment on that point. The term "credit multiplier" aims to conceal the fact that new national money is being created for private profit. Whether depriving commercial banks of that privilege would lead to the migration from the City of London of the largest collection of banks in the world, and whether - even if that happened - it would be a disaster for the British economy and society as a whole, are moot points. They need more serious research and analysis, not just knee-jerk assumptions. In fact, it is likely that, after a short period of adaptation by the banking and financial sector, the outcome would prove beneficial to British society as a whole, including the economy's international competitiveness. Much the same point was made by (British) Treasury Minister Ruth Kelly. She said, "It is evident that this proposal would cause a dramatic loss in profits to the banks - all else equal they would still face the costs of running the payments system but would not be able to make profitable loans using the deposits held in current accounts. In this case it is highly likely that banks will attempt to maintain their profitability by re-locating to avoid the restriction on their operations that the proposed reform involves. Given the desirability of an internationally competitive market in financial (and other) services, it would not be in the UK's interests to insulate itself from such a market." But why should monetary reform mean the UK insulating itself from an internationally competitive market for banking and financial services? As has already been suggested, far from being a disaster, withdrawing the banks' present subsidy might prove beneficial to their competitiveness and certainly to the competitiveness of the economy as a whole. The subject needs much more serious analysis and research than it has yet had. That does not need to be carried out in more than one country to be valid. But we must remember, as Machiavelli pointed out in 1532 in The Prince, that "he who introduces a new order of things has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new". However valid the arguments and the research supporting it may turn out to be, it may be difficult to persuade politicians and the public that, in the context of international competition, the risks attaching to monetary reform by one country alone are worth taking. At all events, an international programme of analysis, research and campaigning will be very desirable. Obstacle/Objection 10. No other country is seriously considering monetary reform. In November 2001 Treasury Minister Ruth Kelly wrote, "To the best of my knowledge, no support amongst developed countries or international economic institutions exists" for monetary reform. This brings to mind the joke about the economist who tells his grandson not to bother picking up a GBP 5 note from the pavement, because if it were real somebody else would have picked it up already! There will probably be no harm, and much gain, in being first to introduce monetary reform, if it will make the economy as a whole more efficient and productive, and society more just and inclusive. However, the special interests of the banking industry are likely to find support from politicians and individuals who feel that the risks of being a pioneer outweigh the possible rewards. So once again, international efforts to promote monetary reform will clearly be important. Summing up therefore, it seems clear that, although there is still a great deal of progress to be made within one country such as Britain to mobilise an effective campaign for monetary reform, international research, analysis, advocacy and campaigning will also play a key part. http://www.jamesrobertson.com/book/monetaryreform.pdf TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 5 13:48:05 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 12:48:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Israel #1 threat to Mideast; Homelessness caused by policy choices; Iranian Opposition Warns Against Stricter Sanctions; Globalization a "devastating success"; Mercedes Sosa In-Reply-To: <4ACA4CBA.40400@gmail.com> References: <4ACA4CBA.40400@gmail.com> Message-ID: <83904d240910051248w182873bar31403763a69df8da@mail.gmail.com> *ElBaradei says nuclear Israel number one threat to Mideast: report ** Homelessness - A Matter Of Choice Iranian Opposition Warns Against Stricter Sanctions Globalization a "devastating success" Grammy Winner Fused Folk Music With Social Justice* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ www.chinaview.cn 2009-10-04 *ElBaradei says nuclear Israel number one threat to Mideast: report* TEHRAN, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday that "Israel is number one threat to Middle East" with its nuclear arms, the official IRNA news agency reported. At a joint press conference with Iran's Atomic Energy Organization chief Ali Akbar Salehi in Tehran, ElBaradei brought Israel under spotlight and said that the Tel Aviv regime has refused to allow inspections into its nuclear installations for 30 years, the report said. "Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East given the nuclear arms it possesses," ElBaradei was quoted as saying. Full: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/04/content_12181647.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Montreal Serai *Homelessness - A Matter Of Choice* Bernard Miller ... Worldwide in 1945, almost irrespective of political system, there was a high degree of social consensus. Housing the homeless was seen as a community challenge, a responsibility taken up with alacrity. Multiple approaches were applied. Overcoming the personal and social tragedy of mass homelessness transformed cityscapes and social expectations. One consequence of meeting that challenge successfully was the remarkable fact that by the early 1950s absolute homelessness, people living rough on London?s streets, was almost unknown. We know it could be done then. So why not now? Why does solving the problem of homelessness now feel like an unattainable dream? Do the people who tell us to be ?realistic? know something we don?t? Well, many lessons have been learned and, to mix metaphors, a lot of bucks have flowed under a lot of burning bridges and the bucks don?t stop flowing. To answer that ?why? question, jump forward fifty years to 1992. Two stories in one issue of the Wall Street journal provided a fascinating snapshot of 90s ?reality?. One explained how India, a country with a population then approaching one billion, was denied a development loan of $200 million, less than twenty cents per head. The banks, the newspaper explained, could not be sure India would repay that loan. The other reported that, for reasons not unrelated to preventing the possible collapse of several major Canadian and US banks, three property-developer brothers from Toronto were about to be bailed out with a twenty-billion dollar rescue package, almost seven billion dollars per head. Less than two years later the Reichman brothers? construction company declared bankruptcy owing seventeen billion dollars. Interestingly, they ended up neither homeless nor even penniless. Full: http://www.montrealserai.com/wp/2009/09/26/homelessness-a-matter-of-choice/comment-page-1/#comment-1969 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Washington Post Thursday, October 1, 2009 *Iranian Opposition Warns Against Stricter Sanctions* TEHRAN, Sept. 30 -- As the United States and its allies consider further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fear that such punishment could have unintended consequences, strengthening the government's hand against domestic dissent and triggering an even harsher crackdown on political foes. By Thomas Erdbrink Washington Post Foreign Service http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/30/AR2009093004244.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Real News Network October 3, 2009 *Globalization a "devastating success"* Jomo K.S.: "Before the crisis, finance accounted for 15% of the economy, but had 40% of the profits. http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4301 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Washington Post October 5, 2009 *Grammy Winner Fused Folk Music With Social Justice* By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Mercedes Sosa, an Argentine singer who emerged as an electrifying voice of conscience throughout Latin America for songs that championed social justice in the face of government repression, died Oct. 4 at a medical clinic in Buenos Aires. She was 74 and had liver, kidney and heart ailments. With a rich contralto voice, Ms. Sosa was foremost a compelling singer whose career spanned five decades. She performed with entertainers as varied as rock star Sting, Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milan?s and folk singer Joan Baez, who said she was so moved by Ms. Sosa's "tremendous charisma" and emotive firepower that she once dropped to her knees and kissed Ms. Sosa's feet. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/04/AR2009100400918.html?hpid=moreheadlines ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * * From intnsred at golgotha.net Mon Oct 5 17:50:06 2009 From: intnsred at golgotha.net (Intense Red) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 19:50:06 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Fisk: The demise of the dollar Message-ID: <200910051950.06452.intnsred@golgotha.net> [The end of the "petro-dollar" will also be the end of the American empire.] The demise of the dollar In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading By Robert Fisk In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning ? along with China, Russia, Japan and France ? to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years. The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place ? although they have not discovered the details ? are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security." This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil ? yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves. The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power ? along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system ? which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states. Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East. China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq ? blocked by the US until this year ? and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures. Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro. Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements ? the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system ? America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency. The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar." Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018. The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets. "These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate." Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq. -- "The average American family today, with both parents working their butts off, is spending 75 percent of its disposable income on housing, food and transportation, compared with less than 50 percent of income back in 1960, when most families were supported by only one job. (Explanation for this enigma: the national income is an average, but with the rich getting unprecedentedly richer and the poor poorer, you can quickly see where the missing income is going.)" -- Author Dave Lindorff From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 5 21:56:37 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 20:56:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Afganistani's Mani Message-ID: <832919.58956.qm@web43504.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Afghanistani?s Mani So Obama went to Copenhagen to speak to McCrystal. What a trip. The President is being pressured to increase the level of the troop concentration. This is a trap. The trap is simply to spend all the resources of the American military machine on a futile battle with this high mountain tar baby. The Republicans wanted to see the Federal budget wasted on military applications because it would help their brethren in the Defence industry. Also money spent on the war effort would be of no use for the public health care plan. The Democrats are only in it for the macho glory. There is no point in keeping troops in Afghanistan. There certainly was no way to get Al Qaeda this way. We are protecting a drug dealing government that has nothing going for it but its black market connections. This is useful for the CIA but how much money does the government make from illicit drug dealing? It certainly cannot be worth the bad publicity of propping up a corrupt government with an unpopular war. Al Qaeda on the other hand loves this. They have American troops and all of NATO right where they want them in a virtual turkey shoot. The Taliban understand that the longer the war lasts the stronger they get. All they have to do is wait and watch the Americans become less popular as time passes and every night they can come and blow up any good the American troops do by day. That leaves the US with the option of sending hundreds of thousands of troops. Another option would be to train a huge Afghani military, one that the Afghanistan economy could not sustain. The only way that they could afford it would be by an increase in drug dealing and that will simply increase the governmental corruption. How to win? Win what? Is the goal is to create a western style democracy with a capitalist economy? Hardly. That is a dream of the neocons. I would expect that Obama is smarter than that. So what do they expect to accomplish? All I am sure they want is a reasonably stable regime in place that they can turn the battle over to and get out while claiming a victory. This is going to take some fancy footwork because both the Republicans and the Al Qaeda want to see the Democrats fail. The Afghani regime want simply to be able to continue with the kleptocracy they have been running. Does this seem naive? Do you think I am making this up? Are you sure the President has some greater vision about what to do with Afghanistan? I am sure he wishes he did. I am begining to think that he didn?t think that far ahead. He simply wanted to have a flag waving issue to cover for withdrawing from Iraq. Afghanistan fit the bill. But that was simply falling into the Al Qaeda trap. How could this happen? I mean the Soviet Union is gone and there is no cold war going on with Communists battling for the hearts and minds of the third world. So what is going on? Well history is a lot broader and deeper than the simple Capitalist Vs. Communist conflict. That is one factor but with the collapse of the Communists older grievances appear out of the shadows. The Muslim world remembers how the west humiliated them with the destruction of the Caliphate at the end of World War One. The Chinese still remember a century and a half of exploitation and humiliation from the west and Japan. The imposition of Israel as a western occupying nation rubs the Arab world. The maner in which the British left India with an open wound in the relations between Hindus and Moslems leaves a powder keg there waiting to explode. The world is a complicated place and the last two hundred years of western dominance has led to a snakes nest of resentments and hostilities that have to be dealt with. We will reap the whirlwind by taking the place of the European powers in the world and now the USA will have to deal with the results. Lots of Americans died in the last couple of days in Nuristan. A forested mountainous land on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A bomb went of at a western aid agency in Pakistan today. Remember when they blew up the UN mission in Iraq? Do you see a pattern here? Duh. How smart are these people anyway running this show? CIA analysts what are you telling the President anyway? We have them on the run do we? That is all I have to say today. This is from Indy Media ?From a Monday, October 5, 2009 entry on Informed Comment a blog run by Juan Cole 8 US troops Killed in Nuristan; UN Official Says He was Pressured to Wink at Karzai Ballot Fraud; Abdullah Defiant On Saturday morning, a force of some 300 guerrillas attacked a US outpost and an Afghan police outpost in Nuristan. They killed 8 US troops and two Afghan police, but failed to overwhelm the bastions, and had to withdraw in the face of withering US air power once it arrived. Some of the fighters are reported by Dawn to have been driven from the Swat Valley this summer by the Pakistani army. It is a worry that as the Pakistani military prepares for a major campaign in South Waziristan, it may inadvertently increase violence in Afghanistan, as the fighters move up to Helmand and Uruzgan. On Monday morning, Taliban blew up a bomb in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad near the World Food Program offices. Early reports said at least three people were killed. The Taliban have suffered many reversals in Pakistan in the past few months, and this bombing seems likely an expression of frustration and revenge.? Tags: Afghanistan A Trap For Would Be Do Gooder Imperialist P From tchilds at resist.ca Mon Oct 5 23:18:02 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 05:18:02 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist Angela Davis - CBC radio podcast Message-ID: <1185565404-1254806247-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1042975716-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Good to hear this champion for human rights: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21131.mp3 tc Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From suzannedk at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 01:03:43 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 09:03:43 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Fisk: The demise of the dollar In-Reply-To: <200910051950.06452.intnsred@golgotha.net> References: <200910051950.06452.intnsred@golgotha.net> Message-ID: The power of the U.S. dollar is morphing into NATO as the biggest debt in world history is erased by insolvency. This is no blunder, but calculation. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Intense Red wrote: > [The end of the "petro-dollar" will also be the end of the American > empire.] > > The demise of the dollar > < > http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html > > > In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched > secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency > for oil trading > > By Robert Fisk > > In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf > Arabs are planning ? along with China, Russia, Japan and France ? to end > dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including > the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified > currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including > Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. > > Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central > bank > governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which > will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. > > The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese > banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold > prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets > within nine years. > > The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place ? although they > have not discovered the details ? are sure to fight this international > cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. > Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's > former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of > deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the > Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the > Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the > Middle East over energy interests and security." > > This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between > the > US and China over Middle East oil ? yet again turning the region's > conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil > incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The > transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese > banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts > involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait > and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves. > > The decline of American economic power linked to the current global > recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert > Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of > changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings > this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new > financial power ? along with past anger among oil-producing and > oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international > financial system ? which has prompted the latest discussions involving the > Gulf states. > > Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, > along > with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the > financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the > Middle East. > > China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and > Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq ? blocked by > the US until this year ? and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with > Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in > Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating > for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint > ventures. > > Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 > per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a > huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even > dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president > of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with > Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by > extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance > the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro. > > Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements ? the accords after the Second > World > War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international > financial system ? America's trading partners have been left to cope with > the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony > of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency. > > The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to > stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the > dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far > to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the > basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The > Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the > euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar." > > Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing > the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the > transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for > the currency transition is 2018. > > The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the > Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud > about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national > wealth is tied up in dollar assets. > > "These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," > one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You > will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate." > > Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would > henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of > course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil > in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted > his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq. > > > -- > "The average American family today, with both parents working their butts > off, is spending 75 percent of its disposable income on housing, food and > transportation, compared with less than 50 percent of income back in 1960, > when most families were supported by only one job. (Explanation for this > enigma: the national income is an average, but with the rich getting > unprecedentedly richer and the poor poorer, you can quickly see where the > missing income is going.)" -- Author Dave Lindorff > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Oct 6 04:29:43 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 19:29:43 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Crisis Message-ID: <20091006192943.6a1f17fe.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Groundbreaking economist, Herman Daly {1}, zeroes in on the root cause of our financial meltdown. by Tom Green {2} Adbusters (November 19 2008) The turmoil affecting the world economy unleashed by the US sub-prime debt crisis isn't really a crisis of "liquidity" as it is often called. A liquidity crisis would imply that the economy was in trouble because businesses could no longer obtain credit and loans to finance their investments. In fact, the crisis is the result of the overgrowth of financial assets relative to growth of real wealth - basically the opposite of too little liquidity. We need to take a step back and explore some of the fundamentals that growth-obsessed economists and commentators tend to neglect. After winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry, Frederick Soddy decided he could do greater good for humanity by turning his talents to economics, a field he felt lacked a connection to biophysical reality. In his 1926 book Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: The Solution of the Economic Paradox, (a book that presaged the market crash of 1929), Soddy pointed out the fundamental difference between real wealth - buildings, machinery, oil, pigs - and virtual wealth, in the form of money and debt. Soddy wrote that real wealth was subject to the inescapable entropy law of thermodynamics and would rot, rust, or wear out with age, while money and debt - as accounting devices invented by humans - were subject only to the laws of mathematics. Rather than decaying, virtual wealth, in the form of debt, compounding at the rate of interest, actually grows without bounds. Soddy used concrete examples to demonstrate the flaw in economic thinking. A farmer who raises pigs faces biophysical limits on how many pigs he can take to market. But if that pig farmer took on debt - a promise to repay at a future date - he would in effect be issuing a claim or lien on his future production of pigs. If he borrowed the equivalent value of 100 pigs, he could represent the loan on his balance sheet as "-100 pigs". While debt as the farmer's accounting entry is negative, negative pigs do not really exist. If the farmer should suffer a series of lean years and be unable to pay the interest, he might soon owe more pigs than could be raised on his farm. After a year, with interest looming, he'd show "-110 pigs"; in five years, "-161"; in forty (assuming a patient bank), "-4526". When the bank finally came to call on the pig farmer to collect repayment of its loan, it could well find that most of the virtual wealth that had grown so appealingly on its books had to be written off as a loss. Soddy's insights show us that the institutions of a growth economy lead to the type of crisis that hit the US economy in 2008. Real wealth is concrete. Financial assets are abstractions. Existing real wealth serves as a lien on future debt. For example, the 100 dollars of virtual wealth that I carry in my wallet are a lien on real wealth in that those dollars enable me to buy pork at the store. The problem that we're seeing in the US has arisen because the amount of real wealth is not a sufficient lien to guarantee the staggering outstanding debt which has exploded as a result of banks' ability to create money, loans given out on shaky assets and the US government's deficit, which has been stoked by financing the war and recent tax cuts. All of these factors are exacerbated by the compounding mechanism on debt. The debt is growing, and consequently, it is being devalued in terms of real wealth. The conventional wisdom is that when faced with the threat of recession and business failure, the solution is to grow the economy so we can grow our way out of the crisis. But because the wrong diagnosis is made, namely that businesses are in trouble because access to credit has tightened, the wrong solution is proposed. Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer. The cost of feeding and caring for the extra pigs is greater than the benefit of eating extra pork. To keep up the illusion that growth is making us richer, we deferred costs by issuing financial assets almost without limit, conveniently forgetting that these so-called assets are, for society as a whole, debts to be paid back out of future growth of real wealth. That future growth is very doubtful, given the deferred real costs, while the debt continues to compound to absurd levels. What allowed symbolic financial assets to become so disconnected from underlying real assets? First, our economy is based on fiat money (paper money issued by governments) that has value by convention but isn't backed by any physical wealth. Second, our fractional reserve banking system allows pyramiding of bank money (demand deposits) on top of the fiat government-issued currency. Third, buying stocks and "derivatives" on margin allows a further pyramiding of financial assets on top of the already multiplied money supply. In addition, the financial sector was very inventive in coming up with new financial instruments that were designed to circumvent government regulation of commercial banks to protect the public interest. The agglomerating of mortgages of differing quality into opaque and shuffled bundles that led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis should be outlawed. The US balance of trade deficit has allowed us to consume as if our economy was growing real wealth instead of accumulating debt. So far, US trading partners have been willing to lend the dollars they earned from running a trade surplus back to us by buying treasury bills but these treasury bills are liens on yet-to-exist wealth. Of course, they also buy real assets and their future earning capacity. Our brilliant economic gurus meanwhile continue to preach deregulation of both the financial sector and of international commerce (that is "free trade"). How then do we clean up this mess? A massive bailout - and having the US taxpayer take on billions in bad debt - is merely a way to keep the growth economy from failing a little longer while allowing it to continue degrading the planet. Propping up such a destructive system makes no sense. Instead, we need to redesign our laws and institutions to foster an economy that remains within biophysical limits. I would not advocate a return to commodity money (such as gold), but would certainly advocate gradually increasing reserve requirements for banks. Commercial banks should act as financial intermediaries that lend other peoples' money, not as engines for creating money out of nothing and lending it at interest. If every dollar invested represented a dollar previously saved, we could restore the classical economists' balance between investment and abstinence. Far fewer stupid or crooked investments would be tolerated if abstinence had to precede investment. Of course the growth economists will howl that such measures would slow the growth of GDP. I say so be it - growth has become uneconomic, and we have limited time to bring the economy into line with the biosphere's carrying capacity. Were Soddy still around, I doubt he would be surprised by the havoc wreaked by all these two-legged Wall Street pigs, given that they were left free to raid whatever troughs they could poke their snouts into while drawing on conventional economic thinking to disguise their mess as innovations in finance. But I also think he would be disappointed that eighty years after the publication of his book, we still haven't figured out a way tether the economy to reality - to ensure that the number of negative pigs can't grow without limit. Links: {1} https://www.adbusters.org/authors/herman_daly {2} https://www.adbusters.org/authors/tom_green https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/81/the_crisis.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 12:47:32 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:47:32 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist Angela Davis - CBC radio podcast In-Reply-To: <1185565404-1254806247-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1042975716-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> References: <1185565404-1254806247-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1042975716-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Message-ID: <4ACB90C4.1060306@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 She retired a year or two ago after "Workin' for the 'Man'" at UCSC for a long long time. UCSC= Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp. Just so you know, I live about a 15 minute bike ride (albeit up a very steep hill) from UCSC and any of the local or student activists could tell you she did jack-squat for any of the students involved in campus boycotts, TA union negotiations, military recruiters on campus, or ANYTHING else. Your 'champion' was sitting back in her laurel-shrouded EZ-Bwoy recliner for the last 20 or so years as a tenured (read: "Sold Out") academic. LCM tchilds at resist.ca wrote: > Good to hear this champion for human rights: > > http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21131.mp3 > > > tc > > > > Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKy5DCAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysLQkH/j04zbCU56navH/RHS5CERuf LOzbKCqS484Wtf6TSqaKyYAqF5oWQivmy7gUtluIzUa6yRu2m4FcGAgcQLoUCOK1 VfA2Ty0zc7yXqlTVU8YOFdmAorRL1aFRiPVXnxmR8CJO/YQ6IHWK2HNm+ZzrCIqK VaWsdn8Dl7CJ4jkVY2IsHGKOnjEYx6s2z0fuWVg474x1h6Y/Z4A+A7yJeFxut07/ NHeuJZ74bPHlUWoruj8fFB40noTg06AxvTvdODqr1OWMey9bzodcW7bBcXnf1sGT dOnBMh/CnTQYFUW2vo45qi9M4MvnlmCQ7BQQzScbaUUImD5MkJSahbv3ZGqTWxI= =rhWN -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From tchilds at resist.ca Tue Oct 6 13:16:16 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 19:16:16 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist Angela Davis - CBCradio podcast Message-ID: <1453176856-1254856541-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1840664372-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> LCM, Thanks for your current perspective. Yeah, tenure and cozying in to academea for a couple decades will tend to knock the wind out many a radical activist's sails. Sorry to hear she hasn't been there for the UCSC community. I heard her speak on the Wayne State University campus some 40 years ago. She was definitely an inspiration then. Anyway, as I said, it was good to hear her once again 'talkin' the talk,' even though she no longer 'walks the talk.' tc ------Original Message------ From: LCM Sender: rad-green-bounces+tchilds=resist.ca at lists.econ.utah.edu To: Subcomandante Tomato ReplyTo: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. Subject: Re: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist Angela Davis - CBCradio podcast Sent: Oct 6, 2009 11:47 AM -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 She retired a year or two ago after "Workin' for the 'Man'" at UCSC for a long long time. UCSC= Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp. Just so you know, I live about a 15 minute bike ride (albeit up a very steep hill) from UCSC and any of the local or student activists could tell you she did jack-squat for any of the students involved in campus boycotts, TA union negotiations, military recruiters on campus, or ANYTHING else. Your 'champion' was sitting back in her laurel-shrouded EZ-Bwoy recliner for the last 20 or so years as a tenured (read: "Sold Out") academic. LCM tchilds at resist.ca wrote: > Good to hear this champion for human rights: > > http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21131.mp3 > > > tc > > > > Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKy5DCAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysLQkH/j04zbCU56navH/RHS5CERuf LOzbKCqS484Wtf6TSqaKyYAqF5oWQivmy7gUtluIzUa6yRu2m4FcGAgcQLoUCOK1 VfA2Ty0zc7yXqlTVU8YOFdmAorRL1aFRiPVXnxmR8CJO/YQ6IHWK2HNm+ZzrCIqK VaWsdn8Dl7CJ4jkVY2IsHGKOnjEYx6s2z0fuWVg474x1h6Y/Z4A+A7yJeFxut07/ NHeuJZ74bPHlUWoruj8fFB40noTg06AxvTvdODqr1OWMey9bzodcW7bBcXnf1sGT dOnBMh/CnTQYFUW2vo45qi9M4MvnlmCQ7BQQzScbaUUImD5MkJSahbv3ZGqTWxI= =rhWN -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 13:57:24 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:57:24 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist Angela Davis - CBCradio podcast In-Reply-To: <1453176856-1254856541-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1840664372-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> References: <1453176856-1254856541-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1840664372-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Message-ID: <4ACBA124.4000305@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I dunno... once she got out of the 'easy chair' she might HAVE gone back to 'walking the walk'... hard to say, but we're all getting older, and even I, at 56 years young, am not so prone to show up at the g20 ready to get into pitched street fights with the local tac squad anymore. But my full support still goes to people who do, even if, in retrospect, it's only PART of the struggle... The part that makes the front page of the newspaper perhaps, but still, only part of the overall struggle. Who knows what goes through HER mind. I was just commenting on her 'physical reality' while in tenure at UC... I believe it was the Women's Studies Dept... Scratch that... It's referred to as "Feminist Studies" http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/directory/details.php?id=11 Leigh tchilds at resist.ca wrote: > LCM, Thanks for your current perspective. Yeah, tenure and > cozying in to academea for a couple decades will tend to knock the > wind out many a radical activist's sails. Sorry to hear she hasn't > been there for the UCSC community. I heard her speak on the Wayne > State University campus some 40 years ago. She was definitely an > inspiration then. Anyway, as I said, it was good to hear her once > again 'talkin' the talk,' even though she no longer 'walks the > talk.' tc ------Original Message------ From: LCM Sender: > rad-green-bounces+tchilds=resist.ca at lists.econ.utah.edu To: > Subcomandante Tomato ReplyTo: Radical anti-capitalist environmental > discussion. Subject: Re: [R-G] Rare interview w/radical-activist > Angela Davis - CBCradio podcast Sent: Oct 6, 2009 11:47 AM > > She retired a year or two ago after "Workin' for the 'Man'" at UCSC > for a long long time. > > UCSC= Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp. > > Just so you know, I live about a 15 minute bike ride (albeit up a > very steep hill) from UCSC and any of the local or student > activists could tell you she did jack-squat for any of the students > involved in campus boycotts, TA union negotiations, military > recruiters on campus, or ANYTHING else. > > Your 'champion' was sitting back in her laurel-shrouded EZ-Bwoy > recliner for the last 20 or so years as a tenured (read: "Sold > Out") academic. > > LCM > > tchilds at resist.ca wrote: >> Good to hear this champion for human rights: > >> http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20091005_21131.mp3 > > >> tc > > > >> Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry > >> _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing >> list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or >> unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKy6EiAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysYk8H/0S4bIjGZZa4JDR6x+c9qdOv 2iQW97V/VUsOndgfHaj8lFRIRfEH5VKZmVwRbhbC9U8cVd2lWnt0GITOWatoK2UR I1fdy5kRgp3KT61T736GrNAKjq42islJzibGYmIxIbLCMFVWuhYp04g9pf6XaMMH x5Jco7+hzdmHgLxyBBb6UhNpO0Nicd5P2k6NYqH7P5vEQKaTn+j7MYpEpo2uSUFo xdfHdG2vfJ1cjHWcPLkbgefocagSQTflXpwF21wREnJmS/E2adJs9QWrr2neZvvF ntLpfDbykVkn9am97TWXpoxd/rc4TUm4ZSqRqu9uLjkaoQHYBO5tay/AsoNpc5Y= =wA1F -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 19:03:43 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 18:03:43 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Big banks resisting reform ; Vietnamization in Afghanistan ; White House vs. Pentagon over Afghan war strategy ; Florida rules govern Afghan election recount ; Things you Think You Know about Iran Message-ID: <83904d240910061803r72a5423q26253c73a7eb7a40@mail.gmail.com> *Big banks balk at reform plans **Afghan general pegs 2013 as date country's army can take over **Top U.S. commander under fire** **New rules could lift Karzai to victory **Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True* * ** *----------------------------------------------------------- *Big banks balk at reform plans * .... Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods, two professors at Britain's Oxford University, published research earlier this year that shows that the longer politicians wait to implement reforms after a financial crisis, the greater the chance that financial industry lobbyists and other specialists take over the process and water down reforms. .... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/big-banks-balk-at-reform-plans/article1311654/ ----------------------------------------------------------- *Afghan general pegs 2013 as date country's army can take over * The Afghan National Army will be ready to fight the Taliban without the direct help of international forces by 2013, says General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the chief spokesman for the Afghan military. ?Within the next four years we will take the complete responsibility of the security from the international community, and the international forces will stay on their bases to support ANA forces,? Gen. Azimi told The Globe and Mail during an interview in the heavily fortified compound of the Ministry of Defence. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/afghan-general-pegs-2013-as-date-countrys-army-can-take-over/article1311667/ ----------------------------------------------------------- *Top U.S. commander under fire General criticized for going public with campaign to boost U.S. troop numbers* ...... Mounting signs of tension between senior White House officials and Pentagon commanders over Afghan war strategy: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/commander+under+fire/2070644/story.html ----------------------------------------------------------- * New rules could lift Karzai to victory Election recount guidelines appear to favour candidate with most vote-rigging complaints *... The Electoral Complaints Commission issued legal policy guidelines on Monday for the recount that the commission is doing of a sample of about 10 per cent of the roughly 3,500 ballot boxes where fraud is suspected to have occurred. ... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/new-rules-could-lift-karzai-to-victory/article1313097/ ---------------------------------------------- Information Clearing House October 1, 2009 *Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True* Juan Cole http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23601.htm From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 19:32:39 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:32:39 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Vietnamization in Afghanistan... In-Reply-To: <83904d240910061803r72a5423q26253c73a7eb7a40@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910061803r72a5423q26253c73a7eb7a40@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4ACBEFB7.6030301@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sid Shniad wrote: > > **Top U.S. commander under fire** He knows what he's doing, and despite the apparent friction, my take is Obama knows what he's up to as well. The fellow I transcribe news for DID cover the situational similarities between MacArthur and McChrystal though: October 05 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Who's In Charge Here? (FYI, The President) - The Similarities Between General Douglas MacArthur's Tribulations And Some Current Trends In US Military 'Advice' http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-05-2009-travus-t-hipp-morning.html or: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_091005 McChrystal's Infomercial 60 Minutes and the General By BRUCE JACKSON David Martin?s 13-minute ?60 Minutes? interview with General Stanley McChrystal (September 27), the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, may have seemed like one more of those insufferable Sunday evening puff pieces, like Steve Kroft?s strokejob with Clarence Thomas in September 2007 and Morley Safer?s with Bobby Jindahl in March 2009. As in the Kroft and Safer interviews, Martin never asked a question that went faster than slowball and he spent the whole time playing hagiographer and straight-man. He never asked one significant follow-up question. If he?d been a flack for DoD editing this piece in the Pentagon studio he couldn?t have done a better job. But the interview was more than just another ?60 Minutes? puff piece. Four-star battlefront generals don?t put on dog-and-pony shows for reporters without a very good reason for doing so, and he put on a very fancy show for Martin, with stops at his room, his office, his briefing room, trips in his helicopter and SUV, and much more. It?s difficult to imagine that McChrystal?s reason was anything other than putting pressure on the Obama administration to give him the series of very large troop increases he thinks he needs to win his war. McChrystal makes the Westmoreland argument for more American troops, and Martin doesn?t seem remember we?ve heard all this before. The words ?Viet Nam? were never uttered once in the interview by either man, even though you could go through it and substitute ?Viet Nam? for ?Afghanistan? and again and again (if you?re old enough) you?d say, ?But I heard exactly these lines before.? Yes, you did. In Full @ CounterPunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/jackson09292009.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKy++1AAoJEK0+v1xoBEysL4MH/2zLn7p8U3Ejl6Eg4lFW882w 06kLuVmxFWRsKZ5U6ZDKTMGRmOeiMicfwwHs369hetprj4VqiiR/ag5eY6QA8jRD 30oN9JHer8cxb0YuzpSowBgB5jDgiHuNRDzwFxUogjXG5VdKgP4+nuvZlcKSOm1f sXsqQB6u0Ny4uIaI9O1oKhlAX5ZoXRDHTtEZgwkD27NYD78lgNAMA22UmqjmvDAA 8lulhdVwYwnvX+4gUtRheJFH/9iXQZ4NlKsmWor/2jIFanW4tcxSQVi9pjKmdU5r bXyqddrJ3YlupIIHcY1IF2/w/OTvyKARG8uKOlIHtY8z0Dducc310Vj9V7uM3AY= =eD7v -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Oct 6 20:07:49 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:07:49 -0700 Subject: [R-G] 'Special Delivery' for Iran? Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) 'Urgent Operational Need' item in emergency military budget bill Message-ID: <4ACBF7F5.6030205@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 ABCNews: Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? Is the U.S. Stepping Up Preparations for a Possible Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities? By JONATHAN KARL Oct. 6, 2009? Is the U.S. stepping up preparations for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities? The Pentagon is always making plans, but based on a little-noticed funding request recently sent to Congress, the answer to that question appears to be yes. First, some background: Back in October 2007, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had asked Congress for $88 million in the emergency Iraq/Afghanistan war funding request to develop a gargantuan bunker-busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). It's a 30,000-pound bomb designed to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground. Back then, the Pentagon cited an "urgent operational need" for the new weapon. Now the Pentagon is shifting spending from other programs to fast forward the development and procurement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon comptroller sent a request to shift the funds to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees over the summer. Click here to see a copy of the Pentagon's request, provided to ABC News. The comptroller said the Pentagon planned to spend $19.1 million to procure four of the bombs, $28.3 million to accelerate the bomb's "development and testing", and $21 million to accelerate the integration of the bomb onto B-2 stealth bombers. 'Urgent Operational Need' The notification was tucked inside a 93-page "reprogramming" request that included a couple hundred other more mundane items. Why now? The notification says simply, "The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high threat environments. The MOP is the weapon of choice to meet the requirements of the UON." It further states that the request is endorsed by Pacific Command (which has responsibility over North Korea) and Central Command (which has responsibility over Iran). Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? The request was quietly approved. On Friday, McDonnell Douglas was awarded a $51.9 million contract to provide "Massive Penetrator Ordnance Integration" on B-2 aircraft. This is not the kind of weapon that would be particularly useful in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it is ideally suited to hit deeply buried nuclear facilities such as Natanz or Qom in Iran. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-preparing-bomb-iran/story?id=8765343 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKy/f0AAoJEK0+v1xoBEysgVUIAKsvvh9ToVrTnns1v0caByq+ tzs7SbuR6WUv3K2htkjJEs8R1eXzMtsXKfm1BgYNkH3iGB3xK/gkEbyFzIJw6XJp /QyM8GgA8EQaLZQ+R2Lwe5o1nQsuINcpljnxAXy+5fF1PorYR0xVLnvZy1WSx9HR maghnzITkhjYj7IdqlqHgTiR0jesvg5adHBbUaZ6IjcS3DUvGKEx3hamA/J+FAG+ K7nfiqo7w9vb6o+EaYhtNwxfyw3bOJ+YFAotOB7ssJpNSW5YypEOC+pOM0Ma8d9Q xTSLmVBKb+Jc7lpF3fl5jJ4ah3K2Ze2lf/ohtXKUPekagNmDM3XQ60E9pH7gQoQ= =dA9h -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 6 22:55:51 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 21:55:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Incarcerated America, Prison USA, Aliens in Jail, What To Do Message-ID: <690783.22415.qm@web43512.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> What To Do. Health & War, Prisoners In USA. President is willing to give the insurance companies everything they want. We the people will be screwed if we don?t have a public option. We need something that will work. Gee what if we bring our troops home and cut the military budget in half? I think we could easily afford universal healthcare. The Arab countries want to get rid of the dollar as the trading currency for oil. That will simply raise the price of imported oil and that means we will have that much more incentive to develop alternative energy and efficiency. Americans have had discounted oil with the weak dollar pegged to the price of oil. Why do you think they use the dollar? Who has the biggest military in the world and fleets stationed all around the middle east and armies in Iraq and Afghanistan? Could it be the USA? Germany has a high standard of living, great benefits for all and it is the world?s largest exporter. How do they do it? Well for one they don?t have such an extreme number of billionaires. People pay taxes and the rich pay their fair share. People get 6 weeks paid vacation every year. They have universal health care, high wages and a very small military. Gee do you think they might be related? The people of America have to decide to stop giving the rich a free ride. The average American is not going to become a millionaire. I am sorry but unless you have a brilliant idea and patent it and market it and don?t have it stolen and don?t have the Chinese make a cheap knock off and if you can convince some major store chain to pick it up and advertise it and people all of a sudden fall in love with your brilliant idea, then perhaps you might get rich, otherwise forget it. What we need is to force Congress to pass legislation that gives us the same level of benefits that the average German or Frenchman gets. Why should they have a higher standard of living than we do? It is not a miracle, it is simply because they organized and their governments out of fear of revolt did the right thing. We need to encourage our politicians to do the right thing and that is not going to happen because they all of a sudden decide to be nice. We need to join groups like Move On, the Green Party, and go to events like Town Halls. We need to write to Congress, we need to join protests and we need to give money to groups like ACORN and media outlets like the Pacifica network that support causes that have the people?s interests in mind. We need to kick out the politicians who represent the interests of corporations before people. We need to join Unions and get elected to leadership positions. We need to write letters to the editor, write blogs and speak to one another. We need to encourage companies like Apple that has quit the Chamber of Commerce because it refused to support the Congressional cap and trade legislation. We need to spend money with companies that make good environmental choices and treat their employees right. I try to shop at union stores when I can and buy environmentally healthy products at the very least. Some of these places that have food I like are not union like Trader Joe?s. But at least that is better than going to Whole Foods where the owner is an out and out fascist and is opposed to health care reform. I stay away from places that are blatantly fascistic unless it is to protest them. Now it may not be possible to lead a purely righteous life and live in the United States. Just paying taxes, even if you resist the income tax, you pay sales taxes if you buy products in the United States. There is no way to avoid committing a crime against humanity if you live here. I live here and that weighs on me. I have at different times attempted to protest militarism, and organized resistance to wars from Vietnam to Iraq and now Afghanistan. Yet I also have worked at companies that were involved in the military industrial complex. I have printed literature for Fair-child Semi Conductor and Raytheon. I even worked at the Air Force Academy as a waiter after the war in Vietnam was over in the 1970?s. I am not against having a military, or a defense industry. I am opposed to these endeavors when they are used to oppress people around the world to aid the interests of private corporations. Corporate interests have used the military for their purposes ever since the Revolutionary war. Privateers have been hired by the government to enforce policy. The Military has been used at least since the shores of Tripoli when the Marines were sent to the Barbary Coast to enforce freedom of the seas for American merchants on the north coast of Africa. The US military was used to enforce slavery most notably in the suppression of John Brown?s attempt to instigate a slave revolt when he occupied the Arsenal at Harper?s Ferry in Virginia. The United States military has intervened in the internal affairs of other countries at least since the 19th century aiding corporations in exploiting the Banana Republics of central America, invading Mexico on numerous occasions as well as instigating massacres and repression in countries such as Indonesia where the CIA aided in the massacre of over half a million mostly Chinese Indonesians in the mid 1960?s. The USA aided in the Military overthrow of the governments of Chile, Guatemala, Grenada, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, to name a few. Now we openly torture and detain nationals of other countries in the hundreds of thousands. Today on the radio I hear there were over 400,000 foreigners detained in prison camps in the USA alone. There are perhaps another 100,000 detained overseas. That is half a million people besides the normal American criminal justice system that has another 2 million plus American citizens behind bars. Guantanamo is simply the most blatant and evident of a huge industry that is the American Prison industry. Jail Statistics from bureau of Justice Department of Statistics. Summary findings Jails are locally-operated correctional facilities that confine persons before or after adjudication. Inmates sentenced to jail usually have a sentence of a year or less, but jails also incarcerate persons in a wide variety of other categories. Jail facilities At midyear 2008, 785,556 inmates were held in the nation?s local jails, up from 780,174 at midyear 2007. In 2008, jails reported adding 14,911 beds during the previous 12 months, bringing the total rated capacity to 828,413. 95% of the rated capacity was occupied at midyear 2008. On June 30, 2008 local jails were operating 5% below their rated capacity. At midyear 2007, jail facilities (83) in Indian country were operating with the capacity to hold 2,900 persons. These jails held 2,163 inmates and were operating at 75% of their capacity. Jail populations From 2000 to 2008, the number of jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents rose from 226 to 258. From midyear 2007 to midyear 2008, the 12-month increase of 0.7% in the jail population the smallest annual rate of growth in 27 years. Almost nine out of every ten jail inmates were adult males. However, the number of adult females in jail increased faster than males. Between 1990 and 2008, the number of Hispanic jail inmates increased at a faster average annual rate of growth (4.5%) than white (3.8%) and black inmates (3.3%). Blacks were three times more likely than Hispanics and five times more likely than whites to be in jail. Prison Statistics Summary findings On June 30, 2008 ? ? 2,310,984 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or in local jails ? an increase of 0.8% from year end 2007, less than the average annual growth of 2.4% from 2000-2007. ? 1,540,805 sentenced prisoners were under state or federal jurisdiction. ? there were an estimated 509 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents ? up from 506 at year end 2007. ? the number of women under the jurisdiction of state or federal prison authorities increased 1.2% from year end 2007, reaching 115,779, and the number of men rose 0.7%, totaling 1,494,805. At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents being held in state or federal prison and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. In 2005 there were an estimated 687,700 state prisoners serving time for a violent offense. State prisons also held an estimated 248,900 property offenders and 253,300 drug offenders. Most serious offense Percent of sentenced State inmates Total 1995 100% 2005 100 % Violent 47 53 Property 23 19 Drug 22 20 Public-order 9 8 Summary findings Probationers include adult offenders whom courts place on community supervision generally in lieu of incarceration. Parolees include those adults conditionally released to community supervision whether by parole board decision or by mandatory conditional release after serving a prison term. They are subject to being returned to jail or prison for rule violations or other offenses. At year end 2007, over 5.1 million adult men and women were supervised in the community, either on probation or parole. More than 8 in 10 were on probation (4,293,163), while less than 2 in 10 were on parole (826,097). About 1 in every 45 adults in the U.S. was supervised in the community, either on probation or parole, at year end 2007. The total community supervision population grew by 104,100 offenders during 2007. While the parole population (up 3.3%) increased at a faster pace than the probation population (up 1.8%) during the year, probation accounted for three-quarters (77,800) of the growth in the number of offenders under community supervision. At the end of 2007 ? ? Among offenders on probation, about half had been convicted for committing a misdemeanor (51%), 47% for a felony, and 3% for other infractions. The most common type of offense for which offenders were on probation was a drug offense (27%). ? Nearly all offenders on parole had been sentenced to a period of incarceration of one year or more (95%). The most common type of offense for which offenders were on parole was a drug offense (37%). ? Women comprised 23% of the nation?s probationers and 12% of the nation?s parolees. ? Fifty-five percent of adults on probation were white, 29% were black, and 13% were Hispanic. Forty-one percent of parolees where white, 38% were black, and 19% were Hispanic. Entries to probation supervision (2.4 million) exceeded exits from supervision (2.3 million) during 2007. Similar to probation, entries to parole supervision (554,500) also exceeded exits from parole (529,200) during 2007. During 2007, a total of 1,248,337 parolees were at-risk of being re-incarcerated, which included those under parole supervision on January 1 or who entered parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007. Summary findings The number of adults in the correctional population has been increasing. In 2007, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year end ? 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults. State and federal prison authorities had jurisdiction over 1,610,584 prisoners at midyear 2008: 1,409,442 in state jurisdiction and 201,142 in federal jurisdiction. Local jails held 785,556 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2008. An additional 72,852 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community. After sharp increases in the 1980s and 1990s, the incarceration rate has recently grown at a slower pace. Population growth during the 12-month period ending June 30, 2008 was same in both state and federal prisons (up 1%). Population growth during the 12-month period ending June 29, 2008 in local jails increased (up 0.7%). ? Incarcerated aliens as of 2005 according to a Department of Homeland Security Report. ?At the federal level, the number of criminal aliens incarcerated increased from about 42,000 at the end of calendar year 2001 to about 49,000 at the end of calendar year 2004?a 15 percent increase. The percentage of all federal prisoners who are criminal aliens has remained the same over the last 3 years?about 27 percent. The majority of criminal aliens incarcerated at the end of calendar year 2004 were identified as citizens of Mexico. We estimate the federal cost of incarcerating criminal aliens?BOP?s cost to incarcerate criminals and reimbursements to state and local governments under SCAAP?totaled approximately $5.8 billion for calendar years 2001 through 2004. BOP?s cost to incarcerate criminal aliens rose from about $950 million in 2001 to about $1.2 billion in 2004?a 14 percent increase. Federal reimbursements for incarcerating criminal aliens in state prisons and local jails declined from $550 million in 2001 to $280 million in 2004, in a large part due to a reduction in congressional appropriations. * At the state level, the 50 states received reimbursement for incarcerating about 77,000 criminal aliens in fiscal year 2002 and 47 states received reimbursement for incarcerating about 74,000 in fiscal year 2003.[Footnote 1] For the 5 states incarcerating about 80 percent of these criminal aliens in fiscal year 2003, [Footnote 2] about 68 percent incarcerated in midyear 2004 reported that the country of citizenship or country of birth as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba. We estimate that 4 of these 5 states spent about $1.6 billion to incarcerate criminal aliens reimbursed through SCAAP during fiscal years 2002 and 2003.[Footnote 3] We estimate that the federal government reimbursed these four states about 25 percent or less of the estimated cost to incarcerate these criminal aliens in fiscal years 2002 and 2003. * At the local level, in fiscal year 2002, SCAAP reimbursed about 750 local governments for incarcerating about 138,000 criminal aliens. In fiscal year 2003, SCAAP reimbursed about 700 local governments for about 147,000 criminal aliens, with 5 local jail systems[Footnote 4] accounting for about 30 percent of these criminal aliens. The 147,000 criminal aliens incarcerated during fiscal year 2003 spent a total of about 8.5 million days in jail. Mexico leads as the country of birth for foreign-born arrestees at these 5 local jails in fiscal year 2003. We estimate that 4 of these 5 local jails spent an estimated $390 million in fiscal years 2002 and 2003 to incarcerate criminal aliens and were reimbursed about $73 million through SCAAP. We estimate that the federal government reimbursed these localities about 25 percent or less of the estimated criminal alien incarceration cost in fiscal years 2002 and 2003. As we agreed with your office, unless you publicly announce the contents of this report earlier, we plan no further distribution of it until 30 days from the date of this letter. We will then send copies to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, other interested congressional committees, and make copies available to others who request them. In addition, the report will be available at no charge on GAO?s Web site at http://www.gao.gov. If you or your staff have any questions concerning this report, please contact me at (202) 512-8816 or by e-mail at Stanar at gao.gov or Michael Dino, Assistant Director, at (213) 830-1150 or Dinom at gao.gov. Key contributors to this report were Amy Bernstein, Ann H. Finley, Evan Gilman, Frederick Lyles, Karen O?Conor, Jason Schwartz, and Carla Wilhoit. Sincerely yours, Signed by: Richard M. Stana, Director: Homeland Security and Justice Issues? Amazingly that is the only government statistic I can find in a google search for illegal aliens incarcerated. I wanted to confirm the reported 400,000 number I heard on NPR today and this old figure has been repeated numerous times by groups interested in the eviction of aliens and the better treatment of aliens. The problem is that these people many of whom have been here for years and have families and jobs are incarcerated and treated as criminals when the only crime they have committed is not having the proper identity papers. America once the land that called upon people from all across the world to come here, is now a nation afraid of the people that it needs to do the jobs most Americans are unwilling to do. This is from a blog site called Reality Check. ?Illegal Immigrant Detentions To Be Scaled Back To Just The Violent And Threatening Posted by Ann ?Babe? Huggett On October - 6 - 2009 Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, will announce later this week that, in order to cut back on the cost of incarceration of illegal aliens in America?s jails, the 40%, which are nonviolent, will be placed in cheaper hotels and nursing homes instead. This comes on the heels of a new reclassification of illegals according to the threats they pose or the crimes that they have already committed. Those not considered dangerous are women, children and non-offenders but if the DHS does not maintain lock-downs on the participating hotels and nursing homes, then this latest program is nothing more than a new variant of ?catch-and-release?. According to Secretary Napolitano, ?Serious felons deserve to be in the prison model but there are others. There are women. There are children.? The Department of Homeland Security claims that it can house a non-threatening immigrant awaiting deportation in a hotel situation for around $14.00 a day as opposed to a jail cell which runs $100.00 a day.? It is about time we got a more humane approach to people who?s only crime is to try to live the American dream. Tags: Prison Statistics in the USA. Incarcerated Immigrants. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Oct 7 03:31:24 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 18:31:24 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Metaphysics of Money Message-ID: <20091007183124.e81efac7.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (September 30 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society To mention money and metaphysics in the same sentence, as I did at the close of last week's post, is to invite any number of misunderstandings. The hoary habit of thinking that walls off philosophical questions in a ghetto of abstractions apart from the world of ordinary life gets in the way of clarity here as so often, but there's an even more basic problem: most people these days have no clear notion of what the word "metaphysics" means in the first place. The tangled history of the word probably makes that inevitable. A nameless librarian in ancient Alexandria first coined it out of sheer desperation while cataloging the works of Aristotle; most of the treatises got names based on their subject matter - Physics, Meteorology, Poetics, and so on - but one difficult treatise was labeled simply meta phusikoi, "the stuff that comes after the Physics". Then, as the fourth-grade history paper put it, some other stuff happened - the library of Alexandria burned, Rome fell, what was left of the classical world got tipped into history's dumpster by a band of helpful Visigoths, and so on. When the dust finally cleared, Aristotle was very nearly the only systematic ancient thinker whose works were still around, and so he became, in Dante's words, "the master of those who know". That meant, among other things, that the labels assigned to his treatises by that anonymous Alexandrian savant became the basic categories of scholarship in the Middle Ages. (Most of them remain basic categories today, which is why your local university has departments of physics, meteorology, and so on.) Metaphysics was no exception, and the philosophical issues Aristotle tackled in that treatise have carried that label ever since. Those issues are what Aristotle himself called "first philosophy": an analysis of the basic terms that have to be sorted out before any kind of philosophy can be sure of its foundations. The medieval scholars who blew the dust off Aristotle's treatise, however, interpreted his work in their own way, which meant that the basic issues of philosophy were redefined in terms of Christian, Muslim, or Jewish theology. By the time the 18th century rolled around, metaphysics as a discipline was almost entirely identified with the theological basis given it by the scholars of the Middle Ages, and so it got dropped like a hot potato as secularism swept the academic world. By the end of the 19th century even theologians had stopped doing metaphysics in the old style, and most of the people practicing what used to be called metaphysics weren't using the word. At that point, in a fine display of history's twisted sense of humor, the word got picked up by the American folk religious movement ancestral to today's New Age scene, and turned into a label for their own beliefs. The town in southern Oregon where I used to live has a Metaphysical Library, which even had a few books on metaphysics in the philosophical sense of the world, though how they got there I have no idea. The vast majority of the books were on past lives, channeled entities, flying saucers, evil conspiracies, and the rest of the mental furniture of contemporary alternative culture. Thus it's probably necessary to point out that when I mention the metaphysics of money, I'm not referring to claims that money was invented by a conspiracy of evil space lizards, or that you can get as much money as you want by convincing yourself that money really, really wants to bed down in your wallet. You can find books making both these claims at the library just mentioned, as it happens, but both beliefs - and a good many statements less obviously absurd - are in large part produced by a failure to engage in the other kind of metaphysics, the thoughtful consideration of the basic categories of thought itself. That sort of analysis seems very abstruse and impractical, until you notice the consequences of ignoring it. Sweeping claims are being made these days about whether certain things exist or do not exist, for example, by people who never seem to have examined their own presuppositions about what it means to exist and how a thing can be known to exist. That's the problem with the ghettoizing of philosophy mentioned earlier; the philosophical issues you ignore can still sneak up on you while you're not looking, and turn your best attempts at thinking into gibberish. This, finally, is where metaphysics and money come together. Last week's post discussed some of the reasons why you can get better economic advice from a randomly chosen fortune cookie at your local Asian buffet than from the most prestigious contemporary economists. Part of it, as I pointed out, was the way that the boom-bust cycle makes giving bad advice the most lucrative career strategy for economists; another part is due to the attempts of economists to make their field a theoretical science without going to the trouble of grounding their theories in an adequate foundation of historical fact. Still, there's a third factor at work, and it's even more pervasive than the two just named. It's far from unique to economics - in one way or another, it underlies a great many of the mistakes that are tipping our own civilization into the same dumpster that received the ruins of Rome - but it stands out in the field of economics with particular clarity. Its roots are in a metaphysical error which might as well be called, after one of its most influential practitioners, Descartes' fallacy. Rene Descartes is famous nowadays for saying "I think, therefore I am". Few people these days take the time to find out what he meant by that statement, and fewer still catch onto the radical project that underlay it. Without too much inaccuracy, Descartes can be called the first modern thinker. Certainly he was the first to embrace what has become an automatic presupposition of modern thought, the notion of the individual self as an isolated, independent witness whose thoughts and experiences are entirely its own. What existed, to Descartes, was limited to what he could know, and know precisely, with the same exactness as a geometrical proof. Descartes was arguing, in effect, that "to be" means the same thing as "to be known", and "to be known" in turn equals "to be precisely defined". It's clear that he recognized, and intended, the sweeping implications of this metaphysical stance. It's equally clear that a great many of the people who unknowingly follow his lead nowadays either accept those implications uncritically or have never noticed their existence. In the hands of much of modern science, in particular, Descartes' equation has been blended with a passion for quantitative measurement to produce an even more extreme form of the same logic. To a great many scientists today, what exists is limited to what can be known; what can be known is limited to what can be measured; and what can be measured is treated as though it was identical to its measurements. You can get away with this in physics, and still do excellent science. The objects studied by physics follow patterns that can be modeled effectively by mathematics, and most of them are so remote from ordinary human experience that anything about them that doesn't measure easily can be ignored without too much trouble. Try doing this in sciences closer to the realm of everyday human life, on the other hand, and you can count on running into trouble, because in that realm Descartes' approach is usually a bad idea, and the modern scientific expansion of it an even worse one. What can be measured is only a subset of what can be known, and what can be known, at least in any given situation, is only a subset of what exists; nor does the fact that some properties of a thing can be measured according to some numerical scale prevent it from having other properties at least as important that are not subject to that kind of measurement. The sort of bad logic that treats quantitative measurements as the only things that really exist is pervasive in the sciences, but its grip is even tighter on those fields of study that want to claim the prestige of science but can't quite pass muster. Economics could be the poster child for this noxious effect. Down through the generations, against the sound advice of its best practitioners, economists have consistently treated the one thing in their field that can easily and consistently be measured with numbers - money - as though it was the one thing that matters. It's easy to see how seductive this habit can be, since it seems to allow everything to be measured on a common scale; the problem, of course, is that everything that can't be flattened out into that common scale gets mislaid, and as often as not these mislaid factors prove to be decisive. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith criticizes the notion - as common in his time as in ours - that money is the same thing as wealth. The wealth of a country, he points out, consists of the product of its natural resources and collective labor: in modern terms, it's the sum total of the goods and services produced by a nation's ecosystems and economy. In another place, though, he defines wealth as anything that can be valued in money. These definitions do not conflict with one another; rather, they make the crucial point that money is not wealth but the yardstick by which modern cultures measure wealth. This ought to be the first thing we teach children about money, though of course it isn't. It probably ought to be the first thing we teach economists about money, too, but the power of Descartes' fallacy stands in the way. Money is a unit of measurement, so it's inherently easy to define, understand, and quantify. Wealth is much less easy to force into the Procrustean bed of numbers; that's why we use money as a rough and ready way of sorting out the relative value of different kinds of wealth so they can be exchanged without too much trouble. Money is so convenient as a way of measuring wealth that very often it ends up eclipsing wealth, and this is why most economists nowadays, even when they think they're talking about wealth, are actually talking about money. This becomes especially problematic when, as so often happens, they start attributing to wealth characteristics that are only true of money. This habit of thought pervades contemporary economics. For a relevant example, watch the way most economists these days brush aside the immense challenges of peak oil with the assurance that if oil ever does get scarce, the market will come up with alternatives. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that any energy source is as good as any other, and that the total amount in the system is effectively unlimited. This is true of money - one dollar bill is worth exactly the same amount as any other, and the total number of dollars in circulation is as close to limitless, these days, as the printing presses of the US Treasury can make it - but it is emphatically not true of energy resources, or of any other form of wealth. Compare any two energy resources in practical terms and it's clear that in most cases they're not even apples and oranges; they're apples and orangutans. Take petroleum and solar energy as good examples. A highly concentrated form of chemical energy and a rather diffuse form of electromagnetic energy have very little in common, and even when they can do the same things - you can heat a house with passive solar design, for example, or you can heat it with an oil-fired burner - the technologies are totally different. Easy talk about swapping one for the other thus evades the immense challenge and nearly unimaginable cost of scrapping multiple continent-wide infrastructures geared to oil and building new ones suited to solar energy. (There are plenty of other questions that it ducks, too, but this one will do for starters.) Presumably an economist would notice something odd if he sat down at a lunch counter, ordered the daily special, and was handed instead a box of socket wrenches, even if the price of the wrenches was exactly the same as the daily special. If the economist was starving on a desert island and a crate that washed ashore proved to contain socket wrenches rather than food, the difference would be a matter of life or death. This latter is uncomfortably close to our position just now, as the world's energy companies race each other and the clock to extract fossil fuels in nearly unimaginable volumes from the Earth's dwindling supplies. If we allow ourselves to wait until those supplies start to run short, it will be much too late to start retooling our civilization for some other energy resource, even if one happens to turn up. Because a subculture of erudite scholars in the economics departments of universities have made a metaphysical error, in other words, our civilization may have missed its chance to dodge disaster. It's hard to think of a better argument for the importance of metaphysics than that. Still, the problem sketched in this post extends much further than I've had space to outline here, and the way in which money has metastatized in our society to become the measure of all things has become a massive though unrecognized barrier in the way of any attempt to improve a rapidly worsening situation. We'll explore that in next week's post. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/metaphysics-of-money.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Wed Oct 7 12:33:59 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 11:33:59 -0700 Subject: [R-G] =?iso-8859-1?q?The_demise_of_the_dollar=3B_We=27re_screwed!?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_=3B_Assassination_Attempt_Against_Ch=E1vez_=3B_Gri?= =?iso-8859-1?q?eving_family_slams_Afghan_war?= Message-ID: <83904d240910071133w301a8610qd1350c538c86f025@mail.gmail.com> *The demise of the dollar **We're screwed! (New York post hoax) **Video Confirms Assassination Attempt Against President Ch?vez* *Grieving family slams Afghan war* --------------------------------------------------------- The Independent 6 October 2009 *The demise of the dollar In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading* By Robert Fisk In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning ? along with China, Russia, Japan and France ? to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------- New York Post September 21, 2009 *We're screwed! It?s Coming!* According to a high tech study commissioned by a concerned Mayor Bloomberg and generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, climate change caused by human-created greenhouse gases is threatening the health, livelihood, and security of New Yorkers?especially those who take the subway to work. Read Full Story http://nypost-se.com/ ( Video explaining hoax using factual material: http://vimeo.com/6676567 ) -------------------------------------------------- *Video Confirms Assassination Attempt Against President Ch?vez* "Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage of a Colombian contract killer detailing an alleged $25m plot to kill Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president. He says the money was offered by Manuel Rosales, one of Chavez's main political rivals, during a secret meeting in 1999 A Colombian paramilitary group took up the offer, according to the hitman..." http://www.webofdemocracy.org/video_confirms_assassinatio.html --------------------------------------------------------- Toronto Star September 19, 2009 * Grieving family slams Afghan war Slain soldier thought Afghanistan mission was 'a bit useless,' brother reveals* MONTREAL? Comments from relatives of a soldier killed in Afghanistan ? saying his death was pointless ? tossed the grieving family into the midst of a national debate. As the body of 23-year-old Pte. Jonathan Couturier was being brought home yesterday, his brother and sister-in-law lambasted the mission and said the young soldier lost his life for a cause he considered hopeless. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/698063 From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Wed Oct 7 23:26:43 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 22:26:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Read, advocate: Afghanistan War Anniversary, anti-war acts :) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <922570.50899.qm@web111512.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> This Action, on Change.org, the url :) Afghanistan War Aniv?? :) http://middleeast.change.org/actions/view/afghanistan_war_aniv http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions ? News from the protest front?? :) From bogus@does.not.exist.com Mon Oct 5 09:29:38 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:29:38 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: THANK YOU! In donations ranging from $5 to $300, you are coming through to keep World = Can't Wait in a position to lead street protests, produce high quality prog= rams, get into schools, and maintain websites and mailings to reach those w= ithout the Internet. Please help raise the last $20 of our goal tonight! now, or email me debrasweet at worldcantwait.net with your pledge, so that it will count for our matching funds. SAVE THE DATE=20 Sat/Sun November 7/8 World Can't Wait National Gathering in NYC If you're thinking "business meetings" or the usual panels and workshops: n= o.=A0 We are bringing together presenters at the center of critical issues = with activists and thinkers to strategize and envision resistance to the cr= imes of our government in 2010. Special feature: the US preview of Andy Wor= thington's new film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo." All the details coming soon - but make plans to be in NYC for a 9am Saturda= y start time, through mid afternoon Sunday. =A0 Viewing all the news coverage today on yesterday's 500-strong protest at th= e White House, I'm struck by how effective it was.=A0 Reporters on the way = to the daily briefing were stepping around us, and couldn't help but hear C= indy Sheehan, with World Can't Wait, Code Pink and Veterans for Peace right= outside the Rose Garden press area. The first question to Robert Gibbs was about the protest.=A0 Of course, we = planned October 5 months ago to mark the 8th anniversary of the occupation = of Afghanistan, not knowing that the government would be in turmoil over ho= w to proceed. Democracy Now http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/6/headlines#1 ran the following exchange: "The White House said Monday President Obama has no plans to walk away from= the war in Afghanistan, which began eight years ago this week. Obama is ex= pected to decide soon whether to send tens of thousands of more troops as r= equested by US commander General Stanley McChrystal.=20 During Monday's White House press briefing, reporter Helen Thomas questione= d Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the President's plans. Helen Thomas: "Is pulling out of Afghanistan part of the assessment?" Robert Gibbs: "No. In fact, the President was-the President was exceedingly= clear that no part of the conversation on-no part of the conversation invo= lved was leaving Afghanistan. That's not something that has ever been enter= tained, despite the fact that people still get asked what happens if we lea= ve Afghanistan. That's not a decision that's on the table to make." Thomas: "What does he think will happen?" Gibbs: "What does he think will happen?" Thomas: "If we leave?" Gibbs: "I don't think we have the option to leave. I think that's-that's qu= ite clear." Hundreds of mainstream news stories were filed on the protest, many of them= accurate in depicting the demands and demeanor, and many interesting detai= ls of the protest. I was interviewed by media from all over the world.=A0 D= ana Milbank noted the World Can't Wait t-shirt and anti-torture protest: "The policies that earned Obama such a salute were printed on the back of t= he "Obomba" T-shirts, sold by the group World Can't Wait: "Indefinite Deten= tion." "CIA Rendition." "Escalation of War in Afghanistan." "Increase in Go= vernment Spying." "Unmanned Drones Bombing Pakistan."=A0 And those shirts d= idn't mention Obama's latest bomb dropped on civil libertarians: reversing = his support for a law to protect anonymous sources who expose wrongdoing." Elaine Brower organized the display of 870 pairs of boots and hundreds of s= hoes this weekend on the Ellipse, commemorating the deaths of US military a= nd Afghani civilians, the first time such a display has been mounted on Afg= hanistan.=A0 Read her account of the weekend. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Kicking-Some-Serious-Ass-i-by-Elaine-Browe= r-091006-202.html Missy Beattie, whose nephew was killed in Iraq, was also with us, and write= s in CounterPunch today. OCTOBER 6: Day of Resistance to Recruiters Today we were in high schools, a= nd soon will report on what we learned.=A0 In Chicago, Denver and San Franc= isco, the protests are focusing on military recruiting.=A0 We learned that = all military recruiting offices were closed today in Arkansas, specifically= because World Can't Wait organized this day.=A0 And the day was mentioned = in the New York Times blog.=20 =A0 http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/blogtalk-exclusive-or-man-on-= the-street/ Tomorrow, here in New York, we'll be in Grand Central Terminal with a drama= tic new kind of protest, bringing the message to commuters of just what the= ir government is doing in Afghanistan.=A0 Wedding photos soon! Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait =A0 World Can't Wait - info at worldcantwait.org - 866.973.4463 - 305 W. Broadway = #185, NY, NY 10013Send checks or money orders, payable to "World Can't Wait= ": World Can't Wait 305 W. Broadway #185 New York, NY 10013 For sponsorship level donations, or if you wish to make stock donations ple= ase contact our development director Samantha Goldman samantha at worldcantwai= t.org, 347-581-2677. To make a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more in support of WCW's educa= tional activities, please make checks out to "The Alliance for Global Justi= ce," a 501(3)(c) organization, and designate "for WCW" in the check memo li= ne.=0A=0A=0A From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Oct 8 03:42:01 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 18:42:01 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] World War Three Anybody? Message-ID: <20091008184201.9c44f63f.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (October 05 2009) When Alan Greenspan predicted three percent economic growth showing up in the reported figures for the third quarter of 2009, did he mean executive compensation packages? Maybe the lesson here is: don't ask a crackhead to predict the future supply of crack. Greenspan's greatest success may be to drive economics into such disrepute that it will be cut loose from the universities and only be taught by mail order or internet subscription from the same outfits that offer PhD's in astrology. That is, before the universities themselves go broke. The predicament that the USA finds itself will not be "solved" at the scale of operation that we're accustomed to, and we should just stop wasting precious time and dwindling resources in the idle hope that it will be. The failure to recognize this dynamic is the most impressive part of the meltdown. The only thing that the federal government is likely to prove in the process is the ineffectiveness of its actions as applied to any of the raging current problems from the killing burden of hyper-debt to the brushfires of geopolitics. Congress will only make the health care system more complex. Both congress and President Obama will do everything possible to keep housing prices unaffordable - in a quixotic effort to protect the collateral of the big banks. Capital will continue to vanish in the black hole of default. Something's got to give in the remaining three months of 2009. My guess is that attention will shift overseas for a while. This will not be due, as many probably think, to a cynical effort by the government to divert attention from the financial fiasco, but because the intrinsic tensions in the Middle East are reaching the snapping point. Iran is being called out on its nuclear program. If, from the start, it had just maintained the need for electric generating power in the face of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, they might have gone unchallenged. As it happened, though, the elected leader of Iran made too many intemperate remarks about wiping other nations off the face of the earth, and this has only prompted the leaders of other nations to take his remarks at face value and presume that Iran's nuclear program was devoted to armaments, not electric power generation. So, now the USA has picked up the gauntlet. If Iran doesn't act to demonstrate the de-activation of its bomb-making capacity, then the USA will try to impose sanctions depriving Iran of necessary imported supplies. (Iran actually imports gasoline, due to inadequate refineries.) For sanctions to be effective, support will be required by other nations, including Iran's chief gasoline supplier, China. What a delicate calculus this will be! I rather imagine that China would not like to see the Middle East blow up. I'm not so sure about the nations of the Middle East though, or at least major parties in certain nations. The rulers of Saudi Arabia would probably enjoy seeing Iran get into big trouble, since Iran is Saudi Arabia's most active antagonist, working tirelessly to destabilize the Kingdom. Al Qaeda interests dispersed in many nations would certainly cheer any mayhem. The Taliban would love anything that takes the spotlight off them in Afghanistan. The Russians are conflicted between the wish to enhance their own leverage in world affairs and their need to discipline Islamic maniacs along their own borders. Europe is probably scared to death of anything that might threaten their energy lifeline. Pakistan is too tormented to have a position, but its radical Islamist factions are probably on the side of disorder - as the best remedy for the status quo. If any of that spills over on India, as in the Mumbai bombing, then that flashpoint could turn to conflagration very quickly. We forget about Turkey, which was the hegemonic player in the region for centuries until its swift decline after 1914, but it has potent military capability and very mixed feelings about the the Jihad to ruin the West (since it is partly of the West). And finally there is Israel, the object of Iran's intemperate public statements. This is a dangerous situation. I'm not so sure that Israel could launch an effective attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but it might try anyway, especially if a US-backed sanctions effort fails to coalesce quickly. I'm not sure Israel would seek permission from the US to do this, though the US would certainly be tasked with defending the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. Iran might succeed in sinking more than a couple of US ships-of-the-line with sunburn missles and other toys, and this would lead to the bigger danger of oil supplies being choked off to the rest of the world. The US air response would be impressive, but possibly not effective against hardened targets. The leaders of Iran might exult even if the Iranian people were swept into a maelstrom. I imagine that what followed would be a very extravagant military frenzy amounting to World War Three, with European air forces and navies dragged in, with Hezbollah and Syria striking back at Israel, India and Pakistan possibly incinerating each other, and mayhem galore among the bystanders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. There could easily be internal mischief in the UK, France, and Germany from angry immigrant populations, and "sleepers" could work some overdue hoodoo in the USA. I don't know what Turkey would do, but it could be the biggest beneficiary of a bad regional meltdown, providing the only effective governance what remains in the region. China and Japan would probably just gape at the spectacle in wonder and nausea from the sidelines as they saw their energy supplies for years-to-come go up in flames. The G-20 nations would be crippled as global oil supplies were choked off indefinitely. And if anyone - Iran, or its friends inside the Kingdom - managed to pull off a stunt such as blowing up the Ras Tanura oil terminal - then a darkness will spread across places that were used to being lighted and they will stay dark a long time. I don't know if any of this will come to pass, but as I said, tensions have reached a breaking point, including the greater tensions of history, which seem to require periodic release no matter how poignant the Pete Seegar songs are. It is perhaps, just another prime symptom of "overshoot", the world's way of shedding some of the toxic organisms that are making it so unhappy - Gaia in a really bad mood. If nothing develops along these lines on the geopolitical scene, the USA is still stuck in its predicament of trying desperately to maintain an overscaled living arrangement, with no coherent public discussion of downscaling, re-scaling, or re-arranging things. My guess is that this kind of restructuring only occurs when all other options have been exhausted. The last time the USA found itself in an intractable economic morass, World War Two came along and it made things all better here (after considerable sacrifice for us and catastrophe elsewhere). After World War Two, we ruled the world for a couple of generations. The outcome of World War Three would not be so favorable for us. At the very least, it would leave us attempting to run things on about one-quarter of the oil we're used to. That does not suggest a seamless transition between how we behave now and how the future will require us to behave differently. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/10/world-war-three-anybody.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Thu Oct 8 15:58:57 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 14:58:57 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? ; A War of Absurdity ; Electoral Fraud in Afghanistan ; UN Afghan vote fraud row shows split in West ; US protected Cuban terrorist ; Message-ID: <83904d240910081458u4b2bd146m4fd78c717864f008@mail.gmail.com> *Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? **A War of Absurdity** **Fired UN Official Accuses UN of Helping Cover Up Electoral Fraud Committed by Afghan President* *U.N.'s Afghan vote fraud row shows split in West* *US protected Cuban terrorist *------------------------------------------------------- ABC News Oct. 6, 2009 *Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran? Is the U.S. Stepping Up Preparations for a Possible Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities?* By JONATHAN KARL Is the U.S. stepping up preparations for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities? The Pentagon is always making plans, but based on a little-noticed funding request recently sent to Congress, the answer to that question appears to be yes. First, some background: Back in October 2007, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had asked Congress for $88 million in the emergency Iraq/Afghanistan war funding request to develop a gargantuan bunker-busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). It's a 30,000-pound bomb designed to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground. Back then, the Pentagon cited an "urgent operational need" for the new weapon. Now the Pentagon is shifting spending from other programs to fast forward the development and procurement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon comptroller sent a request to shift the funds to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees over the summer. Click hereto see a copy of the Pentagon's request, provided to ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-preparing-bomb-iran/story?id=8765343 ------------------------------------------------------- *A War of Absurdity* By Robert Scheer Truthdig: October 6, 2009 Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president's national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan: "The al-Qaida presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies." Less than 100! And he is basing his conservative estimate on the best intelligence data available to our government. That means that al-Qaida, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan-so why are we having a big debate about sending even more troops to fight an enemy that has relocated elsewhere? Because of the blind belief, in the minds of those like John McCain, determined to "win" in Afghanistan, that if we don't escalate, al-Qaida will inevitably come back. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091007_a_war_of_absurdity/ ------------------------------------------------------- *Fired UN Official Peter Galbraith Accuses the United Nations of Helping Cover Up Electoral Fraud Committed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai* Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon fired the top American diplomat at the United Nations in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith. Galbraith had accused his boss at the UN mission in Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, of helping cover up electoral fraud and being biased in favor of Hamid Karzai. Galbraith has described the Afghan election as a ?foreseeable train wreck? and says the election has ?handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.? http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/5/fired_un_official_peter_galbraith_accuses ------------------------------------------------------- Reuters October 1, 2009 *U.N.'s Afghan vote fraud row shows split in West* By Peter Graff KABUL - A U.S. diplomat's scathing charge that the United Nations effectively let Afghanistan's election be stolen has exposed the international community's disunity and may help explain Washington's new doubts about the war. The outcome of the Aug. 20 election has yet to be decided, amid accusations of massive fraud, and in public all Western diplomatic missions in Kabul say they are reserving judgment until a complaints process is complete. http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSSP398898 ------------------------------------------------------- *US protected Cuban terrorist* http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB288/index.htm ------------------------------------------------------- From shniad at gmail.com Thu Oct 8 16:00:03 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 15:00:03 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Three Government Reports Point to Fiscal Doomsday Message-ID: <83904d240910081500w7d46dfb3ke86e51b1dd667026@mail.gmail.com> *MONEY**ANDMARKETS**?* ** Monday, October 5, 2009 YOUR BEST SOURCE FOR THE UNBIASED MARKET COMMENTARY YOU WON'T GET FROM WALL STREET [?] Money and Markets 2009 Archive View This Issue On Our Website [?] *Three Government Reports Point to Fiscal Doomsday * *by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. * Dear Subscriber, [image: Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.] When our leaders have no awareness of the disastrous consequences of their actions, they can claim ignorance and take no action. Or when our leaders have no hard evidence as to what might happen in the future, they can at least claim uncertainty. But when they have *full knowledge* of an impending disaster ... they have * proof* of its inevitability in ANY scenario ... and they so *declare* in their official reports ... but STILL don't lift a finger to change course ... then they have only one remaining claim: *INSANITY!* And, unfortunately, that's precisely the situation we're in today: Three recently released government reports now point to fiscal doomsday for America; and one of the reports, issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), says so explicitly: - The CBO paints two future scenarios for the U.S. budget deficit and the national debt. But it plainly declares that fiscal disaster will strike in EITHER scenario. Furthermore ... - The CBO states that its fiscal disaster scenarios could cause severe economic declines for decades to come, including hyperinflation and destruction of retirement savings. - The CBO then proceeds to admit that even its worse-case scenario could be *understated by a wide margin *due to panic in the financial markets or vicious cycles that are beyond control. - Separately, in its *Flow of Funds Report* for the second quarter, the Federal Reserve provides irrefutable data that we are *already* beginning to witness the first of these consequences in the United States: an unprecedented cut-off of credit to businesses and consumers. - Meanwhile, the Treasury Department shows that America's fate remains, as before, in the hands of foreigners, with the U.S. still owing them $7.9 trillion! - And despite all this, neither Congress nor the Obama Administration have proposed a plan or a timetable for averting these doomsday scenarios. Their sole solution is to issue more bonds, borrow more, and print more without restraint. That, dear Subscriber, is the epitome of insanity. Yes, the great government bailouts of 2008 and 2009 have bought us some time ... but they have promptly proceeded to sell us into bondage. Yes, they have given us safe passage over tough seas ... but only to throw our assets onto the global auction block for the highest bidders. The one bright spot: Unlike some governments, ours does not conceal the evidence of its folly. Quite the contrary, the proof pours forth from these three government reports in relatively blunt language and unmistakably blatant numbers ... *Report #1* *Congressional Budget Office (CBO): **The Long-Term Budget Outlook* [image: CBO Reort] The CBO opens with a chart predicting the most dramatic surge in government debt of all time. It shows that even in proportion to the larger size of the U.S. economy today, the government debt has ALREADY surpassed the massive debt loads accumulated during World War I and the Great Depression ... and will soon surpass even the massive debt load of World War II. "Large budget deficits," write the authors of the CBO report, would ... - "*Reduce national saving*," leading to ... - "*More borrowing from abroad*" and ... - "*Less domestic investment*," which in turn would ... - "*Depress income growth in the United States*," and ... - "*Seriously harm the economy*." Worse, on page 14, the CBO warns that: - "Lenders may become concerned about* the financial solvency of the government *and ... - "*Demand higher interest rates *to compensate for the increasing riskiness of holding government debt." Plus .... - "Both foreign and domestic lenders* may not provide enough funds for the government to meet its obligations*." The magnitude of the problem cannot be underestimated. The CBO declares on page 15 that: - "The systematic widening of budget shortfalls projected under CBO's long-term scenarios has never been observed in U.S. history" and ... - It will also be larger than the debt accumulations of any *other*industrialized nation in the post-World War II period, including Belgium and Italy, the two worst cases of all. But the CBO admits that even these frightening projections may be grossly understated because: - "The analysis omitted the pressures that a rising ratio of debt to GDP would have on real interest rates and economic growth." - "The growth of debt would lead to a vicious cycle in which the government had to issue ever-larger amounts of debt in order to pay ever-higher interest charges." - "More government borrowing would drain the nation's pool of savings, reducing investment" and ... - "Capital would probably flee the United States, further reducing investment." But none of these are factored into the analysis. On page 17 of its report, the CBO writes ... "The analysis ... does not incorporate the financial markets' reactions to a fiscal crisis and the actions that the government would adopt to resolve such a crisis. Because [our] textbook growth model is not forward-looking, the analysis assumes that people will not anticipate the sustainability issues facing the federal budget; as a result, the model predicts only a gradual change in the economy as federal debt rises. "In actuality, the economic effects of rapidly growing debt would probably be *much more disorderly* as investors' confidence in the nation's fiscal solvency began to erode. If foreign investors anticipated an economic crisis, they might significantly reduce their purchases of U.S. securities, *causing the exchange value of the dollar to plunge, interest rates to climb, and consumer prices to shoot up*.(Bolding is mine.) *Report #2* *U.S. Federal Reserve: **Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States* [image: Flow of Funds] The Fed's data on page 12tells it all: The impact on the U.S. credit markets is not just a future scenario. It's happening right now. Yes, the government is getting its money to finance its exploding deficits (for now). But it's hogging all the available supplies, while American businesses and average consumers are getting shut out or even *shoved* out. Specifically ... - In the first half of last year, the U.S. Treasury raised funds at the annual pace of $411 billion in the first quarter and $310 billion in the second quarter. - But if you think that was a lot, consider this: THIS year, the Treasury has stepped up its pace of borrowing to annual rates of $1.443 TRILLION in the first quarter and $1.896 TRILLION in the second quarter. That's 3.5 times and over SIX TIMES MORE than last year's, respectively. Meanwhile, the private sector is getting killed ... - Last year, banks provided new credit at the annual pace of $472.4 billion in the first quarter and $86.7 billion in the second. This year, they're not providing ANY new credit ? they're actually LIQUIDATING loans at the rate of $857.2 billion in the first quarter and $931.3 billion in the second. So if you're running a business, you may want to think twice before asking your bank for more money. Instead, they may decide to TAKE BACK the money they've already loaned you! - Ditto for mortgages. Last year, mortgages were being created at the annual clip of $522.5 billion and $124 billion in the first and second quarters, respectively. This year, on a net basis, mortgages haven't been created at all. Quite the contrary, the Fed reports that, on a net basis, they've been *liquidated* at an annual pace of $39.3 billion in the first quarter and $239.5 billion in the second. - Getting cash out of credit cards and other consumer credit is even tougher. Last year, folks were able to add to their consumer credit at annual rates of $115 billion and $105 billion in the first two quarters. This year, in contrast, they've been forced to CUT back on their credit at annual rates of $95.3 billion in the first quarter ... and at an even faster pace in the second quarter ? $166.8 billion. Never before in my lifetime have I witnessed a more severe case of crowding out in the credit markets! And never before has the CBO been so right in its forecasts of fiscal doomsday: One of its dire forecasts was already coming true even before it issued its report. *Report #3* *U.S. Treasury Department: * *Treasury Bulletin * [image: Treasury Bulletin] Each and every month, the Treasury reminds us of the single fact that no one in the Treasury wants to face: The U.S. is deep in debt to the rest of the world, and on page 48, it provides the evidence: total liabilities to foreigners of $7,898,435 million (nearly $7.9 trillion)! This isn't a new record. It was actually slightly more last year. But the fact is NOTHING has been done to reduce our debt to foreigners. Quite the contrary, it is the deliberate policy of our government to pile up more ? to sell foreign investors and central banks on the idea that they must continue to lend us money. The fact that this could potentially put our nation into deeper jeopardy is overlooked. And the dire forecast by the CBO that foreign investors might pull the plug is pooh-poohed. Stay alert to our emails for specific instructions on how to harness these potentially overwhelming forces and harvest them for profits. Good luck and God bless! Martin *P.S.* If you want to see exactly where I get my quotes and data, just click on the page numbers cited above, and you'll see the relevant pages I've extracted from the government reports with the critical information highlighted in yellow. ------------------------------ *About Money and Markets* *For more information and archived issues, visit http://www.moneyandmarkets.com * *Money and Markets (MaM)* is published by Weiss Research, Inc. and written by Martin D. Weiss along with Nilus Mattive, Claus Vogt, Ron Rowland, Michael Larson and Bryan Rich. To avoid conflicts of interest, Weiss Research and its staff do not hold positions in companies recommended in * MaM*, nor do we accept any compensation for such recommendations. The comments, graphs, forecasts, and indices published in *MaM* are based upon data whose accuracy is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Performance returns cited are derived from our best estimates but must be considered hypothetical in as much as we do not track the actual prices investors pay or receive. Regular contributors and staff include Kristen Adams, Andrea Baumwald, John Burke, Amy Carlino, Selene Ceballo, Amber Dakar, Dinesh Kalera, Red Morgan, Maryellen Murphy, Jennifer Newman-Amos, Adam Shafer, Julie Trudeau, Jill Umiker, Leslie Underwood and Michelle Zausnig. *Attention editors and publishers!* *Money and Markets* issues can be republished. Republished issues MUST include attribution of the author(s) and the following short paragraph: This investment news is brought to you by *Money and Markets*. *Money and Markets* is a free daily investment newsletter from Martin D. Weiss and Weiss Research analysts offering the latest investing news and financial insights for the stock market, including tips and advice on investing in gold, energy and oil. Dr. Weiss is a leader in the fields of investing, interest rates, financial safety and economic forecasting. To view archives or subscribe, visit http://www.moneyandmarkets.com . From bogus@does.not.exist.com Mon Oct 5 09:29:38 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:29:38 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: third-party advertisers known as "external sponsorships." We cannot guarantee the accuracy of these ads. In addition, these ads do not necessarily express the viewpoints of *Money and Markets* or its editors. For more information, see our terms and conditions . View our Privacy Policy . Would you like to unsubscribe from our mailing list ? To make sure you don't miss our urgent updates, add Weiss Research to your address book. Just follow these simple steps . *=A9 2009 by Weiss Research, Inc. All rights reserved.* *15430 Endeavour Drive, Jupiter, FL 33478* From intnsred at golgotha.net Thu Oct 8 17:43:54 2009 From: intnsred at golgotha.net (Intense Red) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 19:43:54 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Democratic Congress to pass a law to suppress torture evidence Message-ID: <200910081943.54904.intnsred@golgotha.net> A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes By Glenn Greenwald The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes. What made those detainee photographs so important from the start is that they depict brutal abuse well outside of the Abu Ghraib facility and thus reveal to Americans -- and the world -- that America's torture was not, as they've been constantly told, limited to rogue sadists at Abu Ghraib and the waterboarding of three bad guys. Instead, our torture regime was systematic, pervasive, brutal, fatal, and -- becuase it was the by-product of conscious policies set at the highest levels of government -- common across America's "War on Terror" detention regime. These photographs would have documented those vital facts; combated the false denials from torture apologists; fueled the momentum for accountability; and revealed, in graphic and unavoidable terms, what was truly done by America's government. But a Democratic-led Congress, at the urging of a Democratic President, is now taking extraordinary steps -- including a new law which has no purpose other than to suppress evidence of America's war crimes -- to ensure that this evidence never sees the light of day. If an historian were to write about the events of the first nine months of 2009 when it came to transparency issues as they relate to the war crimes of the Bush years, the following is what would be written. Just remember this was all done with an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President elected on a promise to usher in "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and "a new era of openness in our country." There's no blaming Republicans for any of this: [...] -- "It's done differently in El Salvador. There they send in the death squads. Here what they do is try to hook you on sitcoms. It's true that both are techniques of control, but they are rather different techniques." -- MIT professor Noam Chomsky. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Oct 9 03:45:18 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 18:45:18 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Marketing in a Small Town Message-ID: <20091009184518.cf54273e.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Interview Number 3 by Dmitry Orlov ClubOrlov (September 26 2009) Dmitry Davydov runs a popular Russian-language blog {1}. Periodically we correspond, and publish the correspondence. The Russian original is at {2}. DD: In the American (and not just American) media, one can periodically read about the barbaric Sharia law, according to which women can be stoned to death. Or about an eight-year-old Saudi girl who was sold into marriage to settle her family's debts. There are entire Web sites devoted to "stupid laws", especially in the southern states, according to which, for instance, it is illegal to have sex completely naked. However, few can see the absurdity and the barbarous nature of many US laws on intellectual property, according to which one can be fined ten thousand dollars for downloading a song or a movie from a torrent {3} (China, Russia and the Ukraine, where piracy flourishes, are considered uncivilized and legally underdeveloped). You once said (albeit in a different context), that those who pay for software are fools. It would be nice to know your opinion of the system of intellectual rights specifically and the US legal system in general. Does it do more harm or good, and why are you convinced that the "legal-police-prison" complex will be one of the first victims of collapse? DO: One of the main foundational insights of the Anglo-Saxon civilization (if can be honored by the use of such a bombastic term) is that unenlightened people are easier to control than enlightened ones. The effects of this can be seen in the fact that in all English-speaking countries there is a very stable layer of low-class people (the so called "underclass") and, except for a bit of lip service, it does not occur to anyone to remedy this situation. It can also be seen in the eagerness of the elites to impersonate British aristocracy by copying their strange habits and customs, as well as in the worship of the British throne by members of the general public, even in countries which shed considerable blood to win their independence from the empire. This can also be seen in the education system, which, except for the most privileged, strives to teach a trade, rules of conduct and obedience, rather than to expand the mental horizon. Not long ago, the acquisition of certain "dangerous" kinds of knowledge was even banned: for example, sailors on British vessels were forbidden to study navigation, and only officers were allowed to know how to chart a course or to pilot a vessel into a harbor. The same tendency can be observed in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice: the language of lawyers bears little resemblance to normal English, and everything is done to ensure that members of the public are not in a position to understand the meaning of not just the laws, but even of the contracts and agreements which they are forced to sign in order to gain access to employment, housing or medical care. Inconvenient laws are studiously ignored. For example, in the US court system, a jury has the right of nullification: they have the right to reject any law as invalid and to acquit the defendant regardless of his "guilt" under a law they see as unjust. So here's a proven method: If you are summoned as a juror, and you do not wish to serve, all you need to do is write the words "I believe in jury nullification" on the form, and the court will send you home at once! In the area of intellectual property rights, although the original copyright system protected the rights of inventors and authors, now it has become a way to ration access to information depending on one's ability to pay. All countries have to participate in this system to some extent in order to be able to defend and protect their own interests, but they should not be too zealous in the implementation of these laws, which are often inconsistent with the public interest. In the current situation, any attempt by the United States to enforce their system of intellectual property rights against citizens of other countries can be successfully ignored, if correctly assisted by the local governments. As for the legal-police-prison complex in the US, there is no longer any need to make predictions: the gaps in the budgets of many states are such that they are forced to prematurely release hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Already in several of the most depressed cities in the US murders are not prosecuted due to lack of police resources. All of this is all starting to look more like ordinary lawlessness than like a system of legal terror. DD: Recently on CNN there was a report about the US mission to the moon. The Indians are planning to land there in 2020, the Russians and Americans in 2025, and the Chinese in 2030. I think that the popularity of conspiracy theories about the staging of those events is that we find it hard to imagine that we can not repeat the achievements of three decades ago without a huge effort. Meanwhile, examples similar to the lunar program are starting to occur more and more frequently. Experts say that Russia has lost the ability to produce modern weapons on a large scale for quite trivial reasons, such as lack of sufficiently skilled metalworkers, because the system of training them has collapsed. How justified are we in fearing that we (the world in general, not just Russia) are starting to slip back in time in terms of technology? DO: In the end, the history of human trips to space will engender new myths: the primitive idols of the future will not be winged, but will sit astride rockets dressed in spacesuits. These trips were only possible thanks to large-scale industrial systems based on the use of fossil hydrocarbons, reserves which have already been exhausted, on average, about half. It will not be possible to exhaust them completely: the technological rollback has already started. It starts long before a particular resource is completely exhausted. To maintain homeostatic equilibrium, an industrial system requires a continuous flow of investment, and in order for this to happen capital must continually be created. If, say, the profitability of a coal mine is inversely proportional to shaft depth, it is enough to get to a depth at which the income is not sufficient to continue to update equipment, and the mine will close, regardless of how much coal there is left in it. But such a rational approach is rarely taken. Rather than make a difficult but timely decision, everyone begins to economize on safety, defer repairs, take on debt and so on. Periodically, the idea comes up that the situation can be improved if only everyone would show more zeal or ingenuity. We certainly all need some level of technology, and we all ought to stop to think hard which technologies can be sustained at a continually decreasing level of extraction of various natural resources. Instantly the thought occurs that aerospace technologies will not make it onto this list. DD: How important are science and technology in modern society, as an ideology, or, if you like, a religion? Why do people prefer to believe that the problem will be solved by hanging solar panels on the roof and buying an electric car, although obviously a more simple solution would be to change the lifestyle so that one's dependence on the car is minimal? DO: I have thought about this long and hard, and came to the conclusion that it all comes down to a very basic question: "How to please a girl?" After all, any modern, progressive, educated and attractive person begins to scoff if you take away her flush toilet and substitute a bucket, or if she has to go shopping leading a donkey, or if, instead of a shower, she is invited to go and stoke a sauna. From time immemorial status in society has been determined by access to luxury goods. As society becomes richer, luxuries turn into necessities. And when society starts to grow poorer again, it turns out that there is no going back. That is, there is a way back, but it is blocked by the innate tendencies of our clever species. My wife and I spent two years living aboard a very attractive and practical yacht slightly less than ten meters in length at the waterline, and although the wife understands everything very well, even she cannot stop herself from casting a sideways glance when a yacht like Abramovich's walks past us, and from making some comment, like "Oh, now this I understand, this is the real thing!" And there is no point in explaining to her that what we have here on board is a very high level of civilization, while Abramovich is just an ordinary consumer. It is very hard, gentlemen, to change the lifestyle, but not change the woman! If someone succeeds in this, then he is a hero and a genius, and we should all learn from him. In the meantime, we are going to live in an apartment, and put the boat on the hard, and install all sorts of solar panels, water heaters, and other technological junk. DD: There are quite a number of people who view the current crisis not as financial or economic, but as a moral crisis and a crisis of rationality. We have developed an entire system, or even multiple systems, that require you to constantly lie and deceive in order to make it into the upper middle class. I mean all of these brokers, bankers, brand managers and so on. This same "plague" has afflicted the academic community, where economic theories are completely independent of reality and common sense. Even in everyday life there is a huge rollback of rationality - otherwise a film like "The Secret", Tony Robbins, "positive thinking" and training for "personal growth" would never have become so popular. What's next - a new renaissance or a new Dark Age? How strong is the relationship between the crisis and questions of world-view, faith and culture? DO: I do not see a fundamental difference between lying in financial and economic realms and lying as a moral and rational matter. Financial and economic lies are that you can endlessly stimulate economic growth, despite the fact that the natural resources and the soil are wearing out, that forests are being cut down, that the environment and the climate have been disrupted, and that investments in high technology do not pay. The moral and rational lies are that economic growth is a good thing, indeed, a necessary thing, otherwise all will be very bad. In the West these lies are taught well at prestigious universities like Harvard, and countries wishing to participate in the global economy have to recruit their graduates to help their central banks and finance ministries to lie on their behalf. Putting it politely, the ability to lie is the ability to pretend. And now our credentialed liars are all pretending that the crisis has ended. Has it really, or is this just the end of the first turn of the crisis spiral, with no end in sight? After all, whether or not you lie, you cannot run away from reality. I do not know whether the coming age will be Dark Age, but I am sure that it will be rather dim. After all, the art of lying has displaced a lot of useful knowledge. DD: In Ireland, you talked about the fact that modern methods of warfare are economically inefficient. That is, you can equip twenty thousand rebels with Kalashnikov rifles (AK-47) and grenades, and they will successfully resist a army that uses tanks and aircraft, that cost tens of millions of dollars. However, guerrilla actions are effective only for defensive purposes, and not conquest. Theoretically, the crisis could lead to Americans being forced to curtail their activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US really are the main aggressors in the world now, but I have major doubts that, as soon as the aircraft carriers are mothballed, we will live in peace and harmony, all will lay down their arms and begin to "work the earth". DO: People fight for all sorts of reasons, and I am sure that military actions in some parts of the world will continue after the disappearance of US from the global battlefield. There is no doubt that Kalashnikovs and grenades have given the poor throughout the world to the ability to bravely defend themselves against the most technologically equipped army. Wars either pay off or the aggressor goes bankrupt, and wars against today's poor but very successful guerrillas pay off much worse than wars against rich, peaceful and defenseless nations (of which there are none left). Americans are still fighting, because they are fighting on credit, but when at last their funding runs out, I suspect that this whole style of war will finally recede into the past. Certainly, there will be plenty of small and large-scale slaughter, particularly in heavily overpopulated and impoverished countries, but for this even Kalashnikovs are not needed. For example, in Rwanda the Hutu tribe did an excellent job with machetes, while the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia quite successfully strangled a lot of people with plastic bags. I do not know how many more countries will follow such a path, but in general I think that, thanks to the successes of modern guerrilla practice, the profitability of military action will continue to decrease. Links: {1} http://davydov.blogspot.com/ {2} http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/09/3.html {3} http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/torrent http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-in-small-town-interview-no-3.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 06:36:15 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 14:36:15 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Big banks resisting reform ; Vietnamization in Afghanistan ; White House vs. Pentagon over Afghan war strategy ; Florida rules govern Afghan election recount ; Things you Think You Know about Iran In-Reply-To: <83904d240910061803r72a5423q26253c73a7eb7a40@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910061803r72a5423q26253c73a7eb7a40@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: The rising tensions between the White House and the Pentagon will be won by the Pentagon, for sure. They would not hesitate to covertly assasinate Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or no. Something Hilary and Joe know well. (Clinton and Biden) Well, Joe with his loose lips may not yet know! Suzanne suzannedk at gmailcom On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > *Big banks balk at reform plans > **Afghan general pegs 2013 as date country's army can take over > **Top U.S. commander under fire** > **New rules could lift Karzai to victory > **Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True* > * > ** > *----------------------------------------------------------- > > > *Big banks balk at reform plans * > > .... > > Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods, two professors at Britain's Oxford > University, published research earlier this year that shows that the longer > politicians wait to implement reforms after a financial crisis, the greater > the chance that financial industry lobbyists and other specialists take > over > the process and water down reforms. > > .... > > > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/big-banks-balk-at-reform-plans/article1311654/ > > > ----------------------------------------------------------- > > > *Afghan general pegs 2013 as date country's army can take over > * > The Afghan National Army will be ready to fight the Taliban without the > direct help of international forces by 2013, says General Mohammad Zahir > Azimi, the chief spokesman for the Afghan military. > > ?Within the next four years we will take the complete responsibility of the > security from the international community, and the international forces > will > stay on their bases to support ANA forces,? Gen. Azimi told The Globe and > Mail during an interview in the heavily fortified compound of the Ministry > of Defence. > > > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/afghan-general-pegs-2013-as-date-countrys-army-can-take-over/article1311667/ > > ----------------------------------------------------------- > > *Top U.S. commander under fire > > General criticized for going public with campaign to boost U.S. troop > numbers* > > ...... > > Mounting signs of tension between senior White House officials and Pentagon > commanders over Afghan war strategy: > > http://www.vancouversun.com/news/commander+under+fire/2070644/story.html > > > ----------------------------------------------------------- > * > New rules could lift Karzai to victory > > Election recount guidelines appear to favour candidate with most > vote-rigging complaints > > *... > > The Electoral Complaints Commission issued legal policy guidelines on > Monday > for the recount that the commission is doing of a sample of about 10 per > cent of the roughly 3,500 ballot boxes where fraud is suspected to have > occurred. > > ... > > > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/new-rules-could-lift-karzai-to-victory/article1313097/ > > ---------------------------------------------- > > Information Clearing House October 1, 2009 > > *Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True* > > Juan Cole > > http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23601.htm > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From critical.montages at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 07:37:22 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 09:37:22 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Nobel Peace Prize for Obama? Message-ID: The only things that O has done which are arguably pro-peace are to send a Nowruz video card to the Iranians and not to invite Dalai Lama to the White House. :-0 Other than those, he has either done little to nothing (Cuba, Israel/Palestine) or done things to undermine peace (more troops to Afghanistan, the Honduras coup, the seven new US bases in Colombia). -- Yoshie Praise and skepticism greet Obama Nobel award Fri Oct 9, 2009 8:01am EDT LONDON (Reuters) - A surprised world greeted the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama with a mixture of praise and skepticism on Friday. In its announcement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee hailed Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg referred to Obama's work for peace and disarmament, saying: "This is a surprising, an exciting prize. It remains to be seen if he will succeed with reconciliation, peace and nuclear disarmament." Afghanistan's Taliban mocked the award, saying it was absurd to give it to Obama when he had ordered 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan this year. "The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the 'Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians'," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency -- awarded the prize in 2005 -- said: "I cannot think of anyone today more deserving of this honor. In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself." European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement: "The award of the prize to President Obama, leader of the most significant military power in the world, at the beginning of his mandate, is a reflection of the hopes he has raised globally with his vision of a world without nuclear weapons." In the Middle East, chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said the award could be a good omen for peace in the region. "We hope that he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East and achieve Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establish an independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital," he told Reuters Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told army radio he believed the award would enhance Obama's ability "to contribute to establishing regional peace in the Middle East and a settlement between us and the Palestinians that will bring security, prosperity and growth to all the peoples of the region." The Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and opposes a peace treaty with Israel, was more skeptical. "Unless real and deep-rooted change is made in American policy toward recognizing the rights of the Palestinian people I would think such a prize would be useless," Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip, told reporters after Friday prayers. REAL CHANGE Saleh al-Mutlaq, a senior Iraqi Sunni Muslim lawmaker, told Reuters: "I think he deserves this prize. Obama succeeded to make a real change in the policy of the United States -- a change from a policy that was exporting evil to the world to a policy exporting peace and stability to the world." In Indonesia, Masdar Mas'udi, deputy head of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization Nahdatul Ulama, said: "I think it's a good thing. I think it's appropriate because he is the only American president who has reached out to us in peace. On the issues of race, religion, skin color, he has an open attitude." In Pakistan, Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party, said: "It's a joke. How embarrassing for those who awarded it to him because he's done nothing for peace. What change has he brought in Iraq, the Middle East or Afghanistan?" South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, awarded the prize himself in 1984, hailed the award as "a magnificent endorsement for the first African American president in history." Two other former recipients, Mikhail Gorbachev and Wangari Maathai, were among the first to offer their congratulations. Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader awarded the prize in 1990, was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying: "In these hard times people who are capable of taking responsibility, who have a vision, commitment and political will should be supported." Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won in 2004, referred to Obama's mixed heritage of a Kenyan father and American mother, called it "another very encouraging event for Africa." From bogus@does.not.exist.com Mon Oct 5 09:29:38 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:29:38 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: share in Barack's honor. We congratulate him." Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangarai, who had been among the favorites to win this year, said Obama was an extraordinary example. "I wish to congratulate President Obama. I think he is a deserving candidate," he told Reuters during a visit to Spain. (Writing by Andrew Dobbie; Editing by Angus MacSwan) From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 10:50:04 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:50:04 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Nobel Peace Prize for Obama? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4ACF69BC.2060501@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gotta look at the "Big Picture", Yoshie. October 09 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: On President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize - The Republicans Say All He's Done Is TALK About Peace But That's Not True... Just Getting Rid Of Cheney, Bush, And Their Cronies IS A GIANT STEP Towards A More Peaceful World My site: http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-09-2009-travus-t-hipp-morning.html Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_091009 But it's not over... Gotta work for peace, 'cause peace ain't comin' this way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPqpV9olIlw Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > The only things that O has done which are arguably pro-peace are to > send a Nowruz video card to the Iranians and not to invite Dalai Lama > to the White House. :-0 Other than those, he has either done little > to nothing (Cuba, Israel/Palestine) or done things to undermine peace > (more troops to Afghanistan, the Honduras coup, the seven new US bases > in Colombia). -- Yoshie > > > Praise and skepticism greet Obama Nobel award > Fri Oct 9, 2009 8:01am EDT > > LONDON (Reuters) - A surprised world greeted the award of the Nobel > Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama with a mixture of praise > and skepticism on Friday. > > In its announcement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee hailed Obama's > "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and > cooperation between peoples." > > Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg referred to Obama's work for > peace and disarmament, saying: "This is a surprising, an exciting > prize. It remains to be seen if he will succeed with reconciliation, > peace and nuclear disarmament." > > Afghanistan's Taliban mocked the award, saying it was absurd to give > it to Obama when he had ordered 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan > this year. > > "The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the 'Nobel Prize for > escalating violence and killing civilians'," Taliban spokesman > Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed > location. > > Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the U.N. International Atomic > Energy Agency -- awarded the prize in 2005 -- said: "I cannot think of > anyone today more deserving of this honor. In less than a year in > office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world > we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself." > > European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement: > "The award of the prize to President Obama, leader of the most > significant military power in the world, at the beginning of his > mandate, is a reflection of the hopes he has raised globally with his > vision of a world without nuclear weapons." > > In the Middle East, chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat > said the award could be a good omen for peace in the region. > > "We hope that he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East and > achieve Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establish an > independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its > capital," he told Reuters > > Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told army radio he believed the > award would enhance Obama's ability "to contribute to establishing > regional peace in the Middle East and a settlement between us and the > Palestinians that will bring security, prosperity and growth to all > the peoples of the region." > > The Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and opposes > a peace treaty with Israel, was more skeptical. > > "Unless real and deep-rooted change is made in American policy toward > recognizing the rights of the Palestinian people I would think such a > prize would be useless," Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in the > Gaza Strip, told reporters after Friday prayers. > > REAL CHANGE > > Saleh al-Mutlaq, a senior Iraqi Sunni Muslim lawmaker, told Reuters: > "I think he deserves this prize. Obama succeeded to make a real change > in the policy of the United States -- a change from a policy that was > exporting evil to the world to a policy exporting peace and stability > to the world." > > In Indonesia, Masdar Mas'udi, deputy head of Indonesia's largest > Muslim organization Nahdatul Ulama, said: "I think it's a good thing. > I think it's appropriate because he is the only American president who > has reached out to us in peace. On the issues of race, religion, skin > color, he has an open attitude." > > In Pakistan, Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a > conservative religious party, said: "It's a joke. How embarrassing for > those who awarded it to him because he's done nothing for peace. What > change has he brought in Iraq, the Middle East or Afghanistan?" > > South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, awarded the prize himself in > 1984, hailed the award as "a magnificent endorsement for the first > African American president in history." > > Two other former recipients, Mikhail Gorbachev and Wangari Maathai, > were among the first to offer their congratulations. > > Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader awarded the prize in 1990, was > quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying: "In these hard times people > who are capable of taking responsibility, who have a vision, > commitment and political will should be supported." > > Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won in 2004, referred to > Obama's mixed heritage of a Kenyan father and American mother, called > it "another very encouraging event for Africa." > > >From Obama's ancestral village of Kogelo in western Kenya his uncle > Said Obama told Reuters: "It is humbling for us as a family and we > share in Barack's honor. We congratulate him." > > Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangarai, who had been among the > favorites to win this year, said Obama was an extraordinary example. > > "I wish to congratulate President Obama. I think he is a deserving > candidate," he told Reuters during a visit to Spain. > > (Writing by Andrew Dobbie; Editing by Angus MacSwan) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKz2m5AAoJEK0+v1xoBEys954H/Rf8MFlYHFlEh6q/k0xsags9 gJu/XQzvbsZs8fLsOapNuGAffS5hV81TO/ck4grZkyI1yOVhpXIYKKs/VRN4whCu UhiNaeiDDTeT3FCGZSLNk/b2LJBiuD5lQGeAIual/q39AmoG+0BBBREKiIwyrNQZ BRKDk4Gb2ebKptJJSRCbFVBmMR0OjxIvPShMzdjC8+khfM131zB+QfkGG+uPfeke S6835PgBks7nGPbuSKcFWUw8oGuprYkSyo+bLl6Wh98q1sM/4Wedm8ax3ENHwPbd CgpEFKWaan1Kg1Y3/9kdNjF6SqdkOP+dRJCkuIQhSIGKqhWiwnnlGi1eug4Tzio= =uQ2B -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shniad at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 13:19:14 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 12:19:14 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Two Leaks and the Deepening Iran Crisis ; What Is Not Being Discussed In The Iran Nuclear Story ; Dore Gold vs. Juan Cole ; Obama wins Nobel Prize; Obama, the do-nothing president ; Message-ID: <83904d240910091219j685d0bf4ndc04006da9af5219@mail.gmail.com> *Two Leaks and the Deepening Iran Crisis **What Is Not Being Discussed In The Iran Nuclear Story* *Iran Nukes - Dore Gold vs. Juan Cole* *Obama **win**s **Nobel **Prize* *Obama, the do-nothing president: Saturday Night Live* -------------------------------------------------------- Stratfor October 5, 2009 *Two Leaks and the Deepening Iran Crisis* By George Friedman Two major leaks occurred this weekend over the Iran matter. In the first, The New York Times published an article reporting that staff at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear oversight group, had produced an unreleased report saying that Iran was much more advanced in its nuclear program than the IAEA had thought previously. According to the report, Iran now has all the data needed to design a nuclear weapon. The New York Times article added that U.S. intelligence was re-examining the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2007, which had stated that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. The second leak occurred in the British paper The Sunday Times, which reported that the purpose of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?s highly publicized secret visit to Moscow on Sept. 7 was to provide the Russians with a list of Russian scientists and engineers working on Iran?s nuclear weapons program. ....Putting the two pieces together, the presence of Russian personnel in Iran would mean that the Iranians had obtained the needed expertise from the Russians. It would also mean that the Russians were not merely a factor in whether there would be effective sanctions but also in whether and when the Iranians would obtain a nuclear weapon. .... The [combined] message was twofold. First, previous assumptions on time frames on Iran are no longer valid, and worst-case assumptions must now be assumed. The Iranians are in fact moving rapidly toward a weapon; have been extremely effective at deceiving U.S. intelligence (read, they deceived the Bush administration, but the Obama administration has figured it out); and therefore, we are moving toward a decisive moment with Iran. Second, this situation is the direct responsibility of Russian nuclear expertise. Whether this expertise came from former employees of the Russian nuclear establishment now looking for work, Russian officials assigned to Iran or unemployed scientists sent to Iran by the Russians is immaterial. The Israelis ? and the Obama administration ? must hold the Russians responsible for the current state of Iran?s weapons program, and by extension, Moscow bears responsibility for any actions that Israel or the United States might take to solve the problem. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20091005_two_leaks_and_deepening_iran_crisis?utm_source=GWeeklyS&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=091005&utm_content=readmore -------------------------------------------------------- BlackCommentator October 1, 2009 *What Is Not Being Discussed In The Iran Nuclear Story* By Bill Fletcher, Jr., BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor ... While the focus of the mainstream Western media has been on Iran?s alleged intent toward a weaponized program, in another part of the Middle, East Israel appears to possess somewhere between 100-200 nuclear weapons. No one is actually quite sure precisely because (1) Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and (2) Israel refuses to confirm or deny its nuclear program. So, as pointed out by many observers, the real nuclear issue in the Middle East is not Iran?s nuclear intent but none other than Israel?s actual possession of such weaponry. Israel not only possesses such weapons but also possesses delivery systems for these weapons. Yet, mainstream political and media personnel in the West refuse to discuss this. ... Idiotic and anti-Jewish remarks by Iranian President Ahmedinejad have been seized upon in order to focus the world?s attention on Iran?s nuclear intent. The fact that President Ahmedinejad often seems out of touch with reality and is cavalier in his concerns and remarks is disquieting. Yet none of that speaks to the actual power structure in Iran and what Iran intends to do with its nuclear program. While Israel used its nuclear program to support apartheid South Africa, nothing of the sort can be placed at the doorstep of Iran. Iran occupies no one?s territories, while Israel occupies Palestinian territories. While Iran has been very cagey with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Israel has completely ignored any and all international inquiries into its nuclear intent. ... BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher. http://www.blackcommentator.com/344/344_cover_aw_iran_nuclear.html -------------------------------------------------------- *Iran Nukes - Gold * If you believe the polls the American public has a little bit of patience with Iran on the subject of nuclear technologybut don't push it. We heard from Michaele Dimiok at the Pew Research Center. Now last week, Iranian officals joined the members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany to talk about Iran's new nuclear facility... the one Iran admitted it was building just days earlier. The talks ended with an agreement to talk again. And since then, Tehran has put out word through its press that it wants to install a more advanced type of centrifuge at the new facility. That has some saying Iran's leaders are only interested in diplomacy as a way of stalling for time while they push ahead on a nuclear weapons program. Dore Gold isn't very optimistic about the possibility of successful diplomacy with Iran. He is Israel's former Ambassador to the United Nations. He's also the author of *The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West *. And he was in Jerusalem. *Iran Nukes - Cole* *Juan Cole has a very different view of the situation. He teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the President of the Global Americana Institute . He says the West has misjudged Iran's military and nuclear capabilities. Juan Colewas in Ann Arbour, Michigan. * *List**en **to Part Two:* *http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200910/20091007.html *---------------------------------------------------* * Toronto Star October 9, 2009 * Praise, shock greet Obama's Nobel win * From bogus@does.not.exist.com Mon Oct 5 09:29:38 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:29:38 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: U.S. President Barack Obama deserved to win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Politicians and pundits split largely along party lines, but average citizens took far more varied approaches, from staunch supporters troubled by Obama's lack of concrete achievement, to unwavering fans, to cynics, to cautious conservatives who admitted the first Afro-American president had indeed changed the world in just a few months. http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/708078--praise-shock-greet-obama-= s-nobel-win ---------------------------------------------------- ** *Obama, the do-nothing president: Saturday Night Live* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DYT5Kl38fSVY From mstainsby at resist.ca Fri Oct 9 14:47:27 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:47:27 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Anti-Olympic signs could net 6 months' jail Message-ID: <4ACFA15F.5030204@resist.ca> Anti-Olympic signs could net 6 months' jail: rights group October 9, 2009 CBC News Vancouver residents could face large fines or jail for posting anti-Olympic signs during the Games in February if a new provincial law is passed, according to a civil rights group.Vancouver residents could face large fines or jail for posting anti-Olympic signs during the Games in February if a new provincial law is passed, according to a civil rights group. (CBC) A new B.C. law could allow municipal officials to enter homes to seize anti-Olympic signs with only 24 hours' notice, and violators could be fined up to $10,000 a day and jailed for up to six months, according to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The proposed law was introduced by the provincial government Thursday as one of dozens of amendments in Bill 13, the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act 2009, which is only at first reading and has not yet passed. According to a statement issued by the B.C. government Thursday, proposed changes to the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act will "provide the municipalities of Vancouver, Richmond and Whistler with temporary enforcement powers to enable them to swiftly remove illegal signs and graffiti during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games." "The legislation does not change the existing scope of authority to regulate signs and graffiti. Rather, it provides, on a temporary basis, a faster way of removing signs and graffiti that violate municipal bylaws during the short period the Games are underway," the statement said. Civil rights group concerned But that interpretation doesn't sit well with civil liberties advocates, who say if the law passes, municipalities would need to enact their own bylaws to take advantage of the new powers granted, and those new powers would actually go much farther than the government suggests, particularly in Vancouver. The city passed the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games bylaw in June to restrict the distribution and exhibition of unapproved advertising material and signs in any Olympic area during the Games. City officials have said the law is intended to clamp down on so-called ambush marketing, and it includes an exception for celebratory signs, which are defined as those that celebrate the 2010 Winter Games and create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere. 'People will be risking $10,000-a-day fines and six months in jail just to criticize the Olympics'?Robert Holmes, BCCLA president But legal experts say the wording of what constitutes an unapproved sign is too vague and open to interpretation. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association has been warning for several months that they believe the vague wording could include anti-Olympic signs or promotions for anti-Olympic events or material. And under the amendments introduced Thursday, the maximum fine for violations would rise from $50 a day to $10,000 a day, and the maximum prison term would be six months, the BCCLA said. Also, city officials would only have to give 24 hours, rather than two weeks notice, before entering a property to remove a sign. "If Vancouver acts on this provision, people will be risking $10,000-a-day fines and six months in jail just to criticize the Olympics," said Robert Holmes, the president of the BCCLA, in statement issued Friday morning. "Six months in jail is usually reserved for criminals who have a record of several convictions for breaking and entering," Holmes said. Court challenge launched Earlier this week the BCCLA also helped two anti-Olympics activists launch a legal challenge of Vancouver's 2010 Olympic bylaw in B.C. Supreme Court, claiming it was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. "Telling people who exercise free speech that local authorities may barge in, rip down signs inside your property, fine you or throw you in jail will underscore the growing impression that our governments care more about their own camera appearances at Olympic events than about people's rights," Holmes said. Anti-Olympic activists involved in the legal challenge have also said they and their family and friends are being subject to unreasonable harassment and surveillance by the Olympic security unit. From mstainsby at resist.ca Fri Oct 9 16:46:57 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:46:57 -0600 Subject: [R-G] A Place at the Table? The Great Bear Rainforest and ForestEthics Message-ID: <4ACFBD61.5060001@resist.ca> A Place at the Table? The Great Bear Rainforest and ForestEthics from "Offsetting Resistance: The effects of foundation funding from the Great Bear Rainforest to the Athabasca River", a special report by Dru Oja Jay and Macdonald Stainsby. Released September, 2009. http://www.offsettingresistance.ca/ Nuxalk Nation hereditary chief Qwatsinas (Ed Moody) explains that logging was causing concerns for his people on the Central BC Coast around Bella Coola, and that resistance began because ?In the boom of the 1960?s and 1970?s, a rush [for logging companies] to get all the timber they could? was already underway. In response, ?There was action with the hereditary chiefs and the elder people, and eventually the band council.? In 1994, the Nuxalk Nation invited Environmental Non- Governmental Organizations (ENGOs) large and small into their territory to see large scale clearcut logging then well underway. ?We sat down and discussed the pros and cons of any kind of relationship, and we set up a protocol and signed a protocol agreement.? The alliance with Greenpeace and smaller ENGOs Forest Action Network, People?s Action for Threatened Habitat and Bear Watch, says Qwatsinas, ?started out really basic. The key people signed the agreements and we had our goals and our objectives and what we want to do to protect the environment.? ?That was the common goal between the environmentalists and ourselves as the First Nation, the Nuxalk, still had the outstanding issue of the land question. There had been a process developed in British Columbia called the BC Treaty Process. We could see that it wasn?t what we wanted because it was very limited, was kind of corrupt and really bent towards the industry.? ?Finally, we just got tired of [the government consultation mechanisms] and went out to King Island and Pod Creek... that?s where the beginning of time starts for our people. That was pretty well the final predicament that allowed us to [start supporting direct action]. Nothing was happening and nothing was changing and the logging was still going on. So we gathered together and went out there and set up the road blockades.? By 1997, the invited ENGOs began blockades in concert with the host Nation. Their direct actions disrupted logging on and off until the year 2000. A boycott campaign targeted those who bought the harvested trees. In 2000, The Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP)?comprised of Greenpeace, Sierra Club BC, Rainforest Action Network and, for the first time as a separate entity, ForestEthics?declared an end to blockades and began closed-door negotiations with the BC Government and logging companies. With the sudden about-face of Greenpeace and other large groups, and the attendant drop in funding, the blockades ended. The smaller groups and First Nations were sidelined, in violation of the protocol agreements they had initially signed. Suddenly a new group, ForestEthics, was effectively leading negotiations. ForestEthics, Qwatsinas explains, wasn?t involved in the resistance to logging in the rainforest. Key Greenpeace organizer Tzeporah Berman, famous for her role in the protests around logging in Clayoquot Sound, left to become a key negotiator for ForestEthics. The Valhalla Wilderness Society was one of the smaller ENGOs sidelined in the negotiations initiated by the RSP. Director Anne Sherrod says that a significant development in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations was the disappearance of traditional mechanisms of accountability. ?The Great Bear Rainforest was the the first place where private collaborations between government, industry and a few environmental groups were able to gain pre-eminence over a public planning process.? ?Backroom negotiations between the Rainforest Solutions Project and the logging companies,? Sherrod explains, ?determined the main parts of the deal. The planning tables didn?t object because they were dominated by timber interests.? Qwatsinas says that the ?table? where negotiations took place kept environmental groups quiet. ?It was just like a public gag-order. You couldn?t bad-mouth the logging companies, you couldn?t bad mouth the logging practices or you couldn?t bad mouth the products or the type of logging or you couldn?t bad mouth the marketing.? ?It was a big, a huge stumbling block for the groups to even try to deter development activity in the Great Bear Rainforest.? The Valhalla Wilderness Society and several other environmental groups, says Sherrod, ?had been working in coastal campaigns for ten or fifteen years before ForestEthics and the RSP existed.? These groups were ultimately betrayed by the RSP, whose members reneged on protocol agreements. ?We welcomed the arrival of ForestEthics? market campaign, but we were also very wary of these groups representing our issues in private negotiations. They had little, if any, experience working on the mid and north coasts. In the interest of working together, we all signed a protocol agreement that held them to a certain level of protection in whatever agreements they made at the table, and to open information flow with us. But they just violated the agreement behind everyone?s back.? Sherrod adds: ?When our input was ignored and we saw atrocious things being accepted as ?Ecosystem-based Management?, we disassociated ourselves from it.? Qwatsinas says that the agreement lacked basic mechanisms of accountability or transparency. ?A lot of it was really hush-hush, it was kept really quiet. There were a lot of things we wondered about, it just looked like it was a stalemate. Nothing was happening and logging activity just kept on going.? The Nuxalk were left out of the negotiations. ?Little parts were discussed about this and that but they never went into the deepness of what they had on the table.? Qwatsinas says Greenpeace out-and-out violated the protocol agreements signed with the Nuxalk First Nation. ?Greenpeace was one of the signatories [of the GBR deal] and they violated our protocol and the other groups [that had been doing direct actions: FAN, PATH, Bear Watch] weren?t involved in the agreements. Before anything went to the table, [Greenpeace] was supposed to tell us what it was all about.... It was kept quiet. There were certain conditions that they had to abide by having signed that [confidentiality] agreement.? When asked about the violation of the protocol agreement, Tzeporah Berman responded, after a long pause: ?It?s been a long time, and I don?t recall the specifics of a protocol agreement we signed with the Nuxalk.? Berman said she understood that Qwatsinas and others were unhappy with the deal. Berman says she is still happy with the deal, despite the compromises. ?No one was stopping other groups from blocking logging roads,? she explains. ?We made a strategic decision that we thought would protect the most land.? ?What we say to our critics is, if you can get a better result, do it.? Qwatsinas says the end result was a failure to protect the Great Bear Rainforest. ?What it did was quash any attempt to fully protect the Great Bear Rainforest... It became a negotiating table and really that table couldn?t make any demands that other groups wanted. It couldn?t meet anything that met the standards of what other people or other communities wanted.? The way negotiations were set up ?really limited what the grassroots people could do,? says Qwatsinas. ?Internationally or nationally [calling off direct action] sort of highlighted the Great Bear Rainforest agreement and really said it was going to save the Great Bear Rainforest. It hasn?t. They?re still logging the Great Bear Rainforest, they?re still developing the coast now.? ?What it did was quash any attempt to fully protect the Great Bear Rainforest... It became a negotiating table and really that table couldn?t make any demands that other groups wanted. It couldn?t meet anything that met the standards of what other people or other communities wanted.? ?It was just like a public gag-order. You couldn?t bad-mouth the logging companies, you couldn?t bad mouth the logging practices or you couldn?t bad mouth the products or the type of logging or you couldn?t bad mouth the marketing.? Qwatsinas was arrested at Ista in 1995, 1996 and 1997, during a direct action campaign to stop logging on Nuxalk lands. First Nations were ultimately sidelined during secret negotiations. ?A lot of it was really hush-hush, it was kept really quiet... Nothing was happening and logging activity just kept on going.? From fentona at shaw.ca Fri Oct 9 17:05:31 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 16:05:31 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Canada in the Great Game Message-ID: <45758829-7814-4A89-9BF4-C3FBF1D3F51D@shaw.ca> 'The maple leaf needs to be there' On the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, Vue looks at Canada's deepening interest in the region's new 'Great Game' Anthony Fenton / Special to Vue Weekly Eight years into a war that many commentators are now calling a quagmire from which NATO forces should extricate themselves as soon as possible, most Canadians are unaware of the link between the war and Canada's increasing involvement in the "Great Game" for the region's abundant natural resources. http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=13294 From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Oct 9 21:35:43 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:35:43 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Open Letter To Citizens Of the U.S (From 'A Pakistani') Message-ID: <4AD0010F.1000601@gmail.com> Open Letter To Citizens Of the U.S Link: http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/open-letter-to-citizens-of-the-u-s/ Dear Citizens of United States, We Pakistanis are ordinary beings like you, having the same dreams, same needs, ambitions, emotions, reservations and same passion if not more for our country. We like you, to feel the same regret for wars, same grief for the world problems, same distress towards injustice, same hopes for a better tomorrow. We, like you, also fantasize having serene borders, comfortable homes for our children, fine education, some leisure, and a satisfied mind that what we are contributing to this country and the world at large today will benefit us and our future generations tomorrow. We fancy the feeling of living in sheer coziness of our homeland, away from overseas interventions and foreign-extremism in the exact same way as an average American desires. We didn?t get our independence as a birthday present, we got it after much struggle and sacrifices (over 4 million lives were lost during the migration); after much strangling and many fatalities, we finally broke free of the quandary at the hands of British and Hindu rulers. After independence, we have shown remarkable progress in many areas despite having rulers who placed personal interests over national interests, who never really had to face the trauma of poverty, sickness, injustice, or leaving their loved ones behind to inhabit a land with no promises. Yet we did not give up and made a nation out of it. We did not fail as our current leaders try to put it, to solicit more and more aid to gratify their own greed. In our short history we have never been blessed with a true leader after our founder, and yet imagine our courage, we did not break down, we moved on and on. And we never really looked for shortcuts to this existence, we have paid plenitude. We have now been presented with yet another aid package from your country which will be financed by American taxpayers money, which is the right of American citizens and on which we have got no claim. To your surprise neither do we need it to solve our problems. We do NOT need it. We have been seasoned to rely on our own resources, our own means; because at the end of the day this money will not be utilized for our poor nation it will land somewhere you cannot imagine its terminus to be. Period. Let us give you a reality check, as the voice of our Pakistani country men and as a friendly gesture to the fellow citizens of U.S. who have a right to know. In all veracity this little aid which comes with a lot of dictation, will be utilized to finance foreign lavish trips of our government personnel who will take approximately 200 personnel including their family members to luxurious places. It will be utilized to provide notorious yet special security services that we cannot afford, to people who are not even part of the government but somehow our democratic rulers are much obliged to flatter. The so-called economic development this new aid promises will definitely not materialize. We know this because this has been happening for the last several decades. The so-called promises to create jobs for us will never be fulfilled, whereby this money would rather be utilized for expanding the job market within the USA for the American people, which itself is being hit by the worst recession in decades. Not only that, the conditions mentioned will destabilize our civil system, will cripple our autonomy, our existence, will rob our craftsmen and the population on the whole of their much deserved earnings, and in turn will fan more frustration. The ordinary Pakistani is already paying a heavy return against the lending of IMF. Our electricity, fuel and other bills have been incremented, and those too over the dictation of the IMF. The Kerry Lugar Bill does not attempt to bring any solution for our challenges at all, instead, it will be sucking blood from our innocent population in the name of few miscreants who are not a part of us in the first place, in the name of a war that didn?t belong to us by any means and was imposed on us. Are we really attempting to build peace in here? Who are we fooling in the name of amity? Islamic Republic of Pakistan is an independent country, which means that we are fully capable to take care of our needs, self reliant and complacent like Islam teaches us to be. We do not rely on shortcuts for realization of our needs. By the grace of our creator, we have been seasoned to work hard and achieve the impossible. The elite on powerful positions do not in anyway represent the opinion of general public. In their sinister yet sadly successful efforts, public is kept so busy in their basic problems that they never really get to question them on where was the Aid money utilized and why was it even asked for in the first place. Its time the U.S realized that and leave the treachery of aiding us on the face and stabbing us at our backs. As the voice of enlightened Pakistanis, let us assure you, we will be delighted if the same money is utilized in your own country to deal with the recession it faces, to deal with the crimes soaring high with U.S. topping the list of most crimes in the world in a year. We will be glad if it is also spent on researches and precautionary measures on why so many Americans die with stress-related diseases every year, why life is getting tougher and tougher for an average American family and their social values are declining. We urge you to ask your Government whether this aid package is really helping us, the fellow citizens of Pakistan, or are you helping our shameless government with their lifestyles and luxuries? Are you helping in setting up schools and better health care or fanning more extremism due to ill-utilization that our rulers will ensure and frustration that the brutal conditions on this sell-out package will bring for us? Are you actually helping to support our displaced countrymen or giving them more reason to hate you for financing our depraved rulers? Your financial aid will not do us any good, since more than this amount already stays in the bank accounts of some of our narcissistic leaders, who occupy the ?seats? but are indifferent towards the distress of the majority. If you are still so keen to help us however, start sharing best practices, help us in establishing good governance, help us in making our systems more transparent, help us in medical researches, help us in building up universities to polish our youth else we really don?t need your help, we can help ourselves. We also request you to ask your government on how this bill helps the American nation and us, when it will just land in a few pockets and exactly what will our unfortunate nation be faced with as conditions to comply, tragedy of which is unimaginable but appalling enough for us to reject any aid from U.S. at all! The Patriot act which has left your nation so vulnerable cannot be allowed to implement in Pakistan. Let us make it more apparent, we will not allow the U.S. access to any of our properties or our citizens. These citizens belong to a free country, accountable to none other than their own national laws and America as a knowledgeable and well-developed country should respect that. Our country is fully capable to deal with any miscreants itself and we have been doing it to our best since this so called war on terror started. We will not allow interference in any form whatsoever in the internal matters of our country, in its governance, in its institutions and above all in its authority that this bill carefully ensures. Our rulers may be dissolute, our nation is not. Your country has not only deceived you in the name of wars to eliminate terror while being exceptionally involved in creating it, but it also has left many homeless, many innocent killed, many children orphans, many women widows, houses and hopes shattered. It hasn?t just betrayed us, it has betrayed you. And rest assured, the bullying tactics that your country specializes in will someday become a pit in itself. Haven?t we all started witnessing that it in front of our eyes already? We however maintain, the U.S. citizens don?t deserve to be kept in darkness. Since World War II, your country has intimidated directly or indirectly at least 44 countries, if not more in the name of peace while creating havocs in real, distributing civil wars, turmoil, oppressing nations, breaking them into pieces, dictating policies that completely butcher the civil structure. As your infamous Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger once put it so correctly: ?While being America?s enemy may be dangerous, being America?s friend is invariably fatal?. Who would comprehend that better than our nation, who has a history of 62 years being your ally and what did we get in return? Treachery, betrayal, deception? What did the US get out of it; a deteriorating economy, a failed social structure, not to mention countless killed soldiers? It isn?t a surprise the same Kissinger who believed in brutal de-population of the world and whose policies your government still follows, also said ?Soldiers are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy?. Decide for yourself, where this face will lead you? This hatred your government is mongering against your beautiful country is pushing you down the path of obscurity too, with a point of no return. Ask yourselves, are the U.S soldiers really worthless herds of cattle to be thrown into hostile territories just so that a few in the Govt. can benefit by selling their weapons to the U.S Govt., which buys them from these local multi-million dollar businesses at such dear cost of American tax-payers? blood-earned money? Decide yourself, where this will lead you as a nation? This hatred your Government is mongering against your beautiful country is pushing you down the path of obscurity too, towards a point of no return. We as responsible citizens of Pakistan request the responsible citizens of U.S. to really ask their government on the effectiveness of wars it has waged in the past and what it plans to wage in future. For instance, what did the Americans get out of the Vietnam war? Did the Vietnamese attack them? What did the Americans get out of the War between Iraq and Iran? What did the American people get out of the recent war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Did the American people get a share of the oil wealth that is being ripped off the Iraqis by use of brutal force? Think about the latest package of deceit this Kerry Lugar Bill brings for us, the ruthless face of which we are already seeing, yet you are kept so oblivious to. We respectfully ask you to convince your government to keep the same money to themselves and utilize it to benefit your ailing economy, or maybe it can be used to return the debt that US owes to China. Only then will we as a nation be inspired by the high spirits on your nation?s conscientiousness, and will be stimulated to follow your footsteps and will be thankful to you for our generations to come. Sincerely, A Pakistani. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Oct 9 21:47:11 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:47:11 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The IMF Catapults from Shunned Agency ... Message-ID: <20091010124711.a715d078.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> ... to Global Central Bank by Ellen Brown webofdebt.com (October 01 2009) "A year ago", said law professor Ross Buckley {1} on Australia's ABC News last week, "nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it's the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries." The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards {2}, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of last week's G20 Summit in Pittsburgh was that "the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank". In a CNBC interview on September 25, Rickards said, "They've issued debt for the first time in history. They're issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or 1981, $30 billion. Now they're issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it's printing money; there's nothing behind these SDRs." SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are a synthetic currency originally created by the IMF to replace gold and silver in large international transactions. But they have been little used until now. Why does the world suddenly need a new global fiat currency and global central bank? Rickards says it because of "Triffin's Dilemma", a problem first noted by economist Robert Triffin in the 1960s. When the world went off the gold standard, a reserve currency had to be provided by some large-currency country to service global trade. But leaving its currency out there for international purposes meant that the country would have to continually run large deficits, and that meant it would eventually go broke. The US has fueled the world economy for the last fifty years, but now it is going broke. The US can settle its debts and get its own house in order, but that would cause world trade to contract. A substitute global reserve currency is needed to fuel the global economy while the US solves its debt problems, and that new currency is to be the IMF's SDRs. That's the solution to Triffin's dilemma, says Rickards, but it leaves the US in a vulnerable position. If we face a war or other global catastrophe, we no longer have the privilege of printing money. The dollar becomes just another currency. To avoid that, the Federal Reserve is hinting that it is prepared to raise interest rates, even though that would mean further squeezing the real estate market and the real economy. Rickards was referring to an oped piece by Fed governor Kevin Warsh {3}, published in The Wall Street Journal the same day the G20 met. Warsh said that the Fed would need to raise interest rates if asset prices rose - which Rickards interprets to mean gold, the traditional go-to investment of investors fleeing the dollar. "Central banks hate gold because it limits their ability to print money", said Rickards. If gold were to suddenly go to $1,500 an ounce, it would mean the dollar was collapsing. Warsh was giving the market a heads up that the Fed wasn't going to let that happen. The Fed would raise interest rates to attract dollars back into the country. "Warsh is saying, 'We sort of have to trash the dollar, but we're going to do it gradually'", Rickards observed. "Warsh is trying to preempt an unstable decline in the dollar. What they want, of course, is a stable, steady decline." What about the Fed's traditional role of maintaining price stability? It's nonsense, said Rickards. "What they do is inflate the dollar to prop up the banks". The dollar has to be inflated because there is more debt outstanding than money to pay it with. The government currently has contingent liabilities of $60 trillion. "There's no feasible combination of growth and taxes that can fund that liability", Rickards said. The government could fund about half that in the next fourteen years, which means the dollar needs to be devalued by half in that time. The IMF's $500 Billion Stimulus Package: Designed to Help Developing Countries or the Banks? This all underscores another dilemma in the current monetary scheme, one that is even more intractable than Triffin's. There is never enough money to cover the outstanding debt, because all money today except coins is created by banks {4} in the form of loans, and more money is always owed back to the banks than they advance when they create their loans. Banks create the principal but not the interest necessary to pay their loans back. The Fed, which is owned by a consortium of banks and was set up to serve their interests, is tasked with seeing that the banks are paid back; and the only way to do that is to inflate the money supply to create the dollars to cover the missing interest. But that means diluting the value of the dollar, which imposes a stealth tax on the citizenry; and the money supply is inflated by making more loans, which adds to the debt and interest burden that the inflated money supply was supposed to relieve. The banking system is basically a pyramid scheme, which can be kept going only by continually creating more debt. And that brings us back to the IMF's stimulus package discussed last week by Professor Buckley {1}. The $500 billion package was billed as helping emerging nations hard hit by the global credit crisis, but Buckley said that he doubts that is what is really going on. Rather, the $500 billion pledged by the G20 nations is "a stimulus package for the rich countries' banks". Why does he think that? Because stimulus packages are usually grants. The money coming from the IMF will be extended in the form of loans. "These are loans that are made by the G20 countries through the IMF to poor countries. They have to be repaid and what they're going to be used for is to repay the international banks now ... The money won't really touch down in the poor countries. It will go straight through them to repay their creditors ... But the poor countries will spend the next thirty years repaying the IMF." Basically, said Professor Buckley, the loans extended by the IMF represent an increase in seniority of the debt. "At the moment the debt is owed by poor countries to banks, and if the poor countries had to, they could default on that. The bank debt is going to be replaced by debt that's owed to the IMF, which for very good strategic reasons the poor countries will always service ... The rich countries have made this $500 billion available to stimulate their own banks, and the IMF is a wonderful party to put in between the countries and the debtors and the banks." The IMF is back in business, but it's the old unseemly business of serving as the collection agency for the international banking industry. As long as third world debtors can service their loans by paying the interest on them, the banks can count the loans as "assets" on their books, allowing them to keep their pyramid scheme going by inflating the global money supply with yet more loans. It's all for the greater good of the banks and their affiliated multinational corporations, funded with $500 billion from the taxpayers of the G20 nations. Links: {1} http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2009/s2693454.htm {2} http://media.cnbc.com/i/CNBC/components/Syndicated%20Video%20Player/videomodule.swf?id=1275511738&pcode=cnbcplayershare&play=&base=http://plus.cnbc.com/stickers/partners/cnbcplayershare/ {3} http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574433041058334138.html {4} http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/dollar-deception.php _____ Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt (2007), her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust". She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from "the money trust". Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine (1998), Nature's Pharmacy (1998), co-authored with Dr Lynne Walker, and The Key to Ultimate Health (2000), co-authored with Dr Richard Hansen. Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com. (c) Copyright 2007 Ellen Brown. All Rights Reserved. http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/the-imf-catapults-from-shunned-agency-to-global-central-bank/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Fri Oct 9 21:53:40 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 20:53:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Open Letter To Citizens Of the U.S (From 'A Pakistani') In-Reply-To: <4AD0010F.1000601@gmail.com> References: <4AD0010F.1000601@gmail.com> Message-ID: <85120.62579.qm@web43516.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> This is long but basicly I agree with the premise that this so called aid is simply a means to control and interfere in the affairs of Pakistan. Disaster relief is one thing. Aid as a bribe to get a countries government to act against the interest of its people is another. That is what most of the so called aid is from the IMF, USAID and the World Bank. It is toxic. It is poison. I would not recommend that the Pakistani people allow it to be accepted on the terms under which it has been given. ________________________________ From: LCM To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Fri, October 9, 2009 8:35:43 PM Subject: [R-G] Open Letter To Citizens Of the U.S (From 'A Pakistani') Open Letter To Citizens Of the U.S Link: http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/open-letter-to-citizens-of-the-u-s/ Dear Citizens of United States, We Pakistanis are ordinary beings like you, having the same dreams, same needs,? ambitions, emotions, reservations and same passion if not more for our country. We like you, to feel the same regret for wars, same grief for the world problems, same distress towards injustice, same hopes for a better tomorrow. We, like you, also fantasize having serene borders, comfortable homes for our children, fine education, some leisure, and a satisfied mind that what we are contributing to this country and the world at large today will benefit us and our future generations tomorrow. We fancy the feeling of living in sheer coziness of our homeland, away from overseas interventions and foreign-extremism in the exact same way as an average American desires. We didn?t get our independence as a birthday present, we got it after much struggle and sacrifices (over 4 million lives were lost during the migration); after much strangling and many fatalities, we finally broke free of the quandary at the hands of British and Hindu rulers. After independence, we have shown remarkable progress in many areas despite having rulers who placed personal interests over national interests, who never really had to face the trauma of poverty, sickness, injustice, or leaving their loved ones behind to inhabit a land with no promises. Yet we did not give up and made a nation out of it. We did not fail as our current leaders try to put it, to solicit more and more aid to gratify their own greed. In our short history we have never been blessed with a true leader after our founder, and yet imagine our courage, we did not break down, we moved on and on. And we never really looked for shortcuts to this existence, we have paid plenitude. We have now been presented with yet another aid package from your country which will be financed by American taxpayers money, which is the right of American citizens and on which we have got no claim. To your surprise neither do we need it to solve our problems. We do NOT need it. We have been seasoned to rely on our own resources, our own means; because at the end of the day this money will not be utilized for our poor nation it will land somewhere you cannot imagine its terminus to be. Period. Let us give you a reality check, as the voice of our Pakistani country men and as a friendly gesture to the fellow citizens of U.S. who have a right to know. In all veracity this little aid which comes with a lot of dictation, will be utilized to finance foreign lavish trips of our government personnel who will take approximately 200 personnel including their family members to luxurious places. It will be utilized to provide notorious yet special security services that we cannot afford, to people who are not even part of the government but somehow our democratic rulers are much obliged to flatter. The so-called economic development this new aid promises will definitely not materialize. We know this because this has been happening for the last several decades. The so-called promises to create jobs for us will never be fulfilled, whereby this money would rather be utilized for expanding the job market within the USA for the American people, which itself is being hit by the worst recession in decades. Not only that, the conditions mentioned will destabilize our civil system, will cripple our autonomy, our existence, will rob our craftsmen and the population on the whole of their much deserved earnings, and in turn will fan more frustration. The ordinary Pakistani is already paying a heavy return against the lending of IMF. Our electricity, fuel and other bills have been incremented, and those too over the dictation of the IMF. The Kerry Lugar Bill does not attempt to bring any solution for our challenges at all, instead, it will be sucking blood from our innocent population in the name of few miscreants who are not a part of us in the first place, in the name of a war that didn?t belong to us by any means and was imposed on us. Are we really attempting to build peace in here? Who are we fooling in the name of amity? Islamic Republic of Pakistan is an independent country, which means that we are fully capable to take care of our needs, self reliant and complacent like Islam teaches us to be. We do not rely on shortcuts for realization of our needs. By the grace of our creator, we have been seasoned to work hard and achieve the impossible. The elite on powerful positions do not in anyway represent the opinion of general public. In their sinister yet sadly successful efforts, public is kept so busy in their basic problems that they never really get to question them on where was the Aid money utilized and why was it even asked for in the first place. Its time the U.S realized that and leave the treachery of aiding us on the face and stabbing us at our backs. As the voice of enlightened Pakistanis, let us assure you, we will be delighted if the same money is utilized in your own country to deal with the recession it faces, to deal with the crimes soaring high with U.S. topping the list of most crimes in the world in a year. We will be glad if it is also spent on researches and precautionary measures on why so many Americans die with stress-related diseases every year, why life is getting tougher and tougher for an average American family and their social values are declining. We urge you to ask your Government? whether this aid package is really helping us, the fellow citizens of Pakistan, or are you helping our shameless government with their lifestyles and luxuries? Are you helping in setting up schools and better health care or fanning more extremism due to ill-utilization that our rulers will ensure and frustration that the brutal conditions on this sell-out package will bring for us? Are you actually helping to support our displaced countrymen or giving them more reason to hate you for financing our depraved rulers? Your financial aid will not do us any good, since more than this amount already stays in the bank accounts of some of our narcissistic leaders, who occupy the ?seats? but are indifferent towards the distress of the majority. If you are still so keen to help us however, start sharing best practices, help us in establishing good governance, help us in making our systems more transparent, help us in medical researches, help us in building up universities to polish our youth else we really don?t need your help, we can help ourselves. We also request you to ask your government on how this bill helps the American nation and us, when it will just land in a few pockets and exactly what will our unfortunate nation be faced with as conditions to comply, tragedy of which is unimaginable but appalling enough for us to reject any aid from U.S. at all! The Patriot act which has left your nation so vulnerable cannot be allowed to implement in Pakistan. Let us make it more apparent, we will not allow the U.S. access to any of our properties or our citizens. These citizens belong to a free country, accountable to none other than their own national laws and America as a knowledgeable and well-developed country should respect that. Our country is fully capable to deal with any miscreants itself and we have been doing it to our best since this so called war on terror started. We will not allow interference in any form whatsoever in the internal matters of our country, in its governance, in its institutions and above all in its authority that this bill carefully ensures. Our rulers may be dissolute, our nation is not. Your country has not only deceived you in the name of wars to eliminate terror while being exceptionally involved in creating it, but it also has left many homeless, many innocent killed, many children orphans, many women widows, houses and hopes shattered. It hasn?t just betrayed us, it has betrayed you. And rest assured, the bullying tactics that your country specializes in will someday become a pit in itself. Haven?t we all started witnessing that it in front of our eyes already? We however maintain, the U.S. citizens don?t deserve to be kept in darkness. Since World War II, your country has intimidated directly or indirectly at least 44 countries, if not more in the name of peace while creating havocs in real, distributing civil wars, turmoil, oppressing nations, breaking them into pieces, dictating policies that completely butcher the civil structure. As your infamous Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger once put it so correctly: ?While being America?s enemy may be dangerous, being America?s friend is invariably fatal?. Who would comprehend that better than our nation, who has a history of 62 years being your ally and what did we get in return? Treachery, betrayal, deception? What did the US get out of it; a deteriorating economy, a failed social structure, not to mention countless killed soldiers? It isn?t a surprise the same Kissinger who believed in brutal de-population of the world and whose policies your government still follows, also said ?Soldiers are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy?. Decide for yourself, where this face will lead you? This hatred your government is mongering against your beautiful country is pushing you down the path of obscurity too, with a point of no return. Ask yourselves, are the U.S soldiers really worthless herds of cattle to be thrown into hostile territories just so that a few in the Govt. can benefit by selling their weapons to the U.S Govt., which buys them from these local multi-million dollar businesses at such dear cost of American tax-payers? blood-earned money? Decide yourself, where this will lead you as a nation? This hatred your Government is mongering against your beautiful country is pushing you down the path of obscurity too, towards a point of no return. We as responsible citizens of Pakistan request the responsible citizens of U.S. to really ask their government on the effectiveness of wars it has waged in the past and what it plans to wage in future. For instance, what did the Americans get out of the Vietnam war? Did the Vietnamese attack them? What did the Americans get out of the War between Iraq and Iran? What did the American people get out of the recent war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Did the American people get a share of the oil wealth that is being ripped off the Iraqis by use of brutal force? Think about the latest package of deceit this Kerry Lugar Bill brings for us, the ruthless face of which we are already seeing, yet you are kept so oblivious to. We respectfully ask you to convince your government to keep the same money to themselves and utilize it to benefit your ailing economy, or maybe it can be used to return the debt that US owes to China. Only then will we as a nation be inspired by the high spirits on your nation?s conscientiousness, and will be stimulated to follow your footsteps and will be thankful to you for our generations to come. Sincerely, A Pakistani. _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sat Oct 10 00:25:43 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 23:25:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Rolling Rocks Up Imaginary Hills Message-ID: <968567.53613.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> On A Personal Note- Rolling Rocks Up Hill.October 9th, 2009 What I know or at least what I think I know. Humans are star seeds. We are literally planted here by meteorites with genetic materials implanted in them. They were flung out into the cosmos at some point in time, perhaps a billion years ago. This is from Wikepedia ?The age of the universe is the time elapsed between the Big Bang and the present day. Current theory and observations suggest that the universe is between 13.5 and 14 billion years old.[1] The uncertainty range has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects. These projects included background radiation measurements and more ways to measure the expansion of the universe. Background radiation measurements give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang. Expansion of the universe measurements give accurate data to calculate the age of the universe.? Ok I am no scientist. I am just a guy with a mind that was built for exploration of the the limits of the universe. This is not done in space ships. This is most effectively done through the mind. The mind is a focusing lens. It is only capable of holding so much information at one time. There is not much difference from one mind to another as far as capability to focus goes. Cultures emphasise certain forms of focus over others and history is merely the story of different focuses at different times. Progress in that sense is a myth. On the other hand there is opportunity to learn in each area of focus. A culture rises and falls in the strength of the focus. As the focus becomes clearer, sharper, more developed, we have a rise in a culture. When the focus is lost, strained, drained, then the culture falls until another attempt at focus is made in another direction. That is pretty simple. It is ultimate simplicity. But why do we chose one area to focus over another? It is a methodical testing of the options that we make on a genetic level seeking keys that will lead to the next step. We have encoded in our genes the desire. It is a desire to seek completion or another way of putting it is that there is another option, always. But that option is not one of the facts. The problem is we have imperfect clarity. We see but only bits and pieces and we don?t necessarily know what will be the right path or the right view. We sharpen our focus and then we realize we are looking at nothing but empty space. There are frustrations. We are sometimes simply genetic machines to combine several other genetic combinations and thus we simply breed and prepare the next generation, rolling the dice hoping that this generation will put it together. It is like a massive puzzle but of course it is not a puzzle. It is not that we are incapable, but that we simply have not come up with the right combination. It is not a matter of technology. Unless you consider breeding to be a technical feat. What it is, is a series of options. These options are endless. We are programed to seek the solution to this puzzle. It is in our genes. We don?t have any other option but to keep seeking, testing and analysing. Our purpose, such as it is, is the solving of this unsolved puzzle or better yet, the what we are, tools of the genetic imperative. It is simple. It is everything. When one of us comes close to the clarity needed to make sense of some of this then we are given the good fortune of having a perfectly pointless existence. Not having biological purpose gives such persons the scary possibility of insight. That is not what we are doing. We, we who are aware, are not particularly blessed with an easy life because this awareness comes at a price. It means we are totaly out of sync with the day to day routine of survival. It also means that we have no particular function in the world that would lead to significance or honors. All experience is meant do do for us is simply to expose us to information that teaches what is required to accelerate the understanding of what we are bringing to focus in this life. It is not glamorous, it is not particularly rewarding and it is definitely not satisfying in any personal sense. The only satisfaction is that which comes when we have climbed a particular mountain to see the next mountain. There is nothing else but scaling one height after another. Going through one experience after another and seeking clarity, seeking meaning seeking sense and focus in all the varied details that make up life. As I realized a long time ago, some thoughts take more than one life to complete. At the time I thought it was simply a drug addled conceit. I simply assumed I was using this as an excuse for why I was a failure. Unfortunately I am not a success or a failure. I am an experiment that is taking its course and it will be as successful as I am able to be. If I am particularly successful I will be able to communicate some level of clarity that I have achieved. If I am not able, then I am simply going to dissolve and someone else will pick up where I left off. assuming there is some accumulative process which I am not entirely sure exists. When I have achieved the fulfilment and that is a debatable concept, fulfilment would be total understanding. Total understanding may not be possible in the human form. There may be some genetic machine hybrid that makes for a greater understanding. Or that method of clarity and focus may simply be a dead end. Technology may not lead to anything but a bunch of cells and nanobots interacting in a totaly random and intermediate manner. That is not something that leads to on or off. Although it may work to some greater good. It also may not. I am sure that there is some purpose that can be useful. But the religious concept, the scientific impulse, the political imperative, the biological desire, these are all simply methods or tools used to motivate, not exactly like a rat in a maize, that would assume that there was a plan, or an actual greater form of meaning that oversees like a human overseas an ant or an ant overseas a microbe. They coexist but do not have interrelated patterns other than an inter sectional one. We interact as we intersect but we don?t control or direct. And in that sense we are not controlled or directed. We interact on levels of scale but these do not imply orders of value. Scale does not imply importance. One may or may not be as important as any other in the same plane. The relationship is purely incidental and associational. Each species has its imperative in its genetic coding that acts out its own pattern of problem solving until it reaches a clarity that reveals meaning. If it is fortunate enough to meet that standard of self hood then it must be able to relay that understanding to the next generation or the next level. That is one concept that is totaly misunderstood. Linear genetic patterning is not the same as ultimate level transformation. We can transform as we evolve vertically. We move linearly in genetic evolution. The combination of the xy graphing in space and time give dimensionality to the genetic and vibrational. These two interact creating flesh forms that both move and have stability in space and time. It is the vibrating of pattern that causes form to appear through duration. It is that pattern of duration inter-phased with the pattern of on and off, light and dark etc that gives rise to electrical synaptic leaps. These leaps are what cause consciousness to have reflectivity. But being able to reflect is only of use if there is a crystalline structure for it to bounce off of. This multiple bouncing back and forth leads to enough repetition for identity to evolve. As this sense of self begins to crystallize it forms a bead like shape in the xy axis that is called a node of consciousness. As the vibrations move through these nodes the resonance of this vibration from one node to another when expanded enough causes the complexity of consciousness to be self aware. At this point I am merely reciting material that is buried in one crystalline structure in my brain or another as it vibrates it is released. This is called the opening of the chakras. These wheels are more like on off switches or portals for the genetic coding to be switched on and off on the xy axis. At this point I am over my own head and I need to retreat into the labyrinth shape of the mental mirror material. It needs to bounce back and forth in the genetic material setting off synaptic nodes that eventually release more encapsulated material. It vibrates more and like low hanging fruit more nodes drop, explode, release seeds and vibrate onto new patterning of nodes on the XY axis. This is unfortunately the essence of Gnosis. It is knowing but not necessarily understanding. But given the alternative, what else is there? Experimentation? Wrote learning? Scientific process? Random luck? Good luck. Tags: Gnosis On A Friday Night. Waiting For Godot or Sisyphus Posted in Art & entertainment, Gnosis:, History From suzannedk at gmail.com Sat Oct 10 11:03:20 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:03:20 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Canada in the Great Game In-Reply-To: <45758829-7814-4A89-9BF4-C3FBF1D3F51D@shaw.ca> References: <45758829-7814-4A89-9BF4-C3FBF1D3F51D@shaw.ca> Message-ID: The article sent in by A. Fenton descibes an information vacuum that is a deadly trap for the Canadians The information is so earth shaking that when it begins to dribble out, facist silence controls are going to have to be inserted as they already are in neighbor, U.S.. Add to that the brutally destructive footprint Canada always leaves behind, the lies that accompany the exploitation, all those countries will feel raped and defiled and will retaliate! America plans to be there a minimum of fifty years. It will abusively and threateningly harass it's neighbor stay just as long. And any other country it can force to come and then stay. This is why the Iraqi Museum was left wide open. That was a profound statement of the future of Iraq. This is planned for Afghanistan as well. There may even be plans what peoples should be inserted into these target countries to replace those there now in order to get rid of the permanently enraged. As to the eight years of war in one of the world's poorest countries that did not attack anyone one only needs to look to English and French old history when the hangings, beheadings etc were a spectator sport of great popularity. It is no oddity that milions in Europe knew about the Nazi camps and said, did, nothing as they were working their horrors. Americans know their manufactured food system gives them the world's highest cancer and diabetes rates, and do not protest. Anthony has courage. suzannedk at gmail On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 1:05 AM, Anthony Fenton wrote: > 'The maple leaf needs to be there' On the anniversary of the invasion > of Afghanistan, Vue looks at Canada's deepening interest in the > region's new 'Great Game' > Anthony Fenton / Special to Vue Weekly > > Eight years into a war that many commentators are now calling a > quagmire from which NATO forces should extricate themselves as soon as > possible, most Canadians are unaware of the link between the war and > Canada's increasing involvement in the "Great Game" for the region's > abundant natural resources. > > http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=13294 > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From lcm95060 at gmail.com Sat Oct 10 12:52:57 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:52:57 -0700 Subject: [R-G] This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey... Message-ID: <4AD0D809.6000005@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey (EcoDefense) http://rapidshare.com/files/291214499/EcoDefense.rar I put this copy together myself by gleaning it from a website and modifying the html to find the 'Images' folder, and as unnecessary as it was, these files have been virus scanned with Avast A/V. The 'Direct Action' page contains web links to a number of sites including the host I derived this copy from. Other than that, there are no external links. Instructions (If you need assistance feel free to contact me): 1) Click the link 2) Download the .rar archive from RapidShare (free, if you wait a minute) Note: If your archive program doesn't understand .rar archives (unlikely in this case), go here http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm to download the software (One of the best free archiving programs in the world). This one "WinRAR x86 (32 bit) Version#" is for the average Windoze computer. 3) Extract the folder "EcoDefense" from the archive and you will see .htm pages, a folder called 'Images', and a link. 4) Click the link "This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey" 5) Enjoy, while keeping in mind that much of what is discussed in this manual will now, if put into practice in the New World Dis-Order, brand you an 'Eco-Terrorist'. LCM This product is meant for educational purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Void where prohibited. Some assembly required. List each check separately by bank number. Batteries not included. Contents may settle during shipment. Use only as directed. No other warranty expressed or implied. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Postage will be paid by addressee. Subject to CAB approval. This is not an offer to sell securities. Apply only to affected area. May be too intense for some viewers. Do not stamp. Use other side for additional listings. For recreational use only. Do not disturb. All models over 18 years of age. If condition persists, consult your physician. No user-serviceable parts inside. Freshest if eaten before date on carton. Subject to change without notice. Times approximate. Simulated picture. No postage necessary if mailed in the United States. Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. For off-road use only. As seen on TV. One size fits all. Many suitcases look alike. Contains a substantial amount of non-tobacco ingredients. Colors may, in time, fade. We have sent the forms which seem right for you. Slippery when wet. For office use only. Not affiliated with the American Red Cross. Drop in any mailbox. Edited for television. Keep cool. process promptly. Post office will not deliver without postage. List was current at time of printing. Return to sender, no forwarding order on file, unable to forward. Not responsible for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect, error or failure to perform. At participating locations only. Not the Beatles. Penalty for private use. See label for sequence. Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Do not write below this line. Falling rock. Lost ticket pays maximum rate. Your canceled check is your receipt. Add toner. Place stamp here. Avoid contact with skin. Sanitized for your protection. Be sure each item is properly endorsed. Sign here without admitting guilt. Slightly higher west of the Mississippi. Employees and their families are not eligible. Beware of dog. Contestants have been briefed on some questions before the show. Limited time offer, call now to ensure prompt delivery. You must be present to win. No passes accepted for this engagement. No purchase necessary. Processed at location stamped in code at top of carton. Shading within a garment may occur. Use only in a well-ventilated are. Keep away from fire or flames. Replace with same type. Approved for veterans. Booths for two or more. Check here if tax deductible. Some equipment shown is optional. Price does not include taxes. No Canadian coins. Not recommended for children. Prerecorded for this time zone. Reproduction strictly prohibited. No solicitors. No alcohol, dogs or horses. No anchovies unless otherwise specified. Restaurant package, not for resale. List at least two alternate dates. First pull up, then pull down. Call toll free before digging. Driver does not carry cash. Some of the trademarks mentioned in this product appear for identification purposes only. Record additional transactions on back of previous stub. Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. No transfers issued until the bus comes to a complete stop. Package sold by weight, not volume. Your mileage may vary. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my cat. Don?t quote me on that. Don?t quote me on anything. All rights reserved. You may distribute this article freely but you may not make a profit from it. Terms are subject to change without notice. Illustrations are slightly enlarged to show detail. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental. Do not remove this disclaimer under penalty of law. Hand wash only, tumble dry on low heat. Do not bend, fold, mutilate, or spindle. No substitutions allowed. For a limited time only. This article is void where prohibited, taxed, or otherwise restricted. Caveat emptor. Article is provided ?as is? without any warranties. Reader assumes full responsibility. An equal opportunity article. No shoes, no shirt, no articles. quantities are limited while supplies last. If any defects are discovered, do not attempt to read them yourself, but return to an authorized service center. Read at your own risk. Parental advisory ? explicit lyrics. Text may contain explicit materials some readers may find objectionable, parental guidance is advised. Keep away from sunlight. Keep away from pets and small children. Limit one-per-family please. No money down. No purchase necessary. You need not be present to win. Some assembly required. Batteries not included. Instructions are included. Action figures sold separately. No preservatives added. Slippery when wet. Safety goggles may be required during use. Sealed for your protection, do not read if safety seal is broken. Call before you dig. Not liable for damages arising from use or misuse. For external use only. If rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops, discontinue reading. Read only with proper ventilation. Avoid extreme temperatures and store in a cool dry place. Keep away from open flames. Avoid contact with eyes and skin and avoid inhaling fumes. Do not puncture, incinerate, or store above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Do not place near a flammable or magnetic source. Smoking this article could be hazardous to your health. The best safeguard, second only to abstinence, is the use of a condom. No salt, MSG, artificial color or flavoring added. If ingested, do not induce vomiting, and if symptoms persist, consult a physician. Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Fun Ball. Caution: Happy Fun Ball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds. Happy Fun Ball contains a liquid core, which if exposed due to rupture should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at. Do not use Happy Fun Ball on concrete. Discontinue use of Happy Fun Ball if any of the following occurs: Itching, Vertigo, Dizziness, Tingling in extremities, Loss of balance or coordination, Slurred speech, Temporary blindness, Profuse Sweating, or Heart palpitations. If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head. Happy Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin. When not in use, Happy Fun Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of Happy Fun Ball, Wacky Products Incorporated, and it?s parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability. Ingredients of Happy Fun Ball include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. May cause any of the aforementioned effects and/or death. Articles are ribbed for your pleasure. Possible penalties for early withdrawal. Offer valid only at participating sites. Slightly higher west of the Rockies. Allow four to six weeks for delivery. Must be 18 to read. Disclaimer does not cover misuse, accident, lightning, flood, tornado, tsunami, volcanic eruption, earthquake, hurricanes and other Acts of God, neglect, damage from improper reading, incorrect line voltage, improper or unauthorized reading, broken antenna or marred cabinet, missing or altered serial numbers, electromagnetic radiation from nuclear blasts, sonic boom vibrations, customer adjustments that are not covered in this list, and incidents owing to an airplane crash, ship sinking or taking on water, motor vehicle crashing, dropping the item, falling rocks, leaky roof, broken glass, mud slides, forest fire, or projectile (which can include, but not be limited to, arrows, bullets, shot, BB?s, shrapnel, lasers, napalm, torpedoes, or emissions of X-rays, Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays, knives, stones, etc.). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJK0NgIAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysWz4IAIDJiw+hSV2y/x3Fr52h5LEj rU4wuSgCpx2xZJcOkMKMsq3AtW/ZFgJIfcQUmyTXGPMGxNambfhY925+XUb0qyoa KLMqUsYypB/iKN2Umnw8uGGUUamX4WED0gWGiw7vPt9zQBw70Glr0BES3WJOEqu9 xJkGzLd8EQ3LqUYIV2TbScYI0vXQO+DiRUJmm0qdk9ctsQUf4FFdwd3OnHprA5cF jElLpsVjH2wyCzpdkgjzIGV+asLoQ7CVxale8qs64vlyiNovfIY4CHhQo5EMvqIH Xr0mvi2kVUn2xPWeUD96AYManTgWcbrO49p5AQZYCtQd97XQfAOGjrEnCBIJ4iI= =2pfr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shniad at gmail.com Sat Oct 10 13:15:19 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:15:19 -0700 Subject: [R-G] US Afghan troops losing heart; We don't threaten West - Afghan Taliban ; The Afghanistan "debate" ; Aghan election fraud ; Canada and the Great Game ; America Has Been Here Before Message-ID: <83904d240910101215t653578eeo509217a522d4d3ef@mail.gmail.com> *American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains **Afghan Taliban say they pose no threat to the West* *The suffocatingly narrow Afghanistan "debate" * *U.N. Data Show Huge Discrepancies in Afghan Vote* *Canada and the Great Game* *America Has Been Here Before* * *------------------------------------------------------ The Times (London) October 8, 2009 *American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains * American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban. Many feel that they are risking their lives ? and that colleagues have died ? for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul. ?The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,? said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division?s 2-87 Infantry Battalion. ?They feel they are risking their lives for progress that?s hard to discern,? said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division?s 4-25 Field Artillery Battalion. ?They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get through.? The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men could not. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6865359.ece ------------------------------------------------ Reuters October 7, 2009 *Afghan Taliban say they pose no threat to the West* By Sayed Salahuddin Sayed Salahuddin KABUL ? The Afghan Taliban pose no threat to the West but will continue their fight against occupying foreign forces, they said on Wednesday, the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that removed them from power. U.S.-led forces with the help of Afghan groups overthrew the Taliban government during a five week battle which started on October 7, 2001, after the militants refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders wanted by Washington for the September 11 attacks on America. "We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe ... our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state," the Taliban said in a statement on the group's website www.shahamat.org. "Still, if you (NATO and U.S. troops) want to colonize the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war." http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_afghanistan_taliban_anniversary ----------------------------------------------- *The suffocatingly narrow Afghanistan "debate" * Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com Apparently, "all options" does not mean "all options." As usual for American wars, examining "all options" means everything other than "ending the war." http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/07/afghanistan/ ----------------------------------------------- Washington Post Wednesday, October 7, 2009 *U.N. Data Show Discrepancies in Afghan Vote* By Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow Washington Post Staff Writers UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 6 -- Voter turnout data kept confidential by the United Nations' chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan's disputed August presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing further indication that the contest was marred by fraud. In southern Helmand province -- where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for President Hamid Karzai -- the United Nations estimated that just 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/06/AR2009100603816.html# -------------------------------------- *Canada and the Great Game * * 'The Maple Leaf Needs to be There'* "Eight years into a war that many commentators are now calling a quagmire from which NATO forces should extricate themselves as soon as possible, most Canadians are unaware of the link between the war and Canada's increasing involvement in the "Great Game" for the region's abundant natural resources." http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=13294 ------------------------------------------------ Toronto Sun September 20, 2009 *America Has Been Here Before* By Eric Margolis We should hang a huge neon sign over Afghanistan: "CAUTION: DEJA VU." Afghanistan's much ballyhooed recent election staged by its foreign occupiers turned out to be a fraud wrapped up in a farce -- as this column predicted a month ago. It was as phony and meaningless as U.S.-run elections in Vietnam in the 1970s. Canada played a shameful role in facilitating this obviously rigged vote. Meanwhile, American and NATO generals running the Afghan war amazingly warn they risk being beaten by Taliban tribesmen in spite of their 107,000 soldiers, B-1 heavy bombers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Apache and AC-130 gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillance. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23548.htm From lcm95060 at gmail.com Sat Oct 10 18:22:48 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:22:48 -0700 Subject: [R-G] This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey... In-Reply-To: <4AD0D809.6000005@gmail.com> References: <4AD0D809.6000005@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4AD12558.6070909@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Torrent: http://www.mininova.org/tor/3033884 One follow up note no matter how you download it,: You may have to recreate the shortcut to the index page or modify the one that came in the archive. I inadvertently never modified the shortcut's text and I DO believe it contains a 'path' unique to my computer. If you choose to recreate the shortcut, the index page is named "inttxt.html" It's not a large file, 5,540 kb, and although I'm not 'seeding' 24/7, at some point during any 24 hour period I'll be up and running for any number of hours. If there are no other seeds (currently one besides me, reliability unknown) just hang tight. LCM wrote: > This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey (EcoDefense) > > http://rapidshare.com/files/291214499/EcoDefense.rar > > I put this copy together myself by gleaning it from a website and > modifying the html to find the 'Images' folder, and as unnecessary > as it was, these files have been virus scanned with Avast A/V. > > The 'Direct Action' page contains web links to a number of sites > including the host I derived this copy from. Other than that, there > are no external links. > > Instructions (If you need assistance feel free to contact me): > > 1) Click the link > > 2) Download the .rar archive from RapidShare (free, if you wait a > minute) > > Note: If your archive program doesn't understand .rar archives > (unlikely in this case), go here http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm > to download the software (One of the best free archiving programs > in the world). This one "WinRAR x86 (32 bit) Version#" is for the > average Windoze computer. > > 3) Extract the folder "EcoDefense" from the archive and you will > see .htm pages, a folder called 'Images', and a link. > > 4) Click the link "This Book Is Dedicated To Edward Abbey" > > 5) Enjoy, while keeping in mind that much of what is discussed in > this manual will now, if put into practice in the New World > Dis-Order, brand you an 'Eco-Terrorist'. > > LCM > > This product is meant for educational purposes only. Any > resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. > Void where prohibited. Some assembly required. List each check > separately by bank number. Batteries not included. Contents may > settle during shipment. Use only as directed. No other warranty > expressed or implied. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or > heavy equipment. Postage will be paid by addressee. Subject to CAB > approval. This is not an offer to sell securities. Apply only to > affected area. May be too intense for some viewers. Do not stamp. > Use other side for additional listings. For recreational use only. > Do not disturb. All models over 18 years of age. If condition > persists, consult your physician. No user-serviceable parts inside. > Freshest if eaten before date on carton. Subject to change without > notice. Times approximate. Simulated picture. No postage necessary > if mailed in the United States. Breaking seal constitutes > acceptance of agreement. For off-road use only. As seen on TV. One > size fits all. Many suitcases look alike. Contains a substantial > amount of non-tobacco ingredients. Colors may, in time, fade. We > have sent the forms which seem right for you. Slippery when wet. > For office use only. Not affiliated with the American Red Cross. > Drop in any mailbox. Edited for television. Keep cool. process > promptly. Post office will not deliver without postage. List was > current at time of printing. Return to sender, no forwarding order > on file, unable to forward. Not responsible for direct, indirect, > incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect, > error or failure to perform. At participating locations only. Not > the Beatles. Penalty for private use. See label for sequence. > Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Do not write below this > line. Falling rock. Lost ticket pays maximum rate. Your canceled > check is your receipt. Add toner. Place stamp here. Avoid contact > with skin. Sanitized for your protection. Be sure each item is > properly endorsed. Sign here without admitting guilt. Slightly > higher west of the Mississippi. Employees and their families are > not eligible. Beware of dog. Contestants have been briefed on some > questions before the show. Limited time offer, call now to ensure > prompt delivery. You must be present to win. No passes accepted for > this engagement. No purchase necessary. Processed at location > stamped in code at top of carton. Shading within a garment may > occur. Use only in a well-ventilated are. Keep away from fire or > flames. Replace with same type. Approved for veterans. Booths for > two or more. Check here if tax deductible. Some equipment shown is > optional. Price does not include taxes. No Canadian coins. Not > recommended for children. Prerecorded for this time zone. > Reproduction strictly prohibited. No solicitors. No alcohol, dogs > or horses. No anchovies unless otherwise specified. Restaurant > package, not for resale. List at least two alternate dates. First > pull up, then pull down. Call toll free before digging. Driver does > not carry cash. Some of the trademarks mentioned in this product > appear for identification purposes only. Record additional > transactions on back of previous stub. Unix is a registered > trademark of AT&T. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. No transfers > issued until the bus comes to a complete stop. Package sold by > weight, not volume. Your mileage may vary. This article does not > reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my > friends, or my cat. Don?t quote me on that. Don?t quote me on > anything. All rights reserved. You may distribute this article > freely but you may not make a profit from it. Terms are subject to > change without notice. Illustrations are slightly enlarged to show > detail. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is > unintentional and purely coincidental. Do not remove this > disclaimer under penalty of law. Hand wash only, tumble dry on low > heat. Do not bend, fold, mutilate, or spindle. No substitutions > allowed. For a limited time only. This article is void where > prohibited, taxed, or otherwise restricted. Caveat emptor. Article > is provided ?as is? without any warranties. Reader assumes full > responsibility. An equal opportunity article. No shoes, no shirt, > no articles. quantities are limited while supplies last. If any > defects are discovered, do not attempt to read them yourself, but > return to an authorized service center. Read at your own risk. > Parental advisory ? explicit lyrics. Text may contain explicit > materials some readers may find objectionable, parental guidance is > advised. Keep away from sunlight. Keep away from pets and small > children. Limit one-per-family please. No money down. No purchase > necessary. You need not be present to win. Some assembly required. > Batteries not included. Instructions are included. Action figures > sold separately. No preservatives added. Slippery when wet. Safety > goggles may be required during use. Sealed for your protection, do > not read if safety seal is broken. Call before you dig. Not liable > for damages arising from use or misuse. For external use only. If > rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops, discontinue > reading. Read only with proper ventilation. Avoid extreme > temperatures and store in a cool dry place. Keep away from open > flames. Avoid contact with eyes and skin and avoid inhaling fumes. > Do not puncture, incinerate, or store above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. > Do not place near a flammable or magnetic source. Smoking this > article could be hazardous to your health. The best safeguard, > second only to abstinence, is the use of a condom. No salt, MSG, > artificial color or flavoring added. If ingested, do not induce > vomiting, and if symptoms persist, consult a physician. Warning: > Pregnant women, the elderly, and children should avoid prolonged > exposure to Happy Fun Ball. Caution: Happy Fun Ball may suddenly > accelerate to dangerous speeds. Happy Fun Ball contains a liquid > core, which if exposed due to rupture should not be touched, > inhaled, or looked at. Do not use Happy Fun Ball on concrete. > Discontinue use of Happy Fun Ball if any of the following occurs: > Itching, Vertigo, Dizziness, Tingling in extremities, Loss of > balance or coordination, Slurred speech, Temporary blindness, > Profuse Sweating, or Heart palpitations. If Happy Fun Ball begins > to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head. Happy > Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin. When not in use, Happy > Fun Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under > refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of Happy Fun > Ball, Wacky Products Incorporated, and it?s parent company, Global > Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability. Ingredients of Happy > Fun Ball include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, > presumably from outer space. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. May cause > any of the aforementioned effects and/or death. Articles are ribbed > for your pleasure. Possible penalties for early withdrawal. Offer > valid only at participating sites. Slightly higher west of the > Rockies. Allow four to six weeks for delivery. Must be 18 to read. > Disclaimer does not cover misuse, accident, lightning, flood, > tornado, tsunami, volcanic eruption, earthquake, hurricanes and > other Acts of God, neglect, damage from improper reading, incorrect > line voltage, improper or unauthorized reading, broken antenna or > marred cabinet, missing or altered serial numbers, electromagnetic > radiation from nuclear blasts, sonic boom vibrations, customer > adjustments that are not covered in this list, and incidents owing > to an airplane crash, ship sinking or taking on water, motor > vehicle crashing, dropping the item, falling rocks, leaky roof, > broken glass, mud slides, forest fire, or projectile (which can > include, but not be limited to, arrows, bullets, shot, BB?s, > shrapnel, lasers, napalm, torpedoes, or emissions of X-rays, Alpha, > Beta and Gamma rays, knives, stones, etc.). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJK0SVWAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysrhUIAMHwwQQGkVU+CTfnbNXyefGV uAnSNd4nfGRw88jzIAScLC8Yc0k8WK47ddHVAnewUZC2rzWE1X+YfnIr8V4L32Uz kKggL5B9xDg3H/cFXNS3eSQPmaPm2dIEyIpEz1TtdNo71jI80lDAbcPARK/DPc33 FAnQT09e3z99fvYoIAU0uqUifj8/J0NJBhEjaFlWcdDkSmBJ50hODOODxFpwiEHi jqpdOeS/pBfAVXSoB7M3+fJ+GFrYMN54oG7BUqlZALKkJhEDUhDdUfCJ7CchybyK qRzhpD296/tI2OYKQpHYK9h1fvFUK2SLe8tJqnz2kFyKLOFW12tAaKiLy5uQ+cg= =VGWX -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Oct 11 04:12:41 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:12:41 +0200 Subject: [R-G] US Afghan troops losing heart; We don't threaten West - Afghan Taliban ; The Afghanistan "debate" ; Aghan election fraud ; Canada and the Great Game ; America Has Been Here Before In-Reply-To: <83904d240910101215t653578eeo509217a522d4d3ef@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910101215t653578eeo509217a522d4d3ef@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: The United state does not intend to leave Afghanistan until all the Middle Eastern Energy sources are used up, at least fifty years or more. The explosion of NATO countries and troops are intended to take up the wars now and any and all in the future and to fund Ameica's joining, leading, them. All the Stans countries are targeted and Iran, the powerhouse of that area, to be put on a leash. Israeli agression and cause of Middle Eastern instability is key. Suzanne suzannedkgmail.com On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > *American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains > **Afghan Taliban say they pose no threat to the West* > *The suffocatingly narrow Afghanistan "debate" * > *U.N. Data Show Huge Discrepancies in Afghan Vote* > *Canada and the Great Game* > *America Has Been Here Before* > * > *------------------------------------------------------ > > The Times (London) > October 8, 2009 > > *American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains * > > American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply > disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have > spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban. > > Many feel that they are risking their lives ? and that colleagues have died > ? for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help > them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this > fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul. > > ?The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger > about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and > just want to get back to their families,? said Captain Jeff Masengale, of > the 10th Mountain Division?s 2-87 Infantry Battalion. > > ?They feel they are risking their lives for progress that?s hard to > discern,? said Captain Sam Rico, of the Division?s 4-25 Field Artillery > Battalion. ?They are tired, strained, confused and just want to get > through.? The chaplains said that they were speaking out because the men > could not. > > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6865359.ece > > ------------------------------------------------ > > Reuters > October 7, 2009 > > *Afghan Taliban say they pose no threat to the West* > > By Sayed Salahuddin Sayed Salahuddin > > KABUL ? The Afghan Taliban pose no threat to the West but will continue > their fight against occupying foreign forces, they said on Wednesday, the > eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that removed them from power. > > U.S.-led forces with the help of Afghan groups overthrew the Taliban > government during a five week battle which started on October 7, 2001, > after > the militants refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders wanted by Washington > for > the September 11 attacks on America. > > "We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those > in Europe ... our goal is the independence of the country and the building > of an Islamic state," the Taliban said in a statement on the group's > website > www.shahamat.org. > > "Still, if you (NATO and U.S. troops) want to colonize the country of proud > and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you > should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for > a > long war." > > http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_afghanistan_taliban_anniversary > > ----------------------------------------------- > > *The suffocatingly narrow Afghanistan "debate" * > > Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com > > Apparently, "all options" does not mean "all options." As usual for > American wars, examining "all options" means everything other > than "ending the war." > > http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/07/afghanistan/ > > ----------------------------------------------- > > Washington Post Wednesday, October 7, 2009 > > *U.N. Data Show Discrepancies in Afghan Vote* > > By Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow > Washington Post Staff Writers > > UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 6 -- Voter turnout data kept confidential by the > United > Nations' chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan's disputed August > presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count > exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing > further indication that the contest was marred by fraud. > > In southern Helmand province -- where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 > of them for President Hamid Karzai -- the United Nations estimated that > just > 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. > spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post. > > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/06/AR2009100603816.html# > > -------------------------------------- > > *Canada and the Great Game > * * > 'The Maple Leaf Needs to be There'* > > "Eight years into a war that many commentators are now calling a > quagmire from which NATO forces should extricate themselves as soon as > possible, most Canadians are unaware of the link between the war and > Canada's increasing involvement in the "Great Game" for the region's > abundant natural resources." > > http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=13294 > > ------------------------------------------------ > > Toronto Sun September 20, 2009 > > *America Has Been Here Before* > > By Eric Margolis > > We should hang a huge neon sign over Afghanistan: "CAUTION: DEJA VU." > > Afghanistan's much ballyhooed recent election staged by its foreign > occupiers turned out to be a fraud wrapped up in a farce -- as this column > predicted a month ago. It was as phony and meaningless as U.S.-run > elections > in Vietnam in the 1970s. > > Canada played a shameful role in facilitating this obviously rigged vote. > > Meanwhile, American and NATO generals running the Afghan war amazingly > warn they risk being beaten by Taliban tribesmen in spite of their 107,000 > soldiers, B-1 heavy bombers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Apache and AC-130 > gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, > white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillance. > > http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23548.htm > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Oct 11 04:33:42 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:33:42 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Cash or Credit Conundrum Message-ID: <20091011193342.9e7adbab.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Ralph Nader www.nader.org (October 05 2009) Consumers rejoice. Floyd Norris has just penned a piece for the New York Times titled: "Rich and Poor Should Pay Same Price" {1}. Mr Norris said, it seems "absurd to have a system that requires people who do not use credit to subsidize those who do. You know there is something wrong when a middle-class person can get a part of his purchases refunded by the bank, or can collect miles good for free airline tickets, while paying the same price as a poor person who can get none of those benefits." Mr Norris is on to something important. He reminded me of an article I wrote in December 1985. I asked readers of my weekly column to consider some of the pitfalls of credit card purchasing. I noted that the big banks relentlessly promote credit card usage without adequately presenting the downside of credit card debt. I asked readers to imagine seeing a television presentation by an organization known as the "Cash Payment Fans of America". The made-for-television production sponsored by this imaginary organization would ask viewers to consider some counter-marketing advice with the following declaration: "Credit Cards: Maybe You DO Want to Leave Home Without Them". Law Professor Adam J Levitin, in a 2008 article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation reports: "On average, credit card transactions cost merchants six times as much as cash transactions and twice as much as checks or PIN-based debit card transactions". Professor Levitin also notes that in 2006 "US merchants paid nearly $57 billion to accept payment card transactions, which makes this component of the payments industry larger than the entire biotech industry, the music industry, the microprocessor industry, the electronic game industry, Hollywood box office sales, and worldwide venture capital investments". These are stunning observations. Alas, our collective imagination may not yet have evolved to the point where we can consider a day without VISA and MasterCard. The buy now, pay later credit card cabal knows few bounds. The credit card vendors want you to forget that using a credit card means you are borrowing money and that you must repay what you borrowed with interest. And, the interest rates can be staggering. Until recently credit card companies could charge annual percentage (APR) rates of up to 36 percent. And, the fine print in your credit card agreement might allow the "merchants of credit" to charge membership fees - described as "participation fees", "maintenance fees", or "activation fees" - on top of the interest fees. And don't forget the "transaction fees", for getting cash with your card, the fees for exceeding your credit limit or for making a late payment. Ed Mierzwinski of USPIRG, a consumer watchdog organization, monitors the credit card racket and the slippery practices of banks that gouge consumers with a variety of fees. USPIRG notes that credit card issuers have tricked consumers by: 1. suddenly advancing long-standing regular due dates by five days or more to trick consumers into paying late; 2. arranging for due dates to fall on weekends and then claiming that bills received after twelve noon or one pm were late; 3. imposing late fees not only when bills were thirty days late, but as little as one minute or one day late; and, 4. raising the interest rate if your credit score declines. Fortunately, some of the most egregious credit card abuses will be eliminated by legislation signed into law on May 22 2009. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009, while not perfect, will generally require 45-days advance notice of any rate increase or any other significant changes in account terms, up from from days, and card issuers will have to inform consumers of their right to cancel their card before rate increases or account changes take effect. Credit card statements must also be mailed out 21 days before they are due. The new law also limits some interest rate hikes for late payments. Unfortunately, the problems associated with getting on the credit card treadmill are still overwhelming. Despite some modest legislative reforms, too many credit card issuers are still predators waiting to pounce. Representative Peter Welch (Vermont) and thirteen House co-sponsors have introduced the "Credit Card Interchange Fees Act of 2009". This piece of legislation is designed to limit some of the fees credit card companies charge retailers and shed some light on the costs of credit card transactions to consumers and merchants. Consumers can make some additional waves themselves by pretending they have joined "Cash Payment Fans of America" and for one week paying with cash for goods and services. The results could be illuminating. Link {1}: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/business/economy/02norris.html http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2142-The-Cash-or-Credit-Conundrum.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Sun Oct 11 11:51:14 2009 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:51:14 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Shutting down the oilsands Message-ID: <164236a30910111051s594e3575t12499edf072a722@mail.gmail.com> In today's Calgary Herald, Andre Clark, a Guardian newspaper correspondent based in New York, was quoted in an article about the Alberta oilsands as Saying" A few people waving placards in Alberta are not likely to push them off their stools".This of course is in reference to the big oil companies who are heavily invested in the tar sands. I think Mr. Clark hit the nail on the head with this one and I believe more eco-activists are starting to realize this too. As a result, I believe, we have seen a revisioning of tactics away from the self-serving - holier then thou - pat myself on the back for being so awesome tactics of waving placards on a march where the dogmatic pacifists(agents of the state) collaborate with the police to tell the activists where to march, how long to march and what kind of activity is acceptable on the march, to tactics with teeth. I think there are three imoportant points that should atleast be considered by eco activist that are working to shut down the oilsands. These points are as follows, 1) get rid of the dogmatic pacifists 2) uderstand and rerspect a diversity of tactics, and 3) understanding the success of SHAC(stop huntington animal crueltey) I remember back in the Summer of 2007 during the main march against the atlantica conference that was being held at the WTCC(world trade and convention centre) in Halifax, after the failure of the black bloc to do anything concrete like attempt to shut down or even interupt the conferencen and after nearly 20 in the bloc got arrested, those of us who were in the green zone quilky convened a group meeting. We asked ourselves what should be done and someone proposed a strong picket on the steps of the WTCC. It was at this time that a dogmatic pacifist spoke up and said, "but it has to be peaceful". I then spoke up and said "what does that mean?" "What do you mean by peaceful?" The acting facilitator passed up a chance to find out what this dogmatic pacifist meant by "peaceful" and because this, the dogmatic pacifists misunderstood belief of what peace is, became the de facto paramaters by which the rest of the conversation was had. Because we failed to have such a conversation, which would not have taken long at all, we did not succeed in getting in the building. I do admitt that my precence and arrest was a factor that needs to be considered when asking why we did not get into the building and shut down the meeting but we cannot deny that the comment from the dogmatic pacifist largely shaped the tactics of the event.Sure there were alot of cops at the front door but their were also other doors that we could of tried to get in and their were many large windows which could have been smashed with relative ease to gain entrance. it is hard to believe unless you witness it yourself, the power that such a small comment can have on an action. This is a prime example of the danger activists face when they do not call dogmatic pacifists to explain themselves and their beliefs. It is simple logic that tells us that if we are faced with a barrier and we limit the tactics we use to overcome the barrier, then we weaken our ability to overcome that barrier. The fact is, the dogmatic pacifist does not listen to logic because they are only concerned with control and power. Before I go any further, I want to eplain the difference between the dogmatic and the non-dogmatic pacifist for those who do not know the difference. The non-dogmatic pacifist is a pacifist who respects a diversity of tactics and even though they would never engage in more agressive or violent tactics, they would more than likley, wish you all the best before you engage in your tactic. The dogmatic pacifist will try to demonize the idea of a diversity of tactiocs because they are religiously opposed to it and a diversity of tatics takes takes attention away from them which makes them feel weak. I believe that most dogmatic pacifists have good intentions, I just think their attempt to have power and control are rooted in thier own insecurities and self esteem issues.This does not mean we should take it easy on them, we need to treast them like the cowards they are, we need to marginalize them and alienate them and out-whit them. We need to be ruthless in our attempt to purge them from activist circles. we must see them as counter-revolutionaries and as long as they are part of our circles we are weak. We may be big with them but it is strategically more effective to me small and strong rather then big and weak. An understanding of diversity of tactic can simply be had by relying on logic and deductive reasoning. If you don't understand it after reading this far in the article, I am going to assume that you lack logic because the olny other reason would be if you did not want to unerstand it and if that was the case you probably would have stopped reading after the fisrt paragraph. if you do lack logic then you should, if you wish to understand logic and reasoning, read up on logic and reasoning. Respecting a diversity of tactics is a whole other can of worms.We all have been conditioned in a society where the answer is either yes or no and the options for solving a problem are often limited to one or the other. As a result of being conditioned in such a society it is undersandable but not justifyable why many people do not have a respect for a diversity of tactics. In order to better respect a diversity of tactics, we must build organs of organisations that are inherently respectful of a diversity of tactics and opinions. Such organizations would be organizations where we strive to build consensus. This means we must stive to confront the class structure of society. I believe class is the biggest obstacle to building consensus based organisation within our society. Within our class based system, we also have sexism and patriachy,ageism, ableism, racism, descrimination based on sexual orientation and other forms of discrimination, oppression and exploitation that we must confront if we wish to build organisations that srive to be inclusive and build consensus with respect to the last point I listed that we must consider,here http://www.shac.net/ is a link to their page. I realize, much like a favorite song of mine from a great,now defunt band called, Team Rocket, that revolution is not a reading group but revolutionary theory often helps with the revolutionary actions. With that being said, happy reading and happy action.try to be successfull and safe. The trick is not to get caught!!! Aaron Doncaster From shniad at gmail.com Sun Oct 11 12:39:55 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:39:55 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense Message-ID: <83904d240910111139k2437e7c4yfc79df59d62fe821@mail.gmail.com> http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254861893834&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull THE JERUSALEM POST October 7, 2009 *Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense* Larry Derfner Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We've honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's performance at the UN, we're delivering it with just the right tone of outrage: How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism! Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who's going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust? The right to self-defense - perfect. But I'd like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense? We probably wouldn't admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - "No!" This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We're entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it was in Operation Cast Lead. AND THERE are no limits on our right to self-defense. There is no such thing as "disproportionate." We can blockade Gaza, we can answer Kassams with F-16s and Apaches, we can take 100 eyes for an eye. We can deliberately destroy thousands of Gazan homes, the Gazan parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, courthouses, the only Gazan flour plant, the main poultry farm, a sewage treatment plant, water wells and God knows what else. Deliberately. After all, we're acting in self-defense. By definition. And what right do the Palestinians have to defend themselves against this? None. Why? Because we're better than them. Because we're a democracy and they're a bunch of Islamo-fascists. Because ours is a culture of life and theirs is a culture of death. Because they're out to destroy us and all we are saying is give peace a chance. One look at the ruins of Gaza ought to make that plain enough. Here is our idea of the "laws of war": When Israeli bulldozers rolled across the border into Gazan villages and flattened house after house so Hamas wouldn't have them for cover after the IDF pulled out, that was self-defense. But if a Palestinian boy who'd lived in one of those houses threw a stone at one of the bulldozers, that was terrorism. The Goldstones of the world call this hypocrisy, a double standard. How dare they! Around here, we call it moral clarity. From shniad at gmail.com Sun Oct 11 12:57:01 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:57:01 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Devastating critique of Obama Message-ID: <83904d240910111157u47a9087bxe2f7b12d3c501aa5@mail.gmail.com> http://www.counterpunch.org/ Weekend Edition October 9-11, 2009 CounterPunch Diary *War and Peace* By ALEXANDER COCKBURN I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years. Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar?s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt?s eligibility for the Peace Prize: ?You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives?the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. ? TR was given the peace prize not long after he?d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino ?monkey men? in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as ?the missing link? in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam?s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama?s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan. People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there?s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It?s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That?s the audacity of hope at full stretch. It?s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly hates to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people mad. He won?t stand up for his own people when they?re being savaged by the nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but from the American perspective he's looking like a wimp. Obama?s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a one-liner designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His pledge was to hunt down and ?kill? Osama bin Laden. Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking ?bipartiship?, instantly nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush?s secretary of defense. He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of the military's joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. It was a fine exhibition of Obama?s eerie skill - also demonstrated in the politicking over health reform - in foreclosing his own range of choices and allowing opponents to coalesce and seize the initiative. If, on his second day in office he?d announced a full and complete review of US aims in Afghanistan, with no option left off the table he?d have had some purchase on the situation. But the months drifted by and finally the worsening situation forced a review of Afghan policy, precisely when Obama?s poll numbers were dropping, the war lobby heartened and the liberals already dejected by Obama?s surrender to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and disastrous efforts in the health fight. At this point fate handed Obama a golden opportunity. With astounding insolence Gen. McChrystal began to conduct a public lobbying campaign for his appeal for 40,000 more troops. His rationale for new troops ended up in the hands of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Harry Truman was an indifferent president who needlessly dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to intimidate Stalin. He launched the cold war arms race in 1948. Yet Americans venerate him for two things: the sign on his desk saying the buck stops here, and his dramatic firing of war hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for insubordination in challenging Truman?s overall direction of the war in Korea (not to mention Truman's fears of likely MacArthur excess in administering plans being carefully evolved in Truman?s high command to deploy and use nuclear weapons on the Koran peninsula.) Truman didn?t allow MacArthur time to stage a grandiose resignation. In April, 1951, he fired him on late night radio, announcing that "With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the U.S. Government and of the U.N. in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the U.S. ?I have decided that I must make a change in command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his command.? It?s clear that McChrystal stepped over the line conclusively in his speech in London at the Institute for Strategic Studies where he contemptuously dismissed the ?small footprint? counter-terrorism strategy proposed by Vice President Joe Biden and Senator John Kerry, saying that it would lead to Afghanistan becoming Chaos-istan. Obama?s National Security Advisor, Gen Jim Jones declared that it would have been better that McChrystal?s criticisms had come up through the Army?s chain of command. That was the moment Obama could have fired McChrystal for MacArthur?s offense ? insubordination and defiance of civilian control of military policy. McChrystal is no war hero, like McArthur. People crave some evidence that Obama has steel in his soul. High risk, maybe, but potentially a huge coup for Obama at a fraught political moment, also a brisk exit from the humiliation of the failed booster trip to Copenhagen to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. Obama did nothing, except further irk his liberal base by saying withdrawal isn?t an option. Pundits solemnly explained that given Democrats? distaste for the war in Afghanistan ? backed by strong popular hostility, Obama might have to go to Republicans to get the votes for the necessary appropriations of money. It?s all much too late for any sensible policy review. There have been two moments in the last 40 years when life might have improved for ordinary Afghans, particularly women. The first came with the the reforming left regime of the late 1970s, destroyed by the warlords with US backing. The second arrived with the US eviction of the Taliban in 2001-2, which was welcomed by many Afghans. But at this stage in the game, simply by definition, no American intervention overseas can be anything other than a ghastly disaster, usually bloodstained. Allready the US had too many chits out to the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The US ?nation building? apparat is irreversibly corrupt ? with a network of $250,000 a year consultancies, insider contracts, and beyond that a de facto stake in the drug industry now supply most of the West?s heroin and opium. There?s no possible light at the end of any tunnel. The robot war via Predator missiles and other instruments in the arsenal infuriates all Afghans, as wedding parties are blown to bits every weekend. With more troops and mercenaries now in Afghanistan than during the Russian military presence at its peak, there?s zero chance for America playing a long-term constructive role in Afghanistan. The US presence is just a recruiting poster for the Taliban. But Obama has now surrounded himself with just the same breed of intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to destroy his presidency by escalating the war. They?re easily as mad as the bible thumper I heard last week on my truck radio as I drove over the Tehachapi pass on route 58, between Barstow and Bakersfield. Harold Camping, president of Family Stations Ministry, was patiently explaining that God?s plan was to end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011, thus trumping the end of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012. In the Biblical perspective 5/21/2011 is the end of the world. The elect will be saved, the rest will perish, not even given brief probation like the inhabitants of Nineveh. Camping's voice was calm and seemingly rational , no doubt like those of the men and women briefing Obama. A doubter called in, emphasizing that he was a 100 per cent believer in the veracity of each line in the Bible, but how to explain verse 4 of the ninetieth psalm? ?For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night?? Why had the divine author permitted himself the ambiguity of simile? Camping plunged confidently into biblical numerology: God revealed to Noah in the year 4990 BC that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon the earth. Substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, and we get 7000 years. And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, we find that it falls on the year 2011 AD. 4990 + 2011 = 7001. He counseled us to remember, when counting from an Old Testament date to a New Testament date, always to subtract one year because there is no year zero, resulting in: 4990 + 2011 ? 1 = 7000 years exactly. But May 21? On May 21, 1988, God finished using the churches and congregations of the world. The Spirit of God left all churches and Satan entered into the churches to rule at that point in time. The Bible decrees that this period of judgment upon the churches wil last for 23 years. A full 23 years (8400 days exactly) would be from May 21, 1988 until May 21, 2011. Camping took pains to remind his vast world audience that this information was discovered in the Bible completely apart from the information regarding the 7000 years from the flood. At this point the geological contours of the Tehachapi pass interrupted the radio signal and soon I was descending into the inferno of sunset over Bakersfield. Is Campoing madder than the augurers who have been counseling Obama on his Afghan policy? Is his devoted audience more gullible than the President? Last week Obama invited Republicans as well as Democrats to the White House for further review of the options. Obama has let events overtake him, exactly as he allowed the health policy debate to spin out of his control in the summer and early fall. He'll shoot for some sort of lethal semi-compromise on reinforcements, thus feeding the right and angering his liberal supporters. A year from now he?ll be paying the penalty in the mid-term elections, just as Clinton did. From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 11 14:28:40 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:28:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Shining Paths and Crooked Roads. Oil Vampirism and Power Message-ID: <987113.99521.qm@web43506.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> PBS Does Neo-Liberal Propaganda, Israeli Reasoning, Power And Ant-idotesOctober 11th, 2009 Hernando de Soto a neo-liberal believer in capitalism leader of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy (ILD) was opposed to the Shining Path. The ILD represented a radical captialist approach. He believes in making the capitalist market work by giving legal title to the small holdings of land and the squatter shacks of the poor. It is called ?The Other Path?. It is the belief that the market system is the way to go. It is an attempt to bring a Swiss style market system which is the model de Soto grew up around when his father left Peru after a coup. The ILD was supported by Fujimori the rightist reform candidate who became president of Peru in the early 1990?s. He passed laws to make it easier for the poor to become property owners. What is interesting is that this documentary on PBS is not a critical analysis of the effects of his concepts. It is a glorification of capitalism. This is another part of the neo-liberal agenda that is being pushed through PBS and NPR where there is a special emphasis on attacking the left in Central & South America. They make it seem that his Institute for Liberty and Democracy alone was able to free Peru of the Maoist attackers. That is simply not the case. The Fujimori administration used its military and bribes and some reform to destroy the Shining Path. Peasants got titles but terror was also used. As we all know lawyers can rob you with greater ease when there is a legal system to use than when you are outside the law. Isolated individuals clinging to a piece of paper that gives them title is exactly what the capitalist ruling class wants. They know that it becomes harder for people to join together to overthrow a system when they are vested in it. That at least is the hope of the right and the fear of the left. The ILD may have earnest believers that this is the way for the poor to become middle class. I am sure for some poor easing of the bureaucratic red tape has made it easier to become integrated into the capitalist system. Is that what the world needs? That is a completely different question and the answer to that is contained in the sustainability of such and attempt. Wealth generation for the sake of improving standards of living is all fine and well. Developing internal markets as an alternative to being solely export driven is good if there are protective tariffs that keep the multinationals from swamping the domestic market with cheap products and agricultural staples. What good does the ability to have legal title to a small business if you cannot compete against the multinationals? There needs to be local infrastructure to protect the development of these small local enterprises. That goes against the free market positions of the ILD. Thus I am not sure what the ILD is all about other than a tool to fool the poor into believing in the magic of the market. This is the decision of the Peruvian Courts regarding the methods used by President Fujimori according to the Washington Post of the Fujimori regime. ?Peru?s Fujimori Gets 25 Years Former President Is Convicted of ?Crimes Against Humanity? for Death-Squad Role By Joshua Partlow and Lucien Chauvin Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 8, 2009 Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was convicted Tuesday of ?crimes against humanity? and sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in killings and kidnappings by security forces during his government?s battle against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s. The verdict, delivered by a three-judge panel on a police base outside Lima where Fujimori has been held throughout the trial, marked the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited back to his home country, tried and convicted of human rights violations. Human rights activists called it a precedent-setting verdict that upheld the ideal that violent abuses cannot be ignored under the banner of fighting terrorism. ?This is a sentence for all the innocents killed in the dirty war,? said Gisela Ortiz, whose brother was among a group taken from a Lima university and executed in 1992 by a military death squad under Fujimori. Many people in Peru admire Fujimori for largely defeating the Shining Path insurgency and ending a two-decade war that left about 70,000 people dead. But the tribunal found that Fujimori was guilty of creating and authorizing a military intelligence death squad that killed innocent people. Despite his years behind bars, Fujimori still casts a wide shadow on Peruvian politics. His political movement remains popular, and his followers account for 13 seats in the 120-member Peruvian Congress. His daughter, congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, is considered a leading candidate to succeed President Alan Garc?a and has vowed to pardon her father if elected. Fujimori?s trial focused on two episodes of killings: a 1991 raid in which 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, were killed at a barbecue in Lima where the military intelligence unit was looking for Shining Path suspects. This raid, which became known as the Barrios Altos massacre, was followed by the 1992 abduction and killing of nine students and a teacher from La Cantuta University, also by the Colina Group. Fujimori was also accused of ordering the kidnappings of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer in 1992. Fujimori was found guilty in 2007 and sentenced to six years in prison for ordering an illegal raid on the home of the estranged wife of his former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos. Fujimori also faces corruption charges, including wiretapping opposition figures and giving $15 million in government money to Montesinos.? On another matter we have Israel the American and European outpost in the Middle East. A rumbling of protest. The Goldstone Report is the report on events last winter in Gaza. It blames the vast majority of the violence and human rights violations on Israel. The Israelis are attempting to deflect world opinion but this writer is noting the hypocrisy in that position. This from the Jerusalem Post Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense By LARRY DERFNER Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We?ve honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu?s performance at the UN, we?re delivering it with just the right tone of outrage: How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism! Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who?s going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust? The right to self-defense - perfect. But I?d like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense? We probably wouldn?t admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - ?No!? This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We?re entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.? By definition whatever capitalism wants is good and whatever anyone else things is debunked as illegitimate. This is from the Jerusalem Post ?Abbas associate: We made a mistake by deferring action on Goldstone Report By AP AND JPOST.COM STAFF A member of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas?s inner circle said Wednesday that the Palestinian leadership had erred by suspending action on the Goldstone Report. The comments came as the first such acknowledgment after days of angry protests in the West Bank and Gaza. The UN report alleged that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter.? As you may recall action on the Report was delayed by the UN at the Request of the Obama Administration. It was agreed to by the Palestinian ruling body which led to protests by Hamas and others in Palestine. You can read the report on my blogroll link if you care to. The war for control of the world?s resources is heating up. We are in a slow motion battle that will either end in justice for all or another slug-fest for dominance between the Chinese led coalition of Asian powers and the Western powers led by the USA. A third block of the South may be formed with Brazil and Venezuela taking the lead. If they can convince the middle east, India and Africa to join them they may be a real power but most likely they will simply be marginal players in the battle between Chinese and United States blocks. Japan may switch to China if it can get rid of American occupation forces. Russia is already cooperating with China, and Africa has except perhaps in the vital Niger Delta become more and more influenced by the Chinese. The French especialy still maintain a strong influence in west Africa but China is making its presence felt in the east and south in particular. Will India go to the western block or return to its position as a leader of the South remains to be seen. It has a natural competition with China and antipathy to the Muslim world that has led to it being in a strange alliance with the USA, and Israel. But I wander. The issue at hand is being decided in the forlorn hills of Afghanistan. This place with little inherent reason for anyone to care about it has become the focus of the world in the great game for control of the last of the Oil. This is not about Al Qaeda, that is merely the smokescreen. It didn?t have anything to do with Iraq and has very little to do with Afghanistan. It is just not polite for power elites to bare their fangs and show their bloody vampiric lust so blatantly. So a soothing balm of little lies are spread to keep the victims in a state of complacency while the dirty work is done. That is why the illicit crops of Opium and Coca are so vital. They provide the secret funding source for black operations that do not dare show up in Congressional oversight hearings. Better to keep the pretense of a war on terror than to acknowledge the real war for oil in the minds of politicians of both parties. Only a few brave souls like Barbara Lee occasionally make a point of objecting or refusal like Cynthia McKinney who decided to fight the power from the outside. I commend their efforts but they are so few and the machine is so vast. What can a puny centrist like Obama do? He is simply more window dressing on the vicious reality. There is still hope for a just peace with a real negotiated and equitable distribution of the worlds resources. This is to be based on a recognition of the rights of all for a share of the wealth and a recognition that it is finite. We can either leave it up to the invisible hand of god and let the chips fall or we can act intelligently and equitably. It is our choice. War is not inevitable. It is only desirable for those who profit from blood and gore. These vampiric forces have been sucking on the teat of our collective lives for too long. Why do we let them? I say because we have been drugged into passivity. TV programing like that one on PBS for the intelligentsia, irrational tirades about home and family for the less astute, it all works together. Literal drugs for those of us likely to take physical action against the state and a police state to keep in line the more criminally endowed. It works, barely, but it has kept us in line for a long while. But now with such easy access to information how will they keep us down? Only by giving us so much choice that we drown in the proliferation of viewpoints. If we take an individualistic path, seek our own way, an anarchistic vision is the only way for them to fragment us enough to keep from uniting in a manner that is truly threatening. As long as we do our own thing we are harmless insects. When we unite like a colony of army ants, we can sweep all before us. Think about it. Anarchism is only a path to collective action. But if we refuse to make the move to the collective intellectual responce then we are trapped in narcissism. That has been the liberal western dilemma and it must be overcome. We must learn to work as a collectivity, as individual note in an orchestrated performance, with a non hierarchic networked responsiveness. We do it unconsciously all the time and advertisers manipulate that. We have to become self aware members of the collectivity, not robots but autonomous agents of collective action for transformation. The more turned on we are the more light we shine on the path ahead. Hence the shining path?. Tags: Against Capital, Capital, Neo-Liberal Market Answers, Oil Politics, Paper Identity, Shining Path From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 03:38:57 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:38:57 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Devastating critique of Obama In-Reply-To: <83904d240910111157u47a9087bxe2f7b12d3c501aa5@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910111157u47a9087bxe2f7b12d3c501aa5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: We may find the Obama is presiding of the death of liberals paries and strengths, permanent oblivion. Suzanne On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > http://www.counterpunch.org/ > > Weekend Edition > October 9-11, 2009 > CounterPunch Diary > > *War and Peace* > > By ALEXANDER COCKBURN > > I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, > though > it represents a radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly > less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely > through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates > like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the > world for years. > > Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked > affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into > the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who > preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for > sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the > Philippines. Senator George Hoar?s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the > floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel > Committee to Roosevelt?s eligibility for the Peace Prize: > > ?You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives?the flower of > our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted > thousands > of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration > camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves > with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane > to > drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American > flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian > churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the > water torture. ? > > TR was given the peace prize not long after he?d displayed his boundless > compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino ?monkey > men? in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as ?the missing link? in the evolution > of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible > if > necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly > dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic > Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle > Sam?s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, > Obama?s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and > portions of Pakistan. > > People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there?s method in > the > madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or > protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they > should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, > albeit > Norwegian. It?s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can > get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and > still win a Peace Prize. That?s the audacity of hope at full stretch. > > It?s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes > to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly > hates > to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people > mad. He won?t stand up for his own people when they?re being savaged by the > nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they > jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but > from > the American perspective he's looking like a wimp. > > Obama?s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a > one-liner > designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he > cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His > pledge was to hunt down and ?kill? Osama bin Laden. > > Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking ?bipartiship?, instantly > nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush?s > secretary > of defense. > > He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal > hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to > eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install > Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of > the military's joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered > 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. > > It was a fine exhibition of Obama?s eerie skill - also demonstrated in the > politicking over health reform - in foreclosing his own range of choices > and > allowing opponents to coalesce and seize the initiative. If, on his second > day in office he?d announced a full and complete review of US aims in > Afghanistan, with no option left off the table he?d have had some purchase > on the situation. But the months drifted by and finally the worsening > situation forced a review of Afghan policy, precisely when Obama?s poll > numbers were dropping, the war lobby heartened and the liberals already > dejected by Obama?s surrender to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and > disastrous efforts in the health fight. > > At this point fate handed Obama a golden opportunity. With astounding > insolence Gen. McChrystal began to conduct a public lobbying campaign for > his appeal for 40,000 more troops. His rationale for new troops ended up > in > the hands of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. > > Harry Truman was an indifferent president who needlessly dropped A-bombs on > Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to intimidate Stalin. He launched the cold > war arms race in 1948. Yet Americans venerate him for two things: the sign > on his desk saying the buck stops here, and his dramatic firing of war hero > Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for insubordination in challenging Truman?s overall > direction of the war in Korea (not to mention Truman's fears of likely > MacArthur excess in administering plans being carefully evolved in > Truman?s > high command to deploy and use nuclear weapons on the Koran peninsula.) > > Truman didn?t allow MacArthur time to stage a grandiose resignation. In > April, 1951, he fired him on late night radio, announcing that "With deep > regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is > unable > to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the U.S. Government and > of the U.N. in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the > specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the U.S. > ?I > have decided that I must make a change in command in the Far East. I have, > therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his command.? > > It?s clear that McChrystal stepped over the line conclusively in his > speech > in London at the Institute for Strategic Studies where he contemptuously > dismissed the ?small footprint? counter-terrorism strategy proposed by Vice > President Joe Biden and Senator John Kerry, saying that it would lead to > Afghanistan becoming Chaos-istan. Obama?s National Security Advisor, Gen > Jim > Jones declared that it would have been better that McChrystal?s criticisms > had come up through the Army?s chain of command. That was the moment Obama > could have fired McChrystal for MacArthur?s offense ? insubordination and > defiance of civilian control of military policy. > > McChrystal is no war hero, like McArthur. People crave some evidence that > Obama has steel in his soul. High risk, maybe, but potentially a huge coup > for Obama at a fraught political moment, also a brisk exit from the > humiliation of the failed booster trip to Copenhagen to win the 2016 > Olympics for Chicago. Obama did nothing, except further irk his liberal > base > by saying withdrawal isn?t an option. Pundits solemnly explained that given > Democrats? distaste for the war in Afghanistan ? backed by strong popular > hostility, Obama might have to go to Republicans to get the votes for the > necessary appropriations of money. > > It?s all much too late for any sensible policy review. There have been two > moments in the last 40 years when life might have improved for ordinary > Afghans, particularly women. The first came with the the reforming left > regime of the late 1970s, destroyed by the warlords with US backing. The > second arrived with the US eviction of the Taliban in 2001-2, which was > welcomed by many Afghans. But at this stage in the game, simply by > definition, no American intervention overseas can be anything other than a > ghastly disaster, usually bloodstained. Allready the US had too many chits > out to the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The US ?nation building? > apparat is irreversibly corrupt ? with a network of $250,000 a year > consultancies, insider contracts, and beyond that a de facto stake in the > drug industry now supply most of the West?s heroin and opium. > > There?s no possible light at the end of any tunnel. The robot war via > Predator missiles and other instruments in the arsenal infuriates all > Afghans, as wedding parties are blown to bits every weekend. With more > troops and mercenaries now in Afghanistan than during the Russian military > presence at its peak, there?s zero chance for America playing a long-term > constructive role in Afghanistan. The US presence is just a recruiting > poster for the Taliban. > > But Obama has now surrounded himself with just the same breed of > intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to destroy his presidency by > escalating the war. They?re easily as mad as the bible thumper I heard last > week on my truck radio as I drove over the Tehachapi pass on route 58, > between Barstow and Bakersfield. Harold Camping, president of Family > Stations Ministry, was patiently explaining that God?s plan was to end the > world by flooding on May 21, 2011, thus trumping the end of the Mayan > calendar, December 21, 2012. In the Biblical perspective 5/21/2011 is the > end of the world. The elect will be saved, the rest will perish, not even > given brief probation like the inhabitants of Nineveh. Camping's voice was > calm and seemingly rational , no doubt like those of the men and women > briefing Obama. A doubter called in, emphasizing that he was a 100 per cent > believer in the veracity of each line in the Bible, but how to explain > verse > 4 of the ninetieth psalm? ?For a thousand years in your sight are like a > day > that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night?? Why had the divine > author permitted himself the ambiguity of simile? Camping plunged > confidently into biblical numerology: God revealed to Noah in the year 4990 > BC that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon > the earth. Substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, and we get > 7000 years. And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, > we > find that it falls on the year 2011 AD. 4990 + 2011 = 7001. He counseled > us > to remember, when counting from an Old Testament date to a New Testament > date, always to subtract one year because there is no year zero, resulting > in: 4990 + 2011 ? 1 = 7000 years exactly. > > But May 21? On May 21, 1988, God finished using the churches and > congregations of the world. The Spirit of God left all churches and Satan > entered into the churches to rule at that point in time. The Bible decrees > that this period of judgment upon the churches wil last for 23 years. A > full 23 years (8400 days exactly) would be from May 21, 1988 until May 21, > 2011. Camping took pains to remind his vast world audience that this > information was discovered in the Bible completely apart from the > information regarding the 7000 years from the flood. > > At this point the geological contours of the Tehachapi pass interrupted the > radio signal and soon I was descending into the inferno of sunset over > Bakersfield. Is Campoing madder than the augurers who have been counseling > Obama on his Afghan policy? Is his devoted audience more gullible than the > President? > > Last week Obama invited Republicans as well as Democrats to the White House > for further review of the options. Obama has let events overtake him, > exactly as he allowed the health policy debate to spin out of his control > in > the summer and early fall. He'll shoot for some sort of lethal > semi-compromise on reinforcements, thus feeding the right and angering his > liberal supporters. A year from now he?ll be paying the penalty in the > mid-term elections, just as Clinton did. > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 03:40:35 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:40:35 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Devastating critique of Obama In-Reply-To: <83904d240910111157u47a9087bxe2f7b12d3c501aa5@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910111157u47a9087bxe2f7b12d3c501aa5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: The election of Obama identified all the liberlas including those with real clout. They can now be easily targeted and controled. And will be. Suzanne On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > http://www.counterpunch.org/ > > Weekend Edition > October 9-11, 2009 > CounterPunch Diary > > *War and Peace* > > By ALEXANDER COCKBURN > > I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, > though > it represents a radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly > less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely > through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates > like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the > world for years. > > Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked > affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into > the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who > preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for > sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the > Philippines. Senator George Hoar?s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the > floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel > Committee to Roosevelt?s eligibility for the Peace Prize: > > ?You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives?the flower of > our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted > thousands > of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration > camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves > with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane > to > drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American > flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian > churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the > water torture. ? > > TR was given the peace prize not long after he?d displayed his boundless > compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino ?monkey > men? in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as ?the missing link? in the evolution > of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible > if > necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly > dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic > Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle > Sam?s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, > Obama?s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and > portions of Pakistan. > > People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there?s method in > the > madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or > protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they > should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, > albeit > Norwegian. It?s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can > get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and > still win a Peace Prize. That?s the audacity of hope at full stretch. > > It?s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes > to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly > hates > to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people > mad. He won?t stand up for his own people when they?re being savaged by the > nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they > jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but > from > the American perspective he's looking like a wimp. > > Obama?s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a > one-liner > designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he > cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His > pledge was to hunt down and ?kill? Osama bin Laden. > > Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking ?bipartiship?, instantly > nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush?s > secretary > of defense. > > He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal > hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to > eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install > Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of > the military's joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered > 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. > > It was a fine exhibition of Obama?s eerie skill - also demonstrated in the > politicking over health reform - in foreclosing his own range of choices > and > allowing opponents to coalesce and seize the initiative. If, on his second > day in office he?d announced a full and complete review of US aims in > Afghanistan, with no option left off the table he?d have had some purchase > on the situation. But the months drifted by and finally the worsening > situation forced a review of Afghan policy, precisely when Obama?s poll > numbers were dropping, the war lobby heartened and the liberals already > dejected by Obama?s surrender to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and > disastrous efforts in the health fight. > > At this point fate handed Obama a golden opportunity. With astounding > insolence Gen. McChrystal began to conduct a public lobbying campaign for > his appeal for 40,000 more troops. His rationale for new troops ended up > in > the hands of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. > > Harry Truman was an indifferent president who needlessly dropped A-bombs on > Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to intimidate Stalin. He launched the cold > war arms race in 1948. Yet Americans venerate him for two things: the sign > on his desk saying the buck stops here, and his dramatic firing of war hero > Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for insubordination in challenging Truman?s overall > direction of the war in Korea (not to mention Truman's fears of likely > MacArthur excess in administering plans being carefully evolved in > Truman?s > high command to deploy and use nuclear weapons on the Koran peninsula.) > > Truman didn?t allow MacArthur time to stage a grandiose resignation. In > April, 1951, he fired him on late night radio, announcing that "With deep > regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is > unable > to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the U.S. Government and > of the U.N. in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the > specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the U.S. > ?I > have decided that I must make a change in command in the Far East. I have, > therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his command.? > > It?s clear that McChrystal stepped over the line conclusively in his > speech > in London at the Institute for Strategic Studies where he contemptuously > dismissed the ?small footprint? counter-terrorism strategy proposed by Vice > President Joe Biden and Senator John Kerry, saying that it would lead to > Afghanistan becoming Chaos-istan. Obama?s National Security Advisor, Gen > Jim > Jones declared that it would have been better that McChrystal?s criticisms > had come up through the Army?s chain of command. That was the moment Obama > could have fired McChrystal for MacArthur?s offense ? insubordination and > defiance of civilian control of military policy. > > McChrystal is no war hero, like McArthur. People crave some evidence that > Obama has steel in his soul. High risk, maybe, but potentially a huge coup > for Obama at a fraught political moment, also a brisk exit from the > humiliation of the failed booster trip to Copenhagen to win the 2016 > Olympics for Chicago. Obama did nothing, except further irk his liberal > base > by saying withdrawal isn?t an option. Pundits solemnly explained that given > Democrats? distaste for the war in Afghanistan ? backed by strong popular > hostility, Obama might have to go to Republicans to get the votes for the > necessary appropriations of money. > > It?s all much too late for any sensible policy review. There have been two > moments in the last 40 years when life might have improved for ordinary > Afghans, particularly women. The first came with the the reforming left > regime of the late 1970s, destroyed by the warlords with US backing. The > second arrived with the US eviction of the Taliban in 2001-2, which was > welcomed by many Afghans. But at this stage in the game, simply by > definition, no American intervention overseas can be anything other than a > ghastly disaster, usually bloodstained. Allready the US had too many chits > out to the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The US ?nation building? > apparat is irreversibly corrupt ? with a network of $250,000 a year > consultancies, insider contracts, and beyond that a de facto stake in the > drug industry now supply most of the West?s heroin and opium. > > There?s no possible light at the end of any tunnel. The robot war via > Predator missiles and other instruments in the arsenal infuriates all > Afghans, as wedding parties are blown to bits every weekend. With more > troops and mercenaries now in Afghanistan than during the Russian military > presence at its peak, there?s zero chance for America playing a long-term > constructive role in Afghanistan. The US presence is just a recruiting > poster for the Taliban. > > But Obama has now surrounded himself with just the same breed of > intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to destroy his presidency by > escalating the war. They?re easily as mad as the bible thumper I heard last > week on my truck radio as I drove over the Tehachapi pass on route 58, > between Barstow and Bakersfield. Harold Camping, president of Family > Stations Ministry, was patiently explaining that God?s plan was to end the > world by flooding on May 21, 2011, thus trumping the end of the Mayan > calendar, December 21, 2012. In the Biblical perspective 5/21/2011 is the > end of the world. The elect will be saved, the rest will perish, not even > given brief probation like the inhabitants of Nineveh. Camping's voice was > calm and seemingly rational , no doubt like those of the men and women > briefing Obama. A doubter called in, emphasizing that he was a 100 per cent > believer in the veracity of each line in the Bible, but how to explain > verse > 4 of the ninetieth psalm? ?For a thousand years in your sight are like a > day > that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night?? Why had the divine > author permitted himself the ambiguity of simile? Camping plunged > confidently into biblical numerology: God revealed to Noah in the year 4990 > BC that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon > the earth. Substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, and we get > 7000 years. And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, > we > find that it falls on the year 2011 AD. 4990 + 2011 = 7001. He counseled > us > to remember, when counting from an Old Testament date to a New Testament > date, always to subtract one year because there is no year zero, resulting > in: 4990 + 2011 ? 1 = 7000 years exactly. > > But May 21? On May 21, 1988, God finished using the churches and > congregations of the world. The Spirit of God left all churches and Satan > entered into the churches to rule at that point in time. The Bible decrees > that this period of judgment upon the churches wil last for 23 years. A > full 23 years (8400 days exactly) would be from May 21, 1988 until May 21, > 2011. Camping took pains to remind his vast world audience that this > information was discovered in the Bible completely apart from the > information regarding the 7000 years from the flood. > > At this point the geological contours of the Tehachapi pass interrupted the > radio signal and soon I was descending into the inferno of sunset over > Bakersfield. Is Campoing madder than the augurers who have been counseling > Obama on his Afghan policy? Is his devoted audience more gullible than the > President? > > Last week Obama invited Republicans as well as Democrats to the White House > for further review of the options. Obama has let events overtake him, > exactly as he allowed the health policy debate to spin out of his control > in > the summer and early fall. He'll shoot for some sort of lethal > semi-compromise on reinforcements, thus feeding the right and angering his > liberal supporters. A year from now he?ll be paying the penalty in the > mid-term elections, just as Clinton did. > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From critical.montages at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 04:21:52 2009 From: critical.montages at gmail.com (Yoshie Furuhashi) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:21:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Iran MPs Back Outlines of Subsidy Reform Plan Message-ID: Iran MPs back outlines of subsidy reform plan By Hashem Kalantari and Fredrik Dahl TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's parliament approved the outlines of a subsidy reform bill on Sunday, seven months after it threw out the plan from the annual budget proposal because of fears it would stoke inflation in the major oil producer. Even though MPs can still reject aspects of the bill in voting due later this week, the clear margin of 188 votes for and 45 against in Sunday's session is likely to be welcomed by the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If the draft law is approved without major changes, it would be a further sign of the hardline president consolidating his position after his disputed re-election in June plunged Iran into months of political turmoil. The government wants to raise energy and utility prices and compensate low-income families with direct cash payments. Critics say this would push up inflation, now running at about 13 percent annually after it hit a high of nearly 30 percent a year ago. In March, MPs dealt a political blow to Ahmadinejad by removing the subsidy reform plan from the 2009-10 budget bill. He accused them of violating the constitution. Defending the proposal on Sunday, Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini told MPs that hefty fuel subsidies mainly benefited the wealthy, not the poor. "One third of the country's income is paid out as subsidies, either openly or in a hidden way, and there is no doubt that these resources are not spent correctly," he said. FUEL SANCTIONS? "Are these subsidies going to groups about whom we have worries? The affluent part of the society uses up the subsidies several times more than the needy," Hosseini added. He also rejected criticism that the government's bill would fuel price rises, saying that making subsidies targeted would "dry the roots" of inflation. It was not immediately clear if the government had made any substantial changes before returning the proposal to parliament after the setback earlier this year. MP Ali-reza Mahjub, one of those arguing against the reform plan, said: "We have to refer to it as the bill of raising prices instead of making subsidies targeted." He added: "They want to tie our economy to the global economy. This would take place under such conditions that we are not enjoying its advantages." Iranian motorists have traditionally enjoyed some of the cheapest petrol in the world, but the government introduced rationing of heavily-subsidised fuel two years ago as part of plans to cut energy subsidies. Natural gas and electricity consumption are also subsidised by the state. "We are not after elimination of subsidies. We are after making payments targeted and fair with the aim of helping productivity," said Hosseini, the economy minister. Iran is the world's fifth-largest crude oil exporter, but it lacks sufficient refining capacity to meet its domestic fuel needs and has to import up to 40 percent of its gasoline requirements, burdening state coffers. This makes it potentially vulnerable for tougher Western sanctions, as the United States and its European allies explore ways of targeting fuel imports into Iran if it continues to press on with its nuclear programme. The West suspects the Islamic state is covertly seeking to develop nuclear weapons, although Iran has vehemently denied it. Ahmadinejad, who came to power in 2005 pledging to share out Iran's oil wealth more fairly, has argued his subsidy reform bill would help "implement justice and remove discrimination". During his first four-year term, opponents accused the government of profligate spending of petrodollars when oil prices were soaring until mid-2008, diminishing Iran's room for manoeuvre once they started sliding. (Editing by Simon Jessop) From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Oct 12 06:42:08 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:42:08 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Metastasis of Money Message-ID: <20091012214208.e8f11969.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (October 07 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society The confusion between money and wealth, the theme of last week's Archdruid Report post, has become almost impossible to avoid these days. Perhaps the most important reason is the extent to which money has metastasized so deeply into our economic life that it's nearly impossible to do much of anything without it. The economic textbooks you did your best not to read in school justify that ubiquity by a neat rhetorical trick. If you remember anything at all about the economics textbook you did your level best not to read back in your school days, it's probably that bit of rhetoric; it can be found in the canned explanation for why we use money, somewhere around page 6. It runs something like this: there's a plumber and a pig farmer who want to do business with one another, see, but the plumber's Jewish and the pig farmer has nothing to trade but pork. Add money, and voila! The farmer sells his pork to other people and uses the proceeds to pay the plumber, who uses it to buy gefilte fish and matzoh meal. Everyone's happy except, presumably, the pigs. It all seems very logical until you think about it for ten seconds. Notice, to start with, how the explanation assumes that the plumber, the pig farmer, the purchasers of pork, the kosher deli, and everyone else are restricted to the specific kind of economic relationships that exist in, and only in, a money economy. The plumber doesn't, as most people did as little as a hundred and fifty years ago, benefit from a household economy that provides a great deal of his food, including small livestock in the back garden. The pig farmer doesn't, as most people did until as little as fifty years ago, do essentially all of his household repairs himself. Both of them are defined by a single function: the pig farmer can only produce pork, the plumber only plumbing. Nor do the farmer, the plumber, or anyone else have access to any of the immense variety of nonmonetary systems of exchange human beings have used throughout history. !Kung hunter-gatherers sharing out a wildebeest among band members according to traditional rules, Haida chiefs distributing blankets and salmon to all comers at a potlatch, and medieval peasants working a baron's demesne lands for a set number of days each year to maintain their feudal right to their own cottages and fields, all participated in flexible and effective systems of exchange that had nothing to do with money. Urban societies as complex as ancient Egypt got by entirely without money, and still managed to keep plumbers, pig farmers, and a great many other occupational specialties gainfully employed for millennia. All that the textbook explanation proves, in other words, is that if you have a money economy, it does probably need some kind of money to make it work. This is not the conclusion the textbooks draw from the plumber and the pig farmer, of course; with very few exceptions, they leap from their canned example to the claim that money must be essential to any economy worth the name, and the rest of the textbook proceeds to focus on theories about the behavior of money under the false impression that those theories deal with the behavior of wealth. The mistaken metaphysics discussed in last week's post plays a large role in fostering this misunderstanding, but the sheer pervasiveness of money in today's industrial economy has an even larger role. For most people in the modern industrial world, the only way to get access to any kind of wealth - that is, any good or service - is to get access to money first, and exchange the money for the wealth. This makes it all too easy to confuse money with wealth, and it also fosters the habit of thought that treats money as the driving force in economic life, and thinks of wealth as a product of money, rather than seeing money as an arbitrary measure of wealth. The thought experiment of placing a hundred economists on a desert island with $1 million each but no food or water is a good corrective to this delusion. Unfortunately this same experiment is being tried on a much vaster scale by the world's industrial economies right now. We have seven billion people on a planet with a finite and dwindling supply of the concentrated energy resources that are keeping most of them alive, and governments and businesses alike are acting as though the only possible difficulty in this situation is coming up with enough money to pay for investments in the energy industry. It should be obvious that no amount of money can overcome the thermodynamic and statistical laws that have placed hard limits on the amount of highly concentrated energy resources that happen to exist on our planet. This is not obvious to most people nowadays, however, because the metastasis of money throughout the economy has trained nearly all of us to think that if you have enough money you can get whatever you want. The fact that the richest people in the world can put their entire fortunes into health care and still get old and die is one of the few persistent reminders that money cannot overcome the laws of nature, or provide access to goods and services that don't exist. So how did money get transformed from a convenient yardstick for real wealth to the be-all and end-all of contemporary economic life? At least three factors were involved, two of them common to complex urban societies throughout history, one unique to ours. First, despite the drastic oversimplifications of the textbook example cited earlier, it reflects a reality: a complex society can gain significant advantages from a medium of exchange that can be traded for any form of wealth. Even in societies where most goods and services are distributed by way of social networks, a social consensus tends to establish certain trade goods - wampum shell strings among the First Nations of eastern North America, for instance - as a common measure for those goods and services that are exchanged in other ways. As a society becomes more complex and the division of labor among different crafts expands, some standard measure of wealth becomes more useful. While money itself was invented around 700 BCE by the ancient Greeks, other ways of measuring wealth for the sake of easy exchange had been in use in Old World urban societies for millennia before then, and it's not inaccurate to include money or some equivalent system as part of the basic toolkit that makes complex urban societies possible. Second, whenever common measures of wealth are controlled by institutions, those who manage those institutions become powerful, and can be counted on to maintain and expand their power whenever possible. In ancient Egypt, for example, grain in temple warehouses provided the basic measure of wealth; as a result the priests who controlled the stockpiled grain became a potent political force. In medieval Europe, when land was the basic measure of wealth - there's a reason we still call it "real estate", as though all other wealth is unreal - the power of the feudal nobility derived directly from their control of land. Today the governments that claim exclusive power to print and regulate money, and the banks and financial corporations that manage most of society's money, derive much of their effective power from their control over the medium of economic exchange, and can be counted on to encourage the rest of society to rely ever more completely on the thing that gives them power. These two factors can be traced in the history of most of the complex urban societies of the past. What makes our civilization something of an extreme case is a third factor - the extreme complexity of an economic system that has temporarily replaced the limited energy resources of other human societies with a torrent of cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. Ilya Prigogine, one of the most innovative physicists of recent years, showed via a series of dizzyingly complex equations that the flow of energy through a system increases the complexity of the system. If there was ever any doubt of the accuracy of his claim, it was settled by the economic history of the western world from 1700 to the present. The societies over which the tsunami of the Industrial Revolution broke in the early 18th century were not unusually complex by the standards of past civilizations; their own contemporaries in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires considered western Europeans, and not without reason, to be grunting, smelly barbarians with few of the arts and graces of civilization. Fossil fuels may not have done anything about the gracelessness and the smell, but it certainly made up for any shortage in complexity. Until the dawn of the industrial age, as a general rule of thumb, some ninety percent of the inhabitants of any complex society worked in agriculture, providing the food and raw materials that supported themselves as well as the ten percent who could be spared for all other economic roles. By 1900, at the zenith of the age of coal, many nations in the industrial world had dropped the percentage of their work force in agriculture below fifty percent, and shifted the workers thus freed up into a broad assortment of new economic roles. By 2000, buoyed by the much higher concentration and efficiency of petroleum, many industrial nations had dropped the percentage of their work force in agriculture below five percent, with the other 95% filling newly invented roles in the most complex economies in the history of the planet. One consequence of this swift and unprecedented surge in complexity was the triumph of money over all other systems of exchange. When the vast majority of workers at every income level labored at tasks so specialized that their efforts only produced value when combined with those of hundreds or thousands of other workers, money provided the only way they could receive a return on their labor. When most of the customers for any given product had money and nothing else to exchange for it, buying products for money became standard. Social networks of exchange - household economies, customary local exchanges, church and fraternal networks - shattered under the strain, and were replaced by purely economic relationships - wage labor, shopping, public assistance - that could be denominated entirely in cash. The last three centuries of social and economic history are largely a chronicle of the results. If economists took a wider view of the history of their discipline than they generally do, they might have noticed that what most of them consider a fundamental feature of all economies worth studying - the centrality of money - is actually a unique feature of an economic era defined by cheap abundant energy. Since the fossil fuels that made that era possible are being extracted at a pace many times the rate at which new supplies are being discovered, current assumptions about the role of money in society may be in for a series of unexpected revisions. In an ironic way, this process of revision may be fostered by the antics of the world's industrial nations as they try to forestall the Great Recession by spending money they don't have. The economic crisis that gripped the world in 2008 was primarily driven by a drastic mismatch between money and wealth. When the price of a rundown suburban house zoomed from $75,000 to $575,000, for example, the change marked a distortion in the yardstick rather than any actual increase in the wealth being measured. That distortion caused every economic decision based on it - for example, a buyer's willingness to go over his head into debt to buy the house, or a bank's willingness to lend money on the basis of imaginary equity - to suffer similar distortions. Now that the yardsticks have snapped back to something like their proper length, the results of the distortion have to be cleared out of the economy if the amount of money in the system is once again to reflect the actual amount of wealth. Yet this is exactly what governments and businesses are doing their level best to forestall. Governments are scrambling to prop up economic activity at a pace the real wealth of their societies can no longer support; banks and businesses are doing everything in their power to divert attention from the fact that a great many of the financial assets propping up their balance sheets were never worth anything in the first place and now, if possible, are worth even less. Both are doing so by the simple expedient of spending money they don't have. As government deficits worldwide spin out of control and the total notional value of the world's derivatives market climbs steadily above one quadrillion dollars, the decoupling of money from wealth is even more extreme than it was at the height of the real estate bubble. This is another context in which a wider view of history than economists usually allow themselves to take could offer a useful warning. The dominance of money in complex societies has a distinctive trajectory over time, and next week's post will discuss some of the ways in which that trajectory might unfold in the decades immediately before us. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/10/metastasis-of-money.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 11:15:44 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:15:44 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali on Obama's Nobel Prize ; The Prize, the Brand and the President ; Zinn on war and peace prizes ; Warmonger Wins Peace Prize Message-ID: <83904d240910121015t2c06b3d7yaebe2e6ab911d729@mail.gmail.com> *Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali on Obama's Nobel Prize The Prize, the Brand and the President Zinn on war and peace prizes **Warmonger Wins Peace Prize** * ----------------------------------------------------------- Democracy Now October 9, 2009 * Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize* http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/9/as_us_continues_afghan_iraq_occupations ------------------------------------------------------ *The Nobel Prize, the Brand and the President* Gilad Atzman The failure of Obama to merge the ?Brand? and the ?President? into a continuous ethical reality is indeed a colossal tragedy. But it is not Just Obama?s tragedy, it is actually our own disaster. As much as the ?Brand? manages to spread some cheering humanist and universal statements, the ?President? is actually imprisoned by some of the most dangerous Zionist guards. ?Obama the President? has a big open bill to pay to the people who gave him the keys to his current white dwelling. In other words he has many Zionists to appease and another bunch of rabid Sayanim* that have managed to invade his office. To a certain extent, Obama's failure to establish an adequate continuum between the ?brand? and the ?president? is due to the unfeasibility of a continuum between humanism and Zionism. http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/the-nobel-prize-the-brand-and-the-president.html ----------------------------------------------- The Guardian 10 October 2009 *War and peace prizes* Howard Zinn The dismaying gift of the Nobel prize puts Barack Obama on the list of its winners who promised peace but prosecuted war I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/09/nobel-peace-prize-war-obama ----------------------------------------------- CounterPunch 10 October 2009 *Warmonger Wins Peace Prize* By Paul Craig Roberts It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality. "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," "Ignorance is Strength." I would add, "Lie is Truth." The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future." Obama, the committee gushed, has created "a new climate in international politics." Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama's "war of necessity" drones on indeterminably. http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10092009.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 13:58:33 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:58:33 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now Message-ID: <83904d240910121258k581b24acu6747d3db454e7542@mail.gmail.com> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175125/william_astore_apocalypse_then_afghanistan_now Tom Dispatch William Astore, Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now Here's the thing: This may be our next "Vietnam moment," but Afghanistan is no Vietnam: there are no major enemy powers like the Soviet Union and China lurking in the background; no organized enemy state with a powerful army like North Vietnam supporting the insurgents; no well organized, unified national liberation movement like the Vietcong, and that's just a beginning. Almost everywhere, in fact, the Vietnam analogy breaks down -- almost everywhere, that is, except when it comes to us. Because we never managed to leave Vietnam behind, even when we were proclaiming that we had kickedthat "syndrome," it turns out that we're still there. Our military leaders, for instance, only recently dusted off the old Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine that once ended in catastrophe, shined it up, and are now presenting it as an ingenious new solution to war-fighting. Let's face it: everything about American thinking still stinks of the Vietnamese debacle, including the inability of our leaders to listen to a genuinely wide range of options. Now, according to Peter Baker of the *Wall Street Journal*, a "battle"of two Vietnam histories is underway at the White House and the Pentagon. Think of them as dueling books. The president and a number of his advisors have just finished reading *Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam*about a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead" and backed by a hawkish national security adviser. The other, a Pentagon favorite, *A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam* , focuses on a military that by the early 1970s was supposedly winning its counterinsurgency struggle only to be "rejected by political leaders who bow[ed] to popular opinion and end[ed] the fight." If it's a battle of Vietnam histories that Washington wants, should the contest really be limited to these two books? After all, one is about a White House advisor who, like so many of "the best and the brightest," was decades behind the curve in discovering that he had made a mistake pushing for war; the other, a smiley-faced look at the years 1968-1973 in Vietnam that champions an eerily familiar "stab in the back"thesis in which pusillanimous civilian leaders lead a proud military to defeat. If it's a Vietnam syllabus you're looking for, President Obama, why not start with The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam's brilliant dissection of the Vietnam disaster? Having covered Vietnam as a *New York Times* reporter, he knew a bankrupt war when he saw one. Or why not consider what an American "counterinsurgency" war * really* meant on the ground? Nothing will give you a more visceral sense of the destruction visited on Vietnam and the Vietnamese in those grim years than Jonathan Schell's double-barreled classic *The Real War*. (Why doesn't anyone in your administration ask Schell, who saw the worst of that war close up, for advice on our new "Vietnam moment"?) Or you might check out William Gibson's devastating, sardonically entitled post-war book, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. It's a history of what the war managers did and, believe me, it gives the World War II acronym snafu new punch. Or you could pick up *Patriots*, Christian Appy's unique oral history of the war as seen from all sides. It provides a perfect way to explore why, faced with overwhelming American firepower, the other side so often refuses to quit. Not long ago, your special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, picked up a phone in Kabul and calledStanley Karnow, who got a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 middle-of-the-road, one-volume history of the war. We don't know how that consultation -- in the presence of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal -- went, but Karnow did offer this comment to an AP reporter later: "What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I." My own suggestion to you and your staff for a single-volume history is Marilyn Young's cautionary tale, *The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990*. And then give her a buzz, too, and see what she thinks about the present moment. (Notice, by the way, that "s" on "wars" in her title, since she includes the U.S.-backed French war. When a good history of the conflict in Afghanistan is written, its title, too, will undoubtedly have the plural "wars" in it. After all, we've been fighting there on and off for three decades now.) Finally, there's a classic from 1967 that should be front and center when discussing the future of the Afghan War. Its title still says it all, even if the topic has yet to make it into your White Housewhen it comes to Afghanistan. I'm talking about Howard Zinn's *Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal*-- which leads me to retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore's latest TomDispatch post, focusing on why, then and now, administrations find themselves trapped within such a narrow ambit of opinion. *Tom* Obama at the Precipice *Tough Guys Don't Need to Dance in Afghanistan* * We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak theater of operations. Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly misleadingimage: If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which, in our fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds. * ... * What Obama needs ... is fewer generals and ex-generals and more Norman Mailers -- more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight. What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war emanating from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so he can hear the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded dissenters. Were he to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest blunder -- and so avoid suffering his political fate as well. * By William J. Astore It's early in 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson faces a critical decision. Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say "yes" to the request from U.S. commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, downsize the American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would help him focus on his top domestic priority, "The Great Society" he hopes to build? We all know what happened. LBJ listened to the generals and foreign policy experts and escalated, with tragic consequences for the United States and calamitous results for the Vietnamese people on the receiving end of American firepower. Drawn deeper and deeper into Vietnam, LBJ would soon lose his way and eventually his will, refusing to run for reelection in 1968. President Obama now stands at the edge of a similar precipice. Should he acquiesce to General Stanley A. McChrystal's call for 40,000 to 60,000or more U.S. troops for Afghanistan? Or should he pursue a new strategy, downsizing our commitment, even withdrawing completely, a decision that would help him focus on national health care, among his other top domestic priorities? The die, I fear, is cast. In his "war of necessity,"Obama has evidently already ruled out even considering a "reduction" option , no less a withdrawal one, and will likely settle on an "escalate lite" program involving more troops (though not as many as McChrystal has urged), more American trainers for the Afghan army, and even a further escalation of the drone war over the Pakistani borderlands and new special operations actions. By failing his first big test as commander-in-chief this way, Obama will likely ensure himself a one-term presidency, and someday be seen as a man like LBJ whose biggest dreams broke upon the shoals of an unwinnable war. *The Conventional Wisdom: Military Escalation* To whom, we may ask, is Obama listening as he makes his decision on Afghanistan strategy and troop levels? Not the skeptics, it's safe to assume. Not the free-thinkers, not today's equivalents of Mary McCarthyor Norman Mailer . Instead, he's doubtless listening to the generals and admirals, or the former generals and admirals who now occupy prominent "civilian" positions at the White House and inside the beltway. By his actions, Obama has embraced the seemingly sober, conventional wisdom that senior military officers, whether on active duty or retired, have, as they say in the corridors of the Pentagon, "subject matter expertise" when it comes to strategy, war, even foreign policy. Don't we know better than this? Don't we know, as Glenn Greenwald recently reminded us, that General McChrystal's strategic review was penned by a "war-loving foreign policy community," in which the usual suspects -- "the Kagans, a Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand" -- were rounded up to argue for more troops and more war? Don't we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded us, that Obama's "civilian" advisors include "Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar" when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency"? Are we surprised, then, that when we "turn crucial war decisions over to the military, [we] functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well"? And that they, in turn, always opt for more troops, more money, and more war? One person unsurprised by this state of affairs would have been Norman Mailer, who died in 2007. War veteran, famed author of the war novel *The Naked and the Dead* (1948) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning report on Vietnam-era protests, *The Armies of the Night* (1968), self-styled tough guy who didn't dance, Mailer witnessed (and dissected) the Vietnam analog to today's Afghan events. Back in 1965, Mailer bluntly stated that the best U.S. option was "to get out of Asia." Period. *The Unconventional Wisdom: Military Extrication* Can Obama find the courage and wisdom to extricate our troops from Afghanistan? Courtesy of Norman Mailer, here are three unconventional pointers that should be driving him in this direction: *1.* Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America." *2.* Beware of cascading dominoes and misleading metaphors, whether in Southeast Asia or anywhere else. The domino theory held that if Vietnam, then split into north and south, was united under communism, other Asian countries, including Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps even India, would inevitably fall to communism as well, just like so many dominoes toppling. Instead, it was communism that fell or, alternately, morphed into a version that we could do business with (to paraphrase former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak theater of operations. Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly misleadingimage: If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which, in our fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds. Despite the fevered talk of falling dominoes in his era, Mailer was unmoved. Such rhetoric suggests, he wrote in 1965, "that we are not protecting a position of connected bastions so much as we are trying to conceal the fact that the bastions are about gone -- they are not dominoes, but sand castles, and a tide of nationalism is on the way in. It is curious foreign policy to use metaphors in defense of a war; when the metaphors are imprecise, it is a swindle." To this I'd add that, in viewing countries and peoples as so many dominoes, which by the actions -- or the inaction -- of the United States are either set up or knocked down, we vastly exaggerate our own agency and emphasize our sense of self-importance. And before we even start in on the inevitable argument about "Who lost Afghanistan?" or "Who lost Pakistan?" is it too obvious to say that never for a moment did we own these countries and peoples? *3.* Carrots and sticks may work together to move a stubborn horse, but not a proud people determined to find their own path. As Mailer put it, with a different twist: "Bombing a country at the same time you are offering it aid is as morally repulsive as beating up a kid in an alley and stopping to ask for a kiss." As our Predator and Reaper dronesscan the Afghan terrain below, launching missiles to decapitate terrorists while unintentionally taking innocents with them, we console ourselves by offering aid to the Afghans to help them improve or rebuild their country. As it happens, though, when the enemy hydra loses a head, another simply grows in its place, while collateral damage only leadsto a new generation of vengeance-seekers. Meanwhile, promised aid gets funneled to multi-national corporations or siphoned off by corrupt government officials, leaving little for Afghan peasants, certainly not enough to win their allegiance, let alone their "hearts and minds." If we continue to speak with bombs while greasing palms with dollars, we'll get nothing more than a few bangs for our $228 billion(and counting). *What if LBJ Had Listened to Mailer in '65?* Not long before LBJ crossed his Rubicon and backed escalation in Vietnam, he could have decided to pull out. Said Mailer: "The image had been prepared for our departure -- we heard of nothing but the corruption of the South Vietnam government and the professional cowardice of the South Vietnamese generals. We read how a Viet Cong army of 40,000 soldiers was whipping a government army of 400,000. We were told in our own newspapers how the Viet Cong armed themselves with American weapons brought to them by deserters or captured in battle with government troops; we knew it was an empty war for our side." Substitute "the Hamid Karzai government" for "the South Vietnam government" and "Taliban" for "Viet Cong" and the same passage could almost have been written yesterday about Afghanistan. We know the Karzai government is corrupt, that it stole the votein the last election, that the Afghan army is largely a figment of Washington's imagination, that its troops sell their American-made weapons to the enemy. But why do our leaders once again fail to see, as Mailer saw with Vietnam, that this, too, is a recognizably "empty war for our side"? Mailer experienced the relentless self-regard and strategic obtuseness of Washington as a mystery, but that didn't stop him from condemning President Johnson's decision to escalate in Vietnam. For Mailer, LBJ was revealed as "a man driven by need, a gambler who fears that once he stops, once he pulls out of the game, his heart will rupture from tension." Johnson, like nearly all Americans, Mailer concluded, was a member of a minority group, defined not in racial or ethnic terms but in terms of "alienat[ion] from the self by a double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands action and more action to define the most rudimentary borders of identity." This American drive for self-definition through constant action, through headlong acceleration, even through military escalation, the novelist described, in something of a mixed metaphor, as "the swamps of a plague" in which Americans had been caught and continued to sink. He saw relief of the desperate condition coming only via "the massacre of strange people." To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Mailer's analysis here, more emotionally Heart-of-Darknessthan coolly rational. But that's precisely why I want someone Mailer-esque -- pugnacious, free-swinging, and prophetical, provocative and profane -- advising our president. Right now. As Obama's military experts wield their battlefield metrics and call for more force (to be used, of course, with ever greater precision and dexterity), I think Mailer might have replied: We think the only thing *they * understand is force. What if the only thing we understand is force? Mailer, I have no doubt, would have had the courage to be seen as "weak" on defense, because he would have known that Americans had no dog in this particular fight. I think he would intuitively have recognized the wisdom of the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years ago in *The Art of War* that "to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Our generals, by way of contrast, seem to want to fight those 100 battles with little hope of actually subduing the enemy. What Obama needs, in other words, is fewer generals and ex-generals and more Norman Mailers -- more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight. What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war emanating from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so he can hear the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded dissenters. Were he to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest blunder -- and so avoid suffering his political fate as well. *William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He can be reached at wastore at pct.edu.* [*Note on sources:* Most of the Mailer quotations in this piece are drawn from a speech he wrote for "Vietnam Day," May 25, 1965, in Berkeley, California, as reprinted in *Cannibals and Christians* (New York, 1966), a fascinating collection of cutting prose and dreadful poetry.] From suzannedk at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 16:41:46 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:41:46 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now In-Reply-To: <83904d240910121258k581b24acu6747d3db454e7542@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910121258k581b24acu6747d3db454e7542@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Afghanistan is not another Vietnam, it is about creating such Middle Eastern Chaos that the U.S. ability to monitor the energy pipelines going in as the wars go on, will be pefect. The U.S. is planning to stay fifty years, for sure. Nothing to do with Vietnam at all. Or Apocalypse. But many in power would be delighted you both think and write so articulately that it is all about Vietnam! Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175125/william_astore_apocalypse_then_afghanistan_now > > Tom Dispatch > William Astore, Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now Here's the thing: This may > be our next "Vietnam moment," but Afghanistan is no Vietnam: there are no > major enemy powers like the Soviet Union and China lurking in the > background; no organized enemy state with a powerful army like North > Vietnam > supporting the insurgents; no well organized, unified national liberation > movement like the Vietcong, and that's just a beginning. Almost everywhere, > in fact, the Vietnam analogy breaks down -- almost everywhere, that is, > except when it comes to us. Because we never managed to leave Vietnam > behind, even when we were proclaiming that we had > kicked< > http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/47440/george-c-herring/america-and-vietnam-the-unending-war > >that > "syndrome," it turns out that we're still there. Our military leaders, > for instance, only recently dusted off the old Vietnam-era > counterinsurgency > doctrine that once ended in catastrophe, shined it up, and are now > presenting it as an ingenious new solution to war-fighting. Let's face it: > everything about American thinking still stinks of the Vietnamese debacle, > including the inability of our leaders to listen to a genuinely wide range > of options. > > Now, according to Peter Baker of the *Wall Street Journal*, a > "battle"< > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125487333320069331.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories > >of > two Vietnam histories is underway at the White House and the Pentagon. > Think of them as dueling books. The president and a number of his advisors > have just finished reading *Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the > Path > to War in Vietnam*< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805090878/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>about > a White House "being marched into an escalating war by a military > viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead" and backed by a > hawkish national security adviser. The other, a Pentagon favorite, *A > Better > War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in > Vietnam* < > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0156013096/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>, > focuses on a military that by the early 1970s was supposedly winning its > counterinsurgency struggle only to be "rejected by political leaders who > bow[ed] to popular opinion and end[ed] the fight." > > If it's a battle of Vietnam histories that Washington wants, should the > contest really be limited to these two books? After all, one is about a > White House advisor who, like so many of "the best and the brightest," was > decades behind the curve in discovering that he had made a mistake pushing > for war; the other, a smiley-faced look at the years 1968-1973 in Vietnam > that champions an eerily familiar "stab in the > back"thesis in which > pusillanimous civilian leaders lead a proud military to > defeat. > > If it's a Vietnam syllabus you're looking for, President Obama, why not > start with The Best and the > Brightest< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0449908704/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>, > David Halberstam's brilliant dissection of the Vietnam disaster? Having > covered Vietnam as a *New York Times* reporter, he knew a bankrupt war when > he saw one. Or why not consider what an American "counterinsurgency" war * > really* meant on the ground? Nothing will give you a more visceral sense of > the destruction visited on Vietnam and the Vietnamese in those grim years > than Jonathan Schell's double-barreled classic *The Real > War*. > (Why doesn't anyone in your administration ask Schell, who saw the worst of > that war close up, for advice on our new "Vietnam moment"?) > > Or you might check out William Gibson's devastating, sardonically entitled > post-war book, The Perfect War: Technowar in > Vietnam< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0871137992/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20%3Ci%3E>. > It's a history of what the war managers did and, believe me, it gives the > World War II acronym snafu new punch. > Or you could pick up > *Patriots*< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0142004499/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>, > Christian Appy's unique oral history of the war as seen from all sides. It > provides a perfect way to explore why, faced with overwhelming American > firepower, the other side so often refuses to quit. > > Not long ago, your special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, > Richard Holbrooke, picked up a phone in Kabul and > calledStanley > Karnow, who got a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 middle-of-the-road, > one-volume > history >of > the war. We don't know how that consultation -- in the presence of > Afghan > war commander General Stanley McChrystal -- went, but Karnow did offer this > comment to an AP reporter later: "What did we learn from Vietnam? We > learned > that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody > else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I." > > My own suggestion to you and your staff for a single-volume history is > Marilyn Young's cautionary tale, *The Vietnam Wars: > 1945-1990*< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060921072/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>. > And then give her a buzz, too, and see what she thinks about the present > moment. (Notice, by the way, that "s" on "wars" in her title, since she > includes the U.S.-backed French war. When a good history of the conflict in > Afghanistan is written, its title, too, will undoubtedly have the plural > "wars" in it. After all, we've been fighting there on and off for three > decades now.) > > Finally, there's a classic from 1967 that should be front and center when > discussing the future of the Afghan War. Its title still says it all, even > if the topic has yet to make it into your White > Housewhen > it comes to Afghanistan. I'm talking about Howard Zinn's > *Vietnam: The Logic of > Withdrawal*< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/089608681X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>-- > which leads me to retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore's latest > TomDispatch post, focusing on why, then and now, administrations find > themselves trapped within such a narrow ambit of opinion. *Tom* > > Obama at the Precipice *Tough Guys Don't Need to Dance in Afghanistan* > * > We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak > theater of operations< > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war>. > Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly > misleadingimage: > If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, > opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which, in > our > fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds. > * > > ... > * > What Obama needs ... is fewer generals and ex-generals and more Norman > Mailers -- more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying > inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight. What > Obama > needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war > emanating > from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so he can hear > the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded dissenters. Were he > to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest blunder -- and so > avoid > suffering his political fate as well. * > > By William J. Astore > > It's early in 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson faces a critical > decision. Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say "yes" to the request > from U.S. commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, > downsize > the American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would > help him focus on his top domestic priority, "The Great Society" he hopes > to > build? > > We all know what happened. LBJ listened to the generals and foreign policy > experts and escalated, with tragic consequences for the United States and > calamitous results for the Vietnamese people on the receiving end of > American firepower. Drawn deeper and deeper into Vietnam, LBJ would soon > lose his way and eventually his will, refusing to run for reelection in > 1968. > > President Obama now stands at the edge of a similar precipice. Should he > acquiesce to General Stanley A. McChrystal's call for 40,000 to > 60,000or > more U.S. troops for Afghanistan? Or should he pursue a new strategy, > downsizing our commitment, even withdrawing completely, a decision that > would help him focus on national health care, among his other top domestic > priorities? > > The die, I fear, is cast. In his "war of > necessity,"Obama > has evidently already ruled out even considering a "reduction" > option , no > less > a withdrawal one, and will likely settle on an "escalate lite" program > involving more troops (though not as many as McChrystal has urged), more > American trainers for the Afghan army, and even a further escalation of the > drone war over the Pakistani borderlands and new special operations > actions. > > > By failing his first big test as commander-in-chief this way, Obama will > likely ensure himself a one-term presidency, and someday be seen as a man > like LBJ whose biggest dreams broke upon the shoals of an unwinnable war. > > *The Conventional Wisdom: Military Escalation* > > To whom, we may ask, is Obama listening as he makes his decision on > Afghanistan strategy and troop levels? Not the skeptics, it's safe to > assume. Not the free-thinkers, not today's equivalents of Mary > McCarthyor Norman > Mailer . Instead, he's > doubtless > listening to the generals and admirals, or the former generals and admirals > who now occupy prominent "civilian" positions at the White House and inside > the beltway. > > By his actions, Obama has embraced the seemingly sober, conventional wisdom > that senior military officers, whether on active duty or retired, have, as > they say in the corridors of the Pentagon, "subject matter expertise" when > it comes to strategy, war, even foreign policy. > > Don't we know better than this? Don't we know, as Glenn Greenwald recently > reminded us< > http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/21/iran/index.html>, > that General McChrystal's strategic review was penned by a "war-loving > foreign policy community," in which the usual suspects -- "the Kagans, a > Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand" -- were > rounded up to argue for more troops and more war? > > Don't we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded > us, > that Obama's "civilian" advisors include "Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired > lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, > a lieutenant general who is the president's special advisor on Afghanistan > and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar" when he held the same position in the > Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who > is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert > Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency"? Are we > surprised, then, that when we "turn crucial war decisions over to the > military, [we] functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well"? And > that they, in turn, always opt for more troops, more money, and more war? > > One person unsurprised by this state of affairs would have been Norman > Mailer, who died in 2007. War veteran, famed author of the war novel *The > Naked and the Dead* (1948) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning report on > Vietnam-era protests, *The Armies of the Night* (1968), self-styled tough > guy who didn't dance< > http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345323211/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>, > Mailer witnessed (and dissected) the Vietnam analog to today's Afghan > events. Back in 1965, Mailer bluntly stated that the best U.S. option was > "to get out of Asia." Period. > > *The Unconventional Wisdom: Military Extrication* > > Can Obama find the courage and wisdom to extricate our troops from > Afghanistan? Courtesy of Norman Mailer, here are three unconventional > pointers that should be driving him in this direction: > > *1.* Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which > means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to > Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is > faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say > which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even > what > the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the > Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of > Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America." > > *2.* Beware of cascading dominoes and misleading metaphors, whether in > Southeast Asia or anywhere else. The domino theory held that if Vietnam, > then split into north and south, was united under communism, other Asian > countries, including Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps even India, would > inevitably fall to communism as well, just like so many dominoes toppling. > Instead, it was communism that fell or, alternately, morphed into a version > that we could do business with (to paraphrase former British Prime Minister > Margaret Thatcher). > > We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak > theater of operations< > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war>. > Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly > misleadingimage: > If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, > opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which, in > our > fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds. > > Despite the fevered talk of falling dominoes in his era, Mailer was > unmoved. > Such rhetoric suggests, he wrote in 1965, "that we are not protecting a > position of connected bastions so much as we are trying to conceal the fact > that the bastions are about gone -- they are not dominoes, but sand > castles, > and a tide of nationalism is on the way in. It is curious foreign policy to > use metaphors in defense of a war; when the metaphors are imprecise, it is > a > swindle." > > To this I'd add that, in viewing countries and peoples as so many dominoes, > which by the actions -- or the inaction -- of the United States are either > set up or knocked down, we vastly exaggerate our own agency and emphasize > our sense of self-importance. And before we even start in on the inevitable > argument about "Who lost Afghanistan?" or "Who lost Pakistan?" is it too > obvious to say that never for a moment did we own these countries and > peoples? > > *3.* Carrots and sticks may work together to move a stubborn horse, but not > a proud people determined to find their own path. As Mailer put it, with a > different twist: "Bombing a country at the same time you are offering it > aid > is as morally repulsive as beating up a kid in an alley and stopping to ask > for a kiss." > > As our Predator and Reaper > drones< > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175056/filling_the_skies_with_assassins > >scan > the Afghan terrain below, launching missiles to decapitate terrorists > while unintentionally taking innocents with them, we console ourselves by > offering aid to the Afghans to help them improve or rebuild their country. > As it happens, though, when the enemy hydra loses a head, another simply > grows in its place, while collateral damage only > leads< > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175063/questions_to_ask_in_the_dead_of_night > >to > a new generation of vengeance-seekers. Meanwhile, promised aid gets > funneled to multi-national corporations or siphoned off by corrupt > government officials, leaving little for Afghan peasants, certainly not > enough to win their allegiance, let alone their "hearts and minds." > > If we continue to speak with bombs while greasing palms with dollars, we'll > get nothing more than a few bangs for our $228 > billion(and > counting). > > *What if LBJ Had Listened to Mailer in '65?* > > Not long before LBJ crossed his Rubicon and backed escalation in Vietnam, > he > could have decided to pull out. Said Mailer: > > "The image had been prepared for our departure -- we heard of nothing but > the corruption of the South Vietnam government and the professional > cowardice of the South Vietnamese generals. We read how a Viet Cong army of > 40,000 soldiers was whipping a government army of 400,000. We were told in > our own newspapers how the Viet Cong armed themselves with American weapons > brought to them by deserters or captured in battle with government troops; > we knew it was an empty war for our side." > > Substitute "the Hamid Karzai government" for "the South Vietnam > government" > and "Taliban" for "Viet Cong" and the same passage could almost have been > written yesterday about Afghanistan. We know the Karzai government is > corrupt, that it stole the > vote >in > the last election, that the Afghan army is largely a figment > of Washington's > imagination< > http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175116/ann_jones_us_or_them_in_afghanistan_ > >, > that its troops sell their American-made weapons to the enemy. But why do > our leaders once again fail to see, as Mailer saw with Vietnam, that this, > too, is a recognizably "empty war for our side"? > > Mailer experienced the relentless self-regard and strategic obtuseness of > Washington as a mystery, but that didn't stop him from condemning President > Johnson's decision to escalate in Vietnam. For Mailer, LBJ was revealed as > "a man driven by need, a gambler who fears that once he stops, once he > pulls > out of the game, his heart will rupture from tension." Johnson, like nearly > all Americans, Mailer concluded, was a member of a minority group, defined > not in racial or ethnic terms but in terms of "alienat[ion] from the self > by > a double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands > action and more action to define the most rudimentary borders of identity." > > This American drive for self-definition through constant action, through > headlong acceleration, even through military escalation, the novelist > described, in something of a mixed metaphor, as "the swamps of a plague" in > which Americans had been caught and continued to sink. He saw relief of the > desperate condition coming only via "the massacre of strange people." > > To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Mailer's analysis here, more > emotionally Heart-of-Darkness< > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness>than > coolly rational. But that's precisely why I want someone Mailer-esque > -- pugnacious, free-swinging, and prophetical, provocative and profane -- > advising our president. Right now. > > As Obama's military experts wield their battlefield metrics and call for > more force (to be used, of course, with ever greater precision and > dexterity), I think Mailer might have replied: We think the only thing > *they > * understand is force. What if the only thing we understand is force? > > Mailer, I have no doubt, would have had the courage to be seen as "weak" on > defense, because he would have known that Americans had no dog in this > particular fight. I think he would intuitively have recognized the wisdom > of > the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years ago > in > *The Art of War* that "to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles > is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme > of skill." Our generals, by way of contrast, seem to want to fight those > 100 > battles with little hope of actually subduing the enemy. > > What Obama needs, in other words, is fewer generals and ex-generals and > more > Norman Mailers -- more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in > staying inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight. > What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more > war emanating from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so > he can hear the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded > dissenters. Were he to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest > blunder -- and so avoid suffering his political fate as well. > > *William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch > regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate > School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. > He can be reached at wastore at pct.edu.* > > [*Note on sources:* Most of the Mailer quotations in this piece are drawn > from a speech he wrote for "Vietnam Day," May 25, 1965, in Berkeley, > California, as reprinted in *Cannibals and Christians* (New York, 1966), a > fascinating collection of cutting prose and dreadful poetry.] > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 17:01:50 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:01:50 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Obama's War - Tuesday on PBS at 9 p.m. Message-ID: <83904d240910121601i7cf4bc32x2a1ef56b3ec469c1@mail.gmail.com> *PBS FRONTLINE: Obama's War On air and online October 13, 9 p.m. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/* From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 12 21:51:56 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:51:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] America, Debt, Health Care, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan ETC Message-ID: <776621.99412.qm@web43515.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Getting Real American Foreign Policy, Debt And Health CareOctober 12th, 2009 Tonight I heard Chris Hedges on KPFK being interviewed about his new book ?Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle?. He was speaking about the lack of intellectual depth in America. He was speaking about the fact that we have become a celebrity worshiping consumer culture. Specifically he says that Americans are deluded by the illusions that they have been sold and that we have become divorced from reality. He claims that Americans are the most delusional people in the world. This is serious. Advertising Age today has released a white paper that says the average American no longer exists. The 2010 census will reveal that the nuclear family of white middle class couples with 2.4 children and a dog with a house in suburbia is simply no longer true. We are a nation of niches. This is the article hyping the paper that is available at a price. ?LOS ANGELES (Adage.com) ? The 2010 Census is expected to find that 309 million people live in the United States. But one person will be missing: the average American. ?The concept of an ?average American? is gone, probably forever,? demographics expert Peter Francese writes in 2010 America, a new Ad Age white paper. ?The average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling.? AD AGE WHITE PAPER 2010 America, a new 32-page white paper by Peter Francese, analyzes what the 2010 census will reveal about the changing face of consumers. The message to marketers is clear: No single demographic, or even handful of demographics, neatly defines the nation. There is no such thing as ?the American consumer.? The Census Bureau will begin releasing data in spring 2011. Mr. Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP?s Ogilvy & Mather, New York, and founder of American Demographics magazine, now offers projections and insight on what the census will show. Selected findings of 2010 America: ?U.S. households are growing ever more complex and varied. ?This census will show that no household type neatly describes even one-third of households,? Mr. Francese writes. ?The iconic American family ? married couple with children ? will account for a mere 22% of households.? The most prevalent type of U.S. household? Married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households, according to Mr. Francese?s projections. The Census will give Americans 14 choices to define household relationships. Mr. Francese says this will ?enable the Census Bureau to count not only traditional families but also the number and growth since 2000 of blended families, single-parent families and multigenerational families, as well as multiple families doubling up in one household.? That presents boundless opportunities for marketers and media in how they target and segment households. ?Minorities are the new majority. ?One fact says it all,? Mr. Francese writes. ?In the two largest states (California and Texas), as well as New Mexico and Hawaii, the nation?s traditional majority group ? white non-Hispanics ? is in the minority.? And in the nation?s 10 largest cities, he says, ?no racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population.? Mr. Francese notes how diversity varies greatly by age, ?with the younger population substantially more diverse than the old.? Consider these 2010 projections: 80% of people age 65-plus will be white non-Hispanics. But just 54% of children under age 18 will be white non-Hispanics. Mr. Francese observes: ?White non-Hispanics will surely account for fewer than half of births by 2015.? In 2010, Hispanics will be both the nation?s fastest-growing and largest minority (50 million people). ?The nation is moving. Over the past decade, Mr. Francese says, 85% of the nation?s population growth occurred in the South and West. ?During the still-nameless decade from 2000 to 2010,? he writes, ?a total of about 3 million people have moved out of the Northeast, and another 2 million have left the Midwest? for the South and West.? What does this mean? Only that data mining will be more and more prevalent as advertisers work on specializing on the niche they want to reach. The largest group in the immediate future will be the aging baby boomers. This is pretty obvious just look at the prevalence of advertising for Viagra, pills in general, and various insurance plans. It is all about old people and their wealth and health. But lets drop all this BS. Liz Cheney put it out there on Fox News, she said that the Nobel Committee wants to see the end of US Dominance in the world and that President Obama is a believer in ending US Dominance. She is a firm believer in the USA as the leader of the world. This is clear in statements she makes like ?Norwegians sleep well at night because American soldiers protect them.? She was advocating giving the Nobel Peace prize to a mother of a dead veteran. I wonder if she would want Cindy Sheehan to get the Nobel Peace Prize? Cindy is certainly the mother of a Veteran and an advocate of peace. Steve Clemons of the Washington Note.com is saying that Obama is attempting to revive America?s relevance tonight on MSNBC. This is the establishment position. He is here as the janitorial president to clean up the mess left by Bush Neo-liberalism. The Obama administration is traditional liberalism lite. Because as we all know there is no money left for real Johnson liberal reforms. The Chinese are worried about the USA letting the dollar decline in value. This means very simply that the Chinese are telling Obama that what we need is neo-liberal structural reform. This is the ultimate Irony. Why won?t Obama meet the Dali Lama, the Chinese won?t like it. Why do we care, because the Chinese hold all our debt and if they stopped buying American debt then we would have to pay for our debt from our own economy and guess what? We don?t have an economy, we out sourced it all. World War Two was a time of greater national debt but it was bought domestically and so when we paid it back we were paying Americans. Now the debt is held by China, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and Great Britain mainly. That means we have to care about what they think. We no longer have a strong domestic manufacturing economy. What we do have is a financial sector that handles other peoples money for them. We have been a safe haven for other peoples money. America is a big spacious empty country. It has lots of room for rich people from all over the world to stash their wealth. The poor are mostly isolated in the cities and the propaganda machine works better here than in most places. Our media has pushed the concept of believing that a positive attitude and a can do approach will always win out. This is not a bad approach but when it is combined with a pathological fear of being called a looser and a shame at reaching out to others in solidarity because of the dream of individual success, it has crippled all organs of labor unity because of this propaganda. It has turned every attempt to form a viable left in the United States into a joke. So what do we do? We stop believing the hype. As Chris Hedges says we have to get real. We have to face the facts. We then have to prioritize. America cannot afford a real comprehensive health plan because we are spending too much money on the military and bailing out the banking industry. We need to prioritise do we want to be an oasis for the rich of the world with a little trickle down to the rest of us or do we want real economic democracy? If that is what we want then are we willing to do the work to make it happen? First we have to stop believing the get rich quick hype. We have to form unions and join progressive political groups. We need to boycott and and protest and blockade the business as usual. We need to stop cooperating with the rich and work for our collective benefit. This does not mean we become jingoistic nationalists. It does mean that we restructure our economy and our laws to benefit the working people and not the multinational corporations. We need to separate the interests of people from that of corporations. They are not the same. It starts with things like health care for all. And I mean all, including so called illegal immigrants. Poor people are people and deserve to be treated with respect no matter where they are from. The rich have tried to get us to believe that we are a poor nation and need to cut back on who we help. Look at this debate over health care. It has turned into a debate over what we can afford because the President has been convinced that we can not afford any more debt. This is the Chinese, and the other wealthy speaking. It is not the american manufacturers. We could use a weak dollar to export. No it is the investors from other countries who don?t want to see their investment in American debt lose value. This is crucial for people to understand. American Health Care is being cut back due to the return on investment required by foreign investors. The second factor is that disposable income is going to the war effort. Why because America has made a deal with Israel and India to out flank China in South Asia. India needs oil and if we move out of Afghanistan then India does not have the leverage it needs in the middle east. It then will have to take a more aggressive position vs a vie China and Pakistan. But that forces Pakistan to fund the Taliban and Kashmir?s resistance fighters to counter act India. What Americans don?t realize is the extent to which India is invested in Afghanistan. Pakistan sees this as a pincer movement on the part of India to surround it. Bush made a deal with India, we would support their illegal nuclear program if India would give material support in Afghanistan. Pakistan saw this as an act of aggression and that is the reason why they attack the Indian Embassy in Kabul and attacked Mumbai. That is why Afghanistan is a trap. We are damned if we do and damned if we don?t. The Afghanis know the USA is only a temporary visitor. We are not going to stay forever, but we also have to stay because we have made commitments to other powers that mean if we leave that we will have to change those commitments. If India cannot count on the USA then it might return to counting on Russia, or make a deal with China. All this is simply politics. But it is done behind the backs of the people and we are simply left in the dark. We have to be aware of what our country does in our name and then decide if this is what we really want. India is a democracy. But so is Pakistan. Neither India or Pakistan have oil but they both have a lot of people. Afghanistan has almost nothing we need unless Opium is a vital resource. But it it weak and thus easy to dominate. This ease of entry is the trap because it also makes whomever is there a target. The United States and NATO is the new target. Like the Tar Baby it is seemingly an easy mark, punch it and you get no resistance, but your hand is stuck. Punch with another fist and that hand is stuck. Pretty soon you are totaly immersed in a seemingly non resistant body. How did we get here? The Russians found out. It almost destroyed their military machine. We had that happen once in Vietnam. Does the United States really want to go through that again in Afghanistan? We bribed our way out of Iraq by paying off the tribal leaders who then turned on Al Qaeda. We got lucky there. Why press our luck? Be aware America. Be aware. The best policy is one of multilateralism. Working with the world. If we don?t then we will be in a subtle war that we cannot win. Just as the Japanese could not overwhelm the Unites States with our superior manufacturing capacity, we are soon running up against the same situation with China only in this case we are the Japanese and they are the Americans. Think about it. Tags: Health Care And Balance of Payments., India, Pakistan, USA China Posted in History, Politics | From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 12 23:47:53 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:47:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] women's healthcare now :) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <908861.70413.qm@web111512.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> My latest week of healthcare reform pledges and petitions, please do any, or all, you can?? :) This Action, on Change.org, the url??? :) women's healthcare now?? :) http://womensrights.change.org/actions/view/womens_healthcare_now http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions ? call for healthcare?? :) http://healthcare.change.org/actions/view/call_for_healthcare ? Have a reality check on republican healthscare spin?? :) http://healthcare.change.org/actions/view/have_a_reality_check_on_republican_healthscare_spin ? Option + CLASS act, a must?? :) http://autism.change.org/actions/view/option_class_act_a_must ? Healthcare-NOW!?? :) http://womensrights.change.org/actions/view/healthcare-now_2 ? Single-Payer Now?? :) http://healthcare.change.org/actions/view/single-payer_now ? A few week accumulation of related actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) all / healthcare reform?? :) http://womensrights.change.org/actions/view/all_healthcare_reform ? Include A Free Choice Proposal?? :) http://autism.change.org/actions/view/include_a_free_choice_proposal ? healthcare for autistic?? :) http://autism.change.org/actions/view/healthcare_for_autistic ? act for healthcare?? :) http://healthcare.change.org/actions/view/act_for_healthcare ? ? Related groups and actions?? :) Petition??? :) http://www.countdowntohealthcare.com/ ? NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FREE CLINICS?? :) my fundraising page?? :) http://www.change.org/national_association_of_free_clinics_inc/projects/fundraising/we_can_do_it_if_we_all_do_what_we_can__21 From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 13 00:00:38 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:00:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] New actions and updates: Free Jailed Falsely :) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <256621.85982.qm@web111507.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Help Mr. Leonard Peltier get the parole he, and humanity, truly deserves, advocate and evoke?? :) Leonard has carried a constant burden for all of humanity, for over 34 years straight, graciously, courageously, and with great generosity, and, besides thanking him, we have a responsibility to act, not just to right the wrongs of this world, to act to lessen? Leonard's, and those like Leonard's, burdens; they've humbly born for us all.? Luckily, "we, the people...", can still be the voice for those unheard; let us do what we can do to support Leonard's parole.? Thanx, again.? Ciao.??? :) reality This Action, on Change.org, the url??? :) Free Jailed Falsely??? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_jailed_falsely http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions16 ? Very latest from Friends Digest?? :) Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 12 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8871 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 11?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8834 LP-DOC Actions: LP: I'm Obama's Political Prisoner Now; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8825 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 9?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8803 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 8?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8793 Friends Digest Acts: Attorney Seitz on denial of parole; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8769 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 7?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8759 Shout Out to NH and Surrounding Area :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8756 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 6?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8748 News from Lewisburg :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8744 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 5 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8727 Eyes On Members of Congress?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8707 Peltier Medical Alert?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8677 June 26th Statement from Leonard Peltier :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8670 34th Anniversary Events?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8666 LP-DOC: Acts: Update on the Lewisburg Vigil, 7-28-09; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8660 LP-DOC: Acts: Health Alert: Peltier Needs Medical Assist; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8655 Previous?? :) Focus Parole, Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 4?? ;) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8650 ? Previous Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) free falsely jailed?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_falsely_jailed Act to Protect Leonard Peltier, severely beaten, institutionally abused, etc..?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/act_to_protect_leonard_peltier_severely_beaten_institutionally ? Other Actions for Leonard on Change.org?? :) Demand an Executive Review of the Peltier Case?? :) http://criminaljustice.change.org/actions/view/demand_an_executive_review_of_the_peltier_case Leonard Peltier Petition?? :) http://criminaljustice.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition Leonard Peltier Petition (newer)? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition_2 From mstainsby at resist.ca Tue Oct 13 00:27:58 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:27:58 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Low-hanging Fruit and Offsets: The collaborative approach to conservation Message-ID: <4AD41DEE.9040707@resist.ca> Low-hanging Fruit and Offsets: The collaborative approach to conservation from "Offsetting Resistance: The effects of foundation funding from the Great Bear Rainforest to the Athabasca River", a special report by Dru Oja Jay and Macdonald Stainsby. Released September, 2009. http://www.offsettingresistance.ca/ Groups like the Canadian Boreal Initiative and ForestEthics tout their method of finding consensus between corporations, First Nations and conservationists as a way of protecting huge areas of land. Critics call it the ?low-hanging fruit? strategy. It?s a reference to the fact that land which corporate ?partners? will agree to protect is usually land they do not want access to. The CBI, for example, plans to protect ?at least 50 per cent? of Canada?s boreal forest. Critics say that since the boreal forest is largely untouched, this amounts to opening up of what remains of the first 50 per cent across all of Canada?s boreal forest with what the CBI calls ?leading-edge sustainable practices?. ?It?s one thing,? CBI Director Larry Innes told the Dominion in an interview in 2007, ?to walk in as an environmental group and another thing to walk in as an environmental group, shoulder to shoulder with First Nations and industry representatives and saying, ?we?ve got a solution.?? According to Fort McMurray Today, ForestEthics campaigner Gillian MacEachern ?said her group is not saying stop oil sands development, just do it better in the transition. ?We want to see government investing and building that shift very quickly, and decreasing the amount of fossil fuels we need to use while at the same time cleaning up the tar sands.?? Land-use planner Petr Cizek argues that there is no scientific basis for protecting 50 per cent of the Boreal Forest across the board in northern Canada ? some regions may require more land protection and some may require less land protection, depending on the circumstances. The David Suzuki Foundation, he points out, did not endorse the ?Boreal Conservation Framework? promoted by the CBI specifically due to its lack of scientific foundation. The free-market environmentalist Larry Solomon has also noted that since resource extraction in the north is not currently economically viable, that future development of the 50 per cent left over would either rely on economic subsidies or on much higher commodity prices. The Boreal Conservation Framework also mandates to ?support the use of policy tools such as... conservation offsets to facilitate voluntary stewardship by industry.? This ?offset? strategy has recently been elaborated in a 40-page document entitled ?Catching Up: Conservation and Biodiversity Offsets in Alberta?s Boreal Forest,? sponsored by CBI, the Pembina Institute and the Alberta Research Council. After acknowledging the financial contribution of $44,000 from tar sands developer Nexen ?to contribute to the costs of this document?, the authors of the document explain ?the basic idea?: ?Impacts associated with the disturbance of ecosystems and habitat loss are mitigated through either restoration or conservation of substitute forest areas so that no net loss of critical habitat is maintained in perpetuity.? Though never quite explained as such, the idea behind offsets is simple: if an oil company wants to strip mine or contaminate an area of a certain size, then it must buy an area of equal size and protect it. This is based on the premise that all land will eventually be developed if it is not protected. Therefore, when land is destroyed, and an equivalent amount of land is protected, there is ?no net loss? of ecology. Critics observe that companies are unlikely to buy land that contain valuable resources for offset purposes, meaning that offsets end up protecting land that isn?t likely to be developed. The authors of the report seem to acknowledge these concerns, noting, in a sidebar titled ?CAUTION!,? that according to some ?public perceptions,? offsets ?are a licence to destroy habitat and avoid requirements to explore alternative options for mitigation.? ?In other cases there is a perception that offsets have been used to gain access to pristine or highly valued areas.? The report?s authors conclude that offsets are only ?part of a package? that includes ?effective land-use planning.? Stopping the development from happening is not mentioned as ?part of the package?; mining and in-situ drilling are accepted as inevitable. According to ?Catching Up,? it is not just by preserving pristine land that offsets can be acquired. ?Conservation banks,? which are one of the more strict types of offsets presented in the report and workshop, can also be created through ?restoration or enhancement of disturbed habitat? or ?creation of new habitat.? In other words, boreal forest which had been strip mined for tar sand could be ?restored?, and then sold as an offset. The permanence of offsets is also left in question by the report. ?Duration of offset obligations and permanent versus temporary offsets? and ?time lags between offset creation and benefits? are listed under ?issues that must be resolved for successful program implementation.? In other words, it has not yet been decided whether land protected as an offset will be permanently protected. A possible scenario under anything but the most strict version of the offset program now on the table would be that an exploration company could offset strip mining by buying an unexplored area. After trees had been planted on the mined area, it could then be counted as an offset for the development of the land that was initially designated as ?protected? to offset its destruction. The report mentions that land in Alberta is ?jurisdictionally complex,? with Treaty Lands overlapping with Crown Land and private land. However, a presumption of Alberta?s jurisdiction over traditional lands of Dene, Cree and Metis populations is upheld implicitly, and Treaty Rights are not explained or elaborated. If previous deals made by ForestEthics and the Canadian Boreal Initiative are any indication, the final step of the ?collaborative? strategy involves closed-door negotiations between government, industry, and representatives from the inside track of the ?coalition.? First Nations and conservation organizations not self-selected as willing collaborators will likely be sidelined, along with the general public. Cizek says that the endgame of closed-door negotiations is ?exactly where they went with the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, that?s exactly what?s been going with the Protected Areas Strategy in the Northwest Territories and it has likely been going on elsewhere.? If we extrapolate from the previous behaviour of the same groups, says Cizek, ?it would seem to be very clear that where they are going with the tar sands campaign is to bring about some sort of moderate reforms on tar sands expansion using conservation [boreal] offsets where they are exchanging protecting certain lands in exchange for developing certain lands along with their so-called greenhouse gas mitigation nonsense where they are saying that so much forest won?t be disturbed, and trying to find a way to get carbon credits for that. So basically, that?s what we can expect.? ?The added icing on the cake is that as corporate partners of CBI you have Nexen, Suncor... The tar sands companies that are corporate partners of CBI get a boost as sort of leading ?green companies? and gain greater social license and competitive advantage.? Cizek argues that history, rather than personality, should be the guide to action. ?Rather than hypothesizing about people?s motivations, why don?t we examine based on past experience what it is that they do?? From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Oct 13 04:21:55 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:21:55 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] October Surprise Message-ID: <20091013192155.25a1ec85.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Peace Prize to a War Criminal by Stephen Lendman sjlendman.blogspot.com (October 12 2009) The Nobel Committee's tradition is long and inglorious, but for the well-informed no surprise. Consider its past honorees: - Henry Kissinger; - Shimon Peres; - Yitzhak Rabin; - Menachem Begin; - FW de Klerk; - Al Gore; - The Dalai Lama, a covert CIA asset; - Kofi Annan, a reliable imperial war supporter; - UN Peacekeeping (Paramilitary) Forces that foster more conflicts than they resolve; - Elie Wiesel, a hawkish Islamophobe; - Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" wheat strains killed millions; - Medecins Sans Frontieres, co-founded by rabid war hawk Bernard Kouchner, now France's Minister of Foreign and European Affairs; - Woodrow Wilson who broke his pledge to keep "us out of war"; - Jimmy Carter who backed an array of tyrants and drew the Soviets into its Afghan quagmire that took a million or more lives; - George C Marshall, instrumental in creating NATO and waging war against North Korea; - Theodore Roosevelt who once said "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one"; and - other undeserving winners .... "War is peace", what Orwell understood, and why the award legitimizes wars and the leaders who wage them. After the October 9 announcement, The New York Times quoted 2007 winner Al Gore saying it was "thrilling" without explaining it was as undeserved as his own. Writers Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg called it a "surprise". For others it shocked and betrayed. Palestinian Muhammad al-Sharif asked: "Has Israel stopped building settlements? Has Obama achieved a Palestinian state yet?" Iyad Burnat, one of the West Bank's non-violent protest leaders, "started to go crazy" after hearing about the award. "I asked myself why. The Americans are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Palestine is still occupied ... Why didn't (they) give the prize to (George Bush. He) worked very hard (for) eight years killing children, starting wars and supporting the occupation, and they gave the prize to (other choices). I think (the) prize makes the people more violent. Do you think that Obama can make peace ... why didn't (they) wait until he actually made" it. Straddling both sides, The Times said that the "unexpected honor ... elicited praise and puzzlement around the globe". It called it a rebuke of Bush's foreign policies instead of explaining it legitimizes wars and conflicts, the same ones Obama's pursuing more aggressively in Afghanistan and Pakistan under a general (Stanley McChrystal) James Petras calls a "notorious psychopath" - responsible for committing war crime atrocities when he headed the Pentagon's infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). No matter, according to Erlanger and Stolberg's Times-speak: "Mr Obama has generated considerable goodwill overseas (and) has made a series of speeches with arching ambition. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons; reached out to the Muslim world (and) sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, at the expense of offending some of his Jewish supporters." In fact, his speeches are disingenuous and lie-filled. He disdains peace. The renamed "Global War on Terror" is now the "Overseas Contingency Operation". Torture remains official US policy. His administration reeks of Islamophobes. The Israeli Lobby remains comfortably dominant. Muslims are still target one. His ambition is global dominance. His method - imperial wars with a first-strike nuclear option. The Nobel Committee's Twisted Logic in Announcing the Award It reflects Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Fact Check: In less than nine months in office, Obama has been confrontational through destabilizing belligerence towards numerous countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, China, Occupied Palestine, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Somalia, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras by deposing a democratically elected president and obstructing efforts to reinstate him. "Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons". Fact Check: America has the world's largest, most threatening arsenal and global delivery systems. Besides Israel, it's the only major power with a first-strike nuclear policy against any country called a threat. Its drawdown plans will replace old weapons with better new ones, and so-called "missile defense" is solely for offense. "Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multinational diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions play." Fact Check: Obama is pursuing the same policies as George Bush: - permanent wars and occupations; - record amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies; - supplying arms and munitions to rogue state allies; - confronting independent ones with sanctions, belligerent threats, and more war; - subverting the rule of law; - pursuing a global jihad against human rights and civil liberties; - using Security Council pressure and intimidation to enforce policy and block constructive measures through vetoes; and - overall continuing America's hegemonic pursuit of "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively. Under Obama, "the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climate challenges the world is confronting". Fact Check: Obama's House-passed "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" is environmentally destructive, lets corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel, and creates new Wall Street bubble potential through carbon trading derivatives speculation. According to Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the "US stance retards progress at Bangkok climate talks" the way it's obstructed earlier efforts. "Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened". Fact Check: Obama's polices have weakened them at home and abroad. Torture remains official US policy. Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists are repeated victims. So are peaceful protestors. Police state measures are still law and tough new ones are planned. Civil and human rights issues are nonstarters. Warrantless illegal spying continues. Health care reform schemes will ration a human right, and the new Swine Flu vaccines are covert bioweapons. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future". Fact Check: Under Obama, growing millions in America face poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, despair, ill health, and early deaths at a time of permanent wars. "For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman". Fact Check: Skirting the truth, the Committee's twisted logic picks honorees who should face prosecutions for their crimes. A 110-Year Tradition Alfred Nobel (1833 - 1896) began it in 1901. Swedish-born, he was a wealthy 19th century chemist, engineer, dynamite inventor, armaments manufacturer, and war profiteer, later reinventing himself as a peacemaker. Past nominees included Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Tony Blair, Rush Limbaugh and George W Bush. Mahatma Gandhi got four nominations but never won. Nor did three-time nominee Kathy Kelly and other deserving choices, passed over for war hawks like Henry Kissenger whose credentials include: - three to four million Southeast Asian deaths; - many tens of thousands more worldwide; - backing coups and despots; - stoking global conflict and violence; and - compiling an overall breathtaking criminal record. Others like: - Israeli leaders Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin matched him against Palestinian civilians; - Kofi Annan backed Western imperialism, years of genocidal Iraqi sanctions, the 2003 invasion and occupation, and the same lawlessness against Afghanistan; and - Al Gore, the 2007 choice, was infamous for putting politics above principles and made a career out of being pro-war, pro-business, anti-union, and no friend of the earth - credentials descriptive of Obama and his national security team, ideologically stacked with hawks. As a result, American war making continues, sanctified and legitimized under Obama's peacemaker mantle. Or as CounterPunch's Alexander Cockburn put it in his October 10 "War and Peace" article: The award is "a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth (and future Nobel hopefuls): you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That's the audacity of hope at full stretch." Nobel hypocrisy also by scorning peace in favor of war. The tradition continues. _____ Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on Republic Broadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10 am US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-surprise-peace-prize-to-war.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 12:53:13 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:53:13 -0700 Subject: [R-G] A jaw-dropping NYT article Message-ID: <83904d240910131153u2d14aa76m6cd35d9a97895fde@mail.gmail.com> New York Times October 13, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist Behind the Laughter By BOB HERBERT Conan O?Brien has been making some pretty rough jokes about Newark, which has led to a (mostly) mock feud between the late-night host and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. O?Brien joked that the mayor was establishing a program to improve the health of the city?s residents, then deadpanned: ?The health care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark.? He did a video bit in which he praised the city?s ?thriving arts scene? (while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its ?four-star lodging? (shots of abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its ?world-class live theater? (a peep show). He threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities, thus ?creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark,? making it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl. The mayor came up with his own YouTube videos in response and, believe it or not, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in at one point as a mock peace negotiator. Conan seems like a nice fellow, and I doubt that he harbors any malice toward Newark. But he and his audience are having fun taunting a city that, like many others across the U.S., is in a desperately tragic situation: poverty-stricken, run down, often unsafe, its children and teenagers in too many instances going nowhere fast. Whether it?s Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, South-Central Los Angeles, Camden, N.J. ? take your pick ? we?ve looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming, life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise. We?re having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America?s third-largest city. Dozens of boys and girls of school-age and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. One hundred were killed there last year, according to the police. The blood of the young is spattered daily on the stoops, sidewalks and streets of American cities from coast to coast, and we won?t even take notice unless, for example, we can engage in the ghoulish delight of watching the murder played over and over again on video. In Newark, where some of the streets do look as bad as the scenes that were part of Conan?s comedy bit, the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Keeping kids in high school long enough to graduate is difficult. Drug dealing is a fallback employment option for men and boys who can?t find legitimate work. Other cities have the same problems, some to a greater degree. So what are we doing? While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, we?ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year. That should tell you all you need to know about twisted national priorities. Even as teachers by the tens of thousands are walking the plank to unemployment, we?re learning, as The Times reported last week, that one in every 10 young male dropouts is locked up in jail or juvenile detention. As if that weren?t gruesome enough, we find that the figure for blacks is one in four. What would it take to get the perpetual crisis facing these young people onto the radar screens of the rest of America? Conan was just trying to be funny, but the reality behind his late-night humor is horrifying. In Detroit, the median sale price of a house has hovered around $8,000. Seventy percent of all murders in the Motor City go unsolved. Joblessness is off the charts. The school system is a catastrophe. I remember driving around Camden, which is right outside of Philadelphia, on a rainy afternoon. Young people with nothing to do ? they had dropped out of school and had little or no chance of finding a job ? were gathered on porches, saying little, staring the hours away. I had on a suit and was driving a nice car. More than one person that I approached thought I was either buying or selling drugs. The inner cities have been in a recession for decades. They?re in a depression now. Myriad issues desperately need to be addressed: employment, education, the foreclosure crisis, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, health care (including mental health treatment and counseling), child care for working parents and on and on and on. Conan?s jokes would carry a silver lining if they could somehow prompt more people to think more seriously about what?s really going on in cities like Newark. From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 13:12:08 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:12:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Mexico electrical workers fight disbanding of utility Message-ID: <83904d240910131212s664ab443ue06732ddeaa763fd@mail.gmail.com> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-utility13-2009oct13,0,1323573.story Los Angeles Times October 13, 2009 *Mexico electrical workers fight disbanding of utility Union threatens legal action to save jobs lost with Calderon's order to dissolve Luz y Fuerza del Centro, which supplies electricity to Mexico City and several neighboring states. * By Ken Ellingwood Reporting from Mexico City Angry electrical workers on Monday asked Mexico's Congress to help them reverse the government's decision to disband the state-run utility that supplies electricity to Mexico City and several neighboring states. The union, representing 66,000 current and retired workers, also threatened legal action to save jobs terminated Sunday when President Felipe Calderon ordered the dissolution of the utility, Luz y Fuerza del Centro. Calderon said the utility was inefficient and its operation too costly during lean times. He appointed another government agency to take it over. The lightning move came amid a dispute between the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, which represents Luz y Fuerza employees, and the Calderon administration over the outcome of the labor group's elections. The administration refused to recognize the reelection in July of union Secretary-General Martin Esparza, citing voting irregularities. On Monday, Esparza went to Congress to argue that the move to disband the utility was illegal and an attack on his union, known as the SME, its Spanish initials. He called Calderon's decision "a provocation." Administration officials said as many as 10,000 fired workers could be hired back by the new management, while the rest would be compensated with as much as 33 months' pay. Federal police in riot gear guarded Luz y Fuerza facilities, but electricity flowed as normal to 24 million residents in the capital and parts of the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos and Puebla. Under the presidential decree issued Sunday, operations will be overseen by the Federal Electricity Commission, a separate government utility that supplies power elsewhere in Mexico. Administration officials said dissolving Luz y Fuerza, or Light and Power, was needed to bring down electricity costs, improve service and modernize an overburdened system plagued by regular outages. The utility's costs of producing and buying electricity had swelled to nearly double its income from customers, according to government figures. Customers have long complained about Luz y Fuerza's high rates and spotty service, and Calderon said its failure to provide adequate and steady supplies of electricity hurt Mexico's competitiveness. The administration said federal subsidies for the utility -- about $3.2 billion this year -- were sapping the treasury at a time when Calderon wants to spend more on anti-poverty programs to offset the country's economic tailspin. Only a third of the utility's labor expenditures go to pay active workers, the administration said; the rest is for compensating retired workers. "This institution was facing an unsustainable financial situation," Calderon said during a nationally broadcast address Sunday night. He said the action was not an attempt to privatize electricity supplies, which were nationalized in 1960. Thousands of members of the electrical workers union marched on the presidential residence Thursday to demand recognition for Esparza, who edged out Alejandro Mu?ozfor the SME's top post. The two men have joined hands since the Calderon decree Sunday. The SME is one of Mexico's strongest unions. It had considerable say over how Luz y Fuerza was run, and its members earned relatively high wages. A carpenter employed by Luz y Fuerza would receive about $350 a month -- more than twice the market rate, according to a study last month by the Center of Research for Development, a Mexico City think tank. Some analysts said Calderon's move was meant to signal to unions and other political foes that he retains clout. Calderon, whose six-year term ends in 2012, suffered a setback when his conservative National Action Party lost control of the lower house of Congress in July elections. "He needed to relaunch the second half of his administration so he wouldn't be a lame duck for three years," said Jorge Buendia, who runs a Mexico City polling firm. "This was a perfect opportunity." ken.ellingwood at latimes.com From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 13:18:02 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:02 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Solidarity with Mexican Electrical Workers In-Reply-To: <69DD8477-6D46-4C13-A38A-FED8623DDD3F@athabascau.ca> References: <69DD8477-6D46-4C13-A38A-FED8623DDD3F@athabascau.ca> Message-ID: <83904d240910131218w46268849oa71970ff36dd1e78@mail.gmail.com> *From: *Dan La Botz *Date: *October 13, 2009 6:23:39 AM PDT (CA) *Subject: **Solidarity with Mexican Electrical Workers* Please circulate this information widely Dear Brothers and Sisters, The Mexican Electrical Workers and other unions in Mexico City are in the streets protesting the government's seizure of the power plants, liquidation of the company, and firing of 45,000 workers, and with that the extinction of their union. This is a critical turning point event that demands our solidarity. I have been in touch with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and they are asking for solidarity. I attach the article I wrote on Sunday which describes the situation. Below please find a model solidarity letter which follows the union's demands. The situation is critical. Please send or post this: If you wish to protest this action, you should write to President Felipe Calder?n at . If you wish to show your solidarity with the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), you should copy your protest email to .Please find a model letter below which you may use or modify as you like. Dear President Calderon, I write to protest the Federal Police occupation of the electrical plants, the liquidation of the Light and Power Company, the firing of 45,000 workers, and the destruction of their union. You action is a violation of labor rights, of human rights, and a disgrace to your government. I urge you to do as the Mexican Electrical Workers Union has asked: 1) Remove the police from their workplaces. 2) Revoke the liquidation of the company. 3) Negotiate the issues with the union. Respect the rights of these workers, their union, and international labor and human rights standards. Sincerely, Name Organization Address Dan La Botz 3503 Middleton Ave. Cincinnati, OH 45220 513-861-8722 Home 513-600-9405 Cel From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 16:04:45 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:04:45 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Afghanistan: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco ; Clinton and Miliband warn Iran ; Obama, Vanunu and the Nobel Prize ; In Europe, the Left is Not Going Away Message-ID: <83904d240910131504s3477d659y387ebbf6dab44a6b@mail.gmail.com> *Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco **Clinton and Miliband **warn Iran* *Obama, Vanunu and the Nobel Prize **In Europe, the Left is Not Going Away* * *---------------------------------------------------------- New York Times October 11, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist *Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco* By FRANK RICH Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11rich.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 ---------------------------------------------------------- *Hillary Clinton and David Miliband tell Iran: time is running out for nuclear deal* Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, turned the spotlight on Iran on Sunday, warning that the ?world will not wait indefinitely? for an agreement over its nuclear programme. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6299286/Hillary-Clinton-and-David-Miliband-tell-Iran-time-is-running-out-for-nuclear-deal.html ---------------------------------------------------------- OpEdNews October 11, 2009 *Obama's Mandate from and Vanunu's letter to: 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Committee * By Eileen Fleming In his congratulatory message to President Obama upon being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli President Shimon Peres stated: "Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided all of humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a Lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction." [1] Within days of the announcement for 2009's Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-two time nominee, Mordechai Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo: "I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations. I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres. Peres established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel. Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping. He continues to oppose my freedom and release. WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW." [2] http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Mandate-from-and-V-by-Eileen-Fleming-091010-940.html ---------------------------------------------------------- Left Margin *Surprise: the Left is Not Going Away* By Carl Bloice, BlackCommentator Editorial Board Black Ccommentator: October 8, 2009 The reported demise of the European left has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, with the results of Sunday's balloting in Greece a case can be made for the opposite conclusion. "A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Socialism's slow collapse," wrote Steven Erlanger in the New York Times. "Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to 'irrational exuberance,' greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right's failures," wrote Erlanger September 28. That line has been conspicuously repeated in articles in the major U.S. media over the past few weeks, the thread being that even amid the severe economic crisis voters in the major industrialized countries are moving to the right. However, the evidence for this shift, for Erlanger's contention that the left is being "trounced," across the continent simply isn't there. That is, unless you start confusing categories like "socialist" with "social democratic" and "left." http://www.blackcommentator.com/345/345_cover_lm_euro_left.html From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 17:05:37 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:05:37 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Citigroup Plutonomy Report (cited in Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story) Message-ID: <83904d240910131605g77e01f7ag5a1ae8a1eaa1ebb2@mail.gmail.com> *Citigroup October 16, 2005**** * *Equity Strategy* *Plutonomy: Buying luxury, explaining global imbalances* * * * http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1 * From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 17:07:38 2009 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:07:38 -0400 Subject: [R-G] important resource you should know if you are representing yourself in court Message-ID: <164236a30910131607m152e906bv51cb0feb30a086f6@mail.gmail.com> There is a Canadain and a world website where you can obtain current case law. I just was informed of this from a friend. the Canadian site is http://www.canlii.organd the world one is http://www.worldlii.org these to site a good tools for those who are fighting injustice. Please share these email far and wide Aaron Doncaster From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Oct 13 18:06:45 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:06:45 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama Wins Gorbachev's Peace Prize Message-ID: <20091014090645.cacd1e6c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Dmitry Orlov Club Orlov (October 09 2009) I've said it here before: Obama is the new Gorbachev, the smiling face behind the crumbling imperial fa?ade, the personable, non-threatening loser. Gorbachev got his Nobel Consolation Prize in October 1990; a little less than a year later the USSR was no more and he was unemployed. In awarding him the Peace Prize, the Nobel committee actually did some good: by reaffirming his legitimacy as a leader, it helped to weaken the hand of the conservative forces within Russia, which later staged an unsuccessful coup in an effort to reclaim control of the dissolving empire. Gorbachev certainly deserves credit for making sure that the USSR disintegrated with a whimper and not a bang. May Barak Obama be just as successful in completing the dissolution of the USA, quietly and without any undue bloodshed. Moving forward, I wish him a long and happy unemployment. ______________________________ Gorbachev wins Nobel peace prize by Jonathan Steele in Moscow guardian.co.uk (October 16 1990) "President Gorbachev yesterday won the world's biggest consolation prize. He took the Nobel peace award for losing the Cold War, becoming the first communist leader to win the trophy worth GBP 360,000 after dismantling the system his party spent seventy years creating. "The Nobel prize committee in Oslo did not quite put it that way. It cited Mr Gorbachev for 'his leading role in the peace process' which today characterises parts of the world ... "In Moscow, hit by shortages of basic foods and consumer goods, the mood was more reserved. When the president of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov, announced the news to MPs, they applauded for barely five seconds. Gennady Gerasimov, the foreign ministry spokesman, said: 'We must remember, this certainly was not the prize for economics' ..." ______________________________ ... Nor is it the prize for economics this time around! If anything, the financial hole the USSR left behind was a whole lot smaller. Now, some people think that Obama isn't doing a good job. He isn't. That's because it's not a good job. It's not even a bad job. It's a downright terrible job. But somebody's got to do it, and that somebody just won a Nobel prize, so he must be doing something right. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-wins-gorbachevs-peace-prize.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 13 20:24:46 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:24:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama Wins Gorbachev's Peace Prize In-Reply-To: <20091014090645.cacd1e6c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <20091014090645.cacd1e6c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <12230.5200.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> I was thinking the same thing the other day. Obama the new Gorby. ________________________________ From: Bill Totten To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Tue, October 13, 2009 5:06:45 PM Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama Wins Gorbachev's Peace Prize by Dmitry Orlov Club Orlov (October 09 2009) I've said it here before: Obama is the new Gorbachev, the smiling face behind the crumbling imperial fa?ade, the personable, non-threatening loser. Gorbachev got his Nobel Consolation Prize in October 1990; a little less than a year later the USSR was no more and he was unemployed. In awarding him the Peace Prize, the Nobel committee actually did some good: by reaffirming his legitimacy as a leader, it helped to weaken the hand of the conservative forces within Russia, which later staged an unsuccessful coup in an effort to reclaim control of the dissolving empire. Gorbachev certainly deserves credit for making sure that the USSR disintegrated with a whimper and not a bang. May Barak Obama be just as successful in completing the dissolution of the USA, quietly and without any undue bloodshed. Moving forward, I wish him a long and happy unemployment. ______________________________ ? ? Gorbachev wins Nobel peace prize by Jonathan Steele in Moscow guardian.co.uk (October 16 1990) "President Gorbachev yesterday won the world's biggest consolation prize. He took the Nobel peace award for losing the Cold War, becoming the first communist leader to win the trophy worth GBP 360,000 after dismantling the system his party spent seventy years creating. "The Nobel prize committee in Oslo did not quite put it that way. It cited Mr Gorbachev for 'his leading role in the peace process' which today characterises parts of the world ... "In Moscow, hit by shortages of basic foods and consumer goods, the mood was more reserved. When the president of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov, announced the news to MPs, they applauded for barely five seconds. Gennady Gerasimov, the foreign ministry spokesman, said: 'We must remember, this certainly was not the prize for economics' ..." ______________________________ ... Nor is it the prize for economics this time around! If anything, the financial hole the USSR left behind was a whole lot smaller. Now, some people think that Obama isn't doing a good job. He isn't. That's because it's not a good job. It's not even a bad job. It's a downright terrible job. But somebody's got to do it, and that somebody just won a Nobel prize, so he must be doing something right. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-wins-gorbachevs-peace-prize.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Oct 13 22:06:17 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:06:17 -0700 Subject: [R-G] A new record... Message-ID: <4AD54E39.1080700@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 A new record... 200+ hits in one day (more than I normally get in a week) on a single month old post at Cabale News Service's 'mirror' @ Archive.org. Want to know what all the fuss is about? http://www.archive.org/details/tth_090907 Truth-telling... Warning... GRAPHIC imagery! LCM -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJK1U43AAoJEK0+v1xoBEysQLcH/0j970SCbsziCl8LS/3uB4tg BI74zEB6Cg7/xU4hG0R5EGGkTFJ+2yY99+mXywoyhQvLPlNay04fD50VwbAtQ3Lf S1kS6TCdubECovGYzixaa5mnWe5I7lxWOAeTnXiDPuJT42zEmDlu+yj4FAot4KgK qH9jB6iHnRd1spqVzPP6X8OL9mVRhUhVqN5lzYuoaByW0XUaPe27s/N1YjQdtpm4 TJT0PGA32v1jAcshbq8VEvfVIvtjNHmYzoISNT6uwaxHY3cghUR32S+mXiPxaxgM rUPDedS46mCplruGuh5YsZzq4pJxIp3Z3kR4f1knm81q03riSM3xYIuOyWJvUlg= =Vp/e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Oct 14 05:15:20 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:15:20 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama and the Nobel Prize Message-ID: <20091014201520.49491641.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> When War becomes Peace When the Lie becomes the Truth by Michel Chossudovsky . Global Research (October 11 2009) When war becomes peace, When concepts and realities are turned upside down, When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction. When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor, When the killing of civilians is upheld as "collateral damage", When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as "insurgents" or "terrorists". When preemptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense, When advanced torture and "interrogation" techniques are routinely used to "protect peacekeeping operations", When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as "harmless to the surrounding civilian population", When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as "national defense", When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker, When the Lie becomes the Truth. Obama's "War Without Borders" We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity. At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon's "Long War": "A War without Borders" in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might. Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons. Since the very outset of the Obama presidency, this global military project has become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the World and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecdented scale. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama provides legitimacy to the illegal practices of war, to the military occupation of foreign lands, to the relentless killings of civilians in the name of "democracy". Both the Obama administration and NATO are directly threatening Russia, China and Iran. The US under Obama is developing "a First Strike Global Missile Shield System": "Along with space-based weapons, the Airborne Laser is the next defense frontier ... Never has Ronald Reagan's dream of layered missile defenses - Star Wars, for short - been as ... close, at least technologically, to becoming realized". "Reacting to this consolidation, streamlining and upgrading of American global nuclear strike potential, on August 11 the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, the same Alexander Zelin cited earlier on the threat of US strikes from space on all of his nation, said that the 'Russian Air Force is preparing to meet the threats resulting from the creation of the Global Strike Command in the US Air Force' and that Russia is developing 'appropriate systems to meet the threats that may arise'. {1} At no time since the Cuban missile crisis has the World been closer to the unthinkable: a World War Three scenario, a global military conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons. 1. The so-called missile defense shield or Star Wars initiative involving the first strike use of nuclear weapons is now to be developed globally in different regions of the World. The missile shield is largely directed against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. 2. New US military bases have been set up with a view to establishing US spheres of influence in every region of the World as well as surrounding and confronting Russia and China. 3. There has been an escalation in the Central Asian Middle East war. The "defense budget" under Obama has spiraled with increased allocations to both Afghanistan and Iraq. 4. Under orders of president Obama, acting as Commander in Chief, Pakistan is now the object of routine US aerial bombardments in violation of its territorial sovereignty, using the "Global War on Terrorism" as a justification. 5. The construction of new military bases is envisaged in Latin America including Colombia on the immediate border of Venezuela. 6. Military aid to Israel has increased. The Obama presidency has expressed its unbending support for Israel and the Israeli military. Obama has remained mum on the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. There has not even been a semblance of renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. 7. There has been a reinforcement of the new regional commands including AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM 8. A new round of threats has been directed against Iran. 9. The US is intent upon fostering further divisions between Pakistan and India, which could lead to a regional war, as well as using India's nuclear arsenal as an indirect means to threaten China. The diabolical nature of this military project was outlined in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC's declared objectives are: defend the American homeland; fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars; perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions; transform US forces to exploit the "revolution in military affairs". {2} The "Revolution in Military Affairs" refers to the development of new advanced weapons systems. The militarization of space, new advanced chemical and biological weapons, sophisticated laser guided missiles, bunker buster bombs, not to mention the US Air Force's climatic warfare program (HAARP) based in Gokona, Alaska, are part of Obama's "humanitarian arsenal". War against the Truth This is a war against the truth. When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer possible. An inquisitorial social system emerges. An understanding of fundamental social and political events is replaced by a World of sheer fantasy, where "evil folks" are lurking. The objective of the "Global War on Terrorism" which has been fully endorsed by Obama administration has been to galvanize public support for a Worldwide campaign against heresy. In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds. The consensus is to wage war. People can longer think for themselves. They accept the authority and wisdom of the established social order. The Nobel Committee says that President Obama has given the world "hope for a better future". The prize is awarded for Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons .... "...His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population." {3} The granting of the Nobel "peace prize" to president Barack Obama has become an integral part of the Pentagon's propaganda machine. It provides a human face to the invaders, it upholds the demonization of those who oppose US military intervention. The decision to grant Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was no doubt carefully negotiated with the Norwegian Committee at the highest levels of the US government. It has far reaching implications. It unequivocally upholds the US led war as a "Just Cause". It erases the war crimes committed both by the Bush and Obama administrations. War Propaganda: Jus ad Bellum The "Just war" theory serves to camouflage the nature of US foreign policy, while providing a human face to the invaders. In both its classical and contemporary versions, the Just war theory upholds war as a "humanitarian operation". It calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against "insurgents", "terrorists", "failed" or "rogue" states. The Just War has been heralded by the Nobel Committee as an instrument of Peace. Obama personifies the "Just War". Taught in US military academies, a modern-day version of the "Just War" theory has been embodied into US military doctrine. The "war on terrorism" and the notion of "preemption" are predicated on the right to "self defense". They define "when it is permissible to wage war": jus ad bellum. Jus ad bellum has served to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It has also served to convince the troops that they are fighting for a "just cause". More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda. Under Obama as Nobel Peace Laureate, the Just War becomes universally accepted, upheld by the so-called international community. The ultimate objective is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the US NATO led war. War becomes peace, a worthwhile "humanitarian undertaking". Peaceful dissent becomes heresy. Military Escalation with a Human Face. Nobel Committee grants the "Green Light" More significantly, the Nobel peace prize grants legitimacy to an unprecedented "escalation" of US-NATO led military operations under the banner of peacemaking. It contributes to falsifying the nature of the US-NATO military agenda. Between 40,000 to 60,000 more US and allied troops are to be sent to Afghanistan under a peacemaking banner. On the 8th of October, a day prior to the Nobel Committee's decision, the US congress granted Obama a 680-billion-dollar defense authorization bill, which is slated to finance the process of military escalation: "Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year". "The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what US and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000. "Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of "perhaps as many as 45,000. "The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America's obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan's history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced. {4} Within hours of the decision of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Obama met with the War Council, or should we call it the "Peace Council". This meeting had been carefully scheduled to coincide with that of the Norwegian Nobel committee. This key meeting behind closed doors in the Situation Room of the White House included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and key political and military advisers. General Stanley McChrystal participated in the meeting via video link from Kabul. General Stanley McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief "several alternative options" including "a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops". The 60,000 figure was quoted following a leak of the Wall Street Journal. {5} "The president had a robust conversation about the security and political challenges in Afghanistan and the options for building a strategic approach going forward" according to an administration official. {6} The Nobel committee had in a sense given Obama a green light. The October 9 meeting in the Situation Room was to set the groundwork for a further escalation of the conflict under the banner of counterinsurgency and democracy building. Meanwhile, in the course of the last few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of village communities in the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, under the banner of combating Al Qaeda. Notes and Links: {1} Rick Rozoff, Showdown with Russia and China: US Advances First Strike Global Missile Shield System, Global Research (August 19 2009) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14843 {2} Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses.pdf, September 2000 {3} Nobel Press Release (October 09 2009) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html {4} Rick Rozoff, US, NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan's History, Global Research (September 24 2009) http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15364 {5} AFP: After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council (October 09 2009) http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iiRsuUcuIjfsOpbYtAiMgORN8ZiA {6} Ibid _____ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=section§ionName=membership The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor at yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. 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For media inquiries: crgeditor at yahoo.com (c) Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2009 (c) Copyright 2005-2009 GlobalResearch.ca www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20091010&articleId=15622 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Wed Oct 14 05:21:56 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:21:56 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Afghanistan: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco ; Clinton and Miliband warn Iran ; Obama, Vanunu and the Nobel Prize ; In Europe, the Left is Not Going Away In-Reply-To: <83904d240910131504s3477d659y387ebbf6dab44a6b@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910131504s3477d659y387ebbf6dab44a6b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: The idea, perhaps a Devil's Advocate idea, that just maybe the fiscal fiasco was set up to help the resulting chaos enable the United States be in a better postion to not be noticed as it consolodates it's power through the speedng NATO enlargement. NATO is owned by the U.S.. So, it ramps up it's Afghanistan war as control of the Middle East is mandatory as it reaches out to control the entire mideast energy fields, busily building pipelines that will be vulnerable to attacks unless NATO countries loyal to the U.S. are on constant alert. Just look at the power equation differently! If you do, you will see that two wrogs make the right the U.S. has long been planning. Maybe 40 to 60 years! Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Sid Shniad wrote: > *Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco > **Clinton and Miliband **warn Iran* > *Obama, Vanunu and the Nobel Prize > **In Europe, the Left is Not Going Away* > * > *---------------------------------------------------------- > > New York > Times > October 11, 2009 > > Op-Ed Columnist > > *Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco* > > By FRANK RICH > > Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the > Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug > us into this hole in the first place. > > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11rich.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > > > *Hillary Clinton and David Miliband tell Iran: time is running out for > nuclear deal* > > Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, turned the spotlight on Iran on > Sunday, warning that the ?world will not wait indefinitely? for an > agreement > over its nuclear programme. > > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6299286/Hillary-Clinton-and-David-Miliband-tell-Iran-time-is-running-out-for-nuclear-deal.html > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > > OpEdNews > October 11, 2009 > > *Obama's Mandate from and Vanunu's letter to: 2009 Nobel Peace Prize > Committee > * > By Eileen Fleming > > In his congratulatory message to President Obama upon being awarded the > Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli President Shimon Peres stated: > > "Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire > world > in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided all of > humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling > that there is a Lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under your > leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from Jerusalem, I > am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You > gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction." [1] > > Within days of the announcement for 2009's Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-two > time nominee, Mordechai Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel > Peace Prize Committee in Oslo: > > "I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations. I cannot > be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres. Peres established > and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel. Peres was the > man who ordered [my] kidnapping. He continues to oppose my freedom and > release. WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW." [2] > > > http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Mandate-from-and-V-by-Eileen-Fleming-091010-940.html > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > > Left Margin > > *Surprise: the Left is Not Going Away* > > By Carl Bloice, BlackCommentator Editorial Board > Black Ccommentator: October 8, 2009 > > The reported demise of the European left has been greatly exaggerated. > In fact, with the results of Sunday's balloting in Greece a case can be > made > for the opposite conclusion. > > "A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Socialism's slow collapse," > wrote Steven Erlanger in the New York Times. "Even in the midst of one of > the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of > the financial system due to 'irrational exuberance,' greed and the weakness > of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing > cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of > the right's failures," wrote Erlanger September 28. That line has been > conspicuously repeated in articles in the major U.S. media over the past > few > weeks, the thread being that even amid the severe economic crisis voters in > the major industrialized countries are moving to the right. However, the > evidence for this shift, for Erlanger's contention that the left is being > "trounced," across the continent simply isn't there. > > That is, unless you start confusing categories like "socialist" with > "social > democratic" and "left." > > http://www.blackcommentator.com/345/345_cover_lm_euro_left.html > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From shniad at gmail.com Wed Oct 14 12:58:21 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:58:21 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Iran and Nuclear Latency Message-ID: <83904d240910141158t489b2008q613958596561c4b3@mail.gmail.com> http://www.juancole.com/ *Iran and Nuclear Latency* Juan Cole Informed Comment: October 06, 2009 When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran's nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are: 1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at least the 5 percent or so needed for energy reactors and also to the 20 percent needed for its medical reactor. 2. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a fatwa in 2005 that no Islamic state may possess or use atomic weapons because they willy nilly kill masses of innocent civilians when used, which is contrary to the Islamic law of war (which forbids killing innocent non-combatants). 3. Iranian officials have repeatedly denied that they are working on a nuclear bomb or that they aspire to have one. 4. US intelligence agencies are convinced that Iran has done no weapons-related experiments since 2003, and that it currently has no nuclear weapons program. 5. Israel forcefully maintains that Iran's nuclear program is for weapons and has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Natanz enrichment facilities. 6. Iran recently announced a new nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. Those who insist that Iran is trying to get a bomb have a difficult time explaining why Khamenei forbids it as un-Islamic and why the president and others all deny it. It is possible that they are lying, but their denials at least have to be noted and analyzed. The skeptics also have to explain away why the 16 US intelligence agencies say after exhaustive espionage and investigation that there is no weapons program now and that there hasn't been one for some time. Those who agree with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there is no evidence for Iran having a nuclear weapons program have to explain Iran's insistence on closing the fuel cycle and being able to enrich uranium itself. The answer I propose, which explains all the anomalies elegantly and concisely, is that Iran is seeking nuclear latency. Latency is the possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called the 'Japan option,' because given its sophisticated scientific establishment and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program. The reason for the construction of the Qom facility, in this reading, would be that the Natanz facility is too easily bombed or struck with missiles. Moreover, the Israelis and some Americans have repeatedly threatened to strike it. A nuclear enrichment program such as that at Natanz, which is subjec to being wiped out by a military strike, cannot truly provide nuclear latency. The Qom facility was necessary in the regime's eyes if the latency strategy was to be preserved. The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further and construct a nuclear device.The latter step would attract severe international sanctions. I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons by an Islamic state. One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered ruling on the law. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals, without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader, Khamenei's pronouncements on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally, since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy? The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere. That would be a dangerous ploy on his part, in a state premised on Islamic jurisprudence, as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out. As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply such intent, and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents incompatible with Islamic law. Khamenei seems to me to have decided some time ago on a policy of nuclear latency, for two reasons. Nuclear reactors lend Iran a hope of energy independence. Iran produces 3.8 million barrels per day of petroleum and uses about 2 mn. b/d itself. It is likely that soon Iran will use up all of its daily petroleum production, leaving it without the petroleum income windfall upon which its government depends. At that point, Khamenei fears, Iran would be dragooned back into the neo-liberal, America-centric order that had dominated Iran under the shah. Second, nuclear latency would help fend off aggressive attempts at regime change by the Western powers or Israel. Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is suffering. Even if my thesis that Iran seeks nuclear latency were accepted, isn't there a chance that in the future the leaders of the Islamic Republic might seek a weapon? Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual bomb is regime and national pride in the country's modernity. But this motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about. Moreover, latent nuclear states sometimes give up their latency and foreswear even a nuclear option. Brazil and Argentina mothballed their programs in the 1980s, either because they saw each other as insufficiently threatening or because their move to democratic rule lessened the power of the military-industrial complex in each country that had been plumping for nukes (Sagan thinks it is the latter). The problem for the West is that nuclear latency is not illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And conveniently for Khamenei, nuclear latency is not incompatible with Islamic law. That is why the US and its close allies have to pretend that Iran is actually going for a bomb, despite the lack of good evidence for serious weaponization; they are using this pretense as a way to attempt to forestall a Japan option, which is what they really object to, since it is a geostrategic game changer for the region in and of itself. Unfortunately for them, the General Assembly is unconvinced, and China and Russia are reluctant. From shniad at gmail.com Wed Oct 14 12:58:10 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:58:10 -0700 Subject: [R-G] YES to BDS! An answer to Uri Avnery ; Capitalism, communism, and Michael Moore Message-ID: <83904d240910141158h75932ad7kd509f02b7f7d93fa@mail.gmail.com> *YES to BDS! An answer to Uri Avnery* * Capitalism, communism, and what Michael Moore has to say about America* -------------------------------------------------------------------- IV Online magazine : IV417 - October 2009 *Israeli state YES to BDS! An answer to Uri Avnery Michel Warschawski* The call for BDS ? Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions ? has finally reached Israeli public opinion. The decision of Norway to divest capitals from Israeli corporations involved in settlement buildings made the difference, and provided the first big success to that important campaign. Moreover, the group of Israelis supporting BDS, under the label ?Boycott from Within? is gaining some momentum, thanks, among other, to a public appeal by Naomi Klein to Israeli activists when she came to Tel Aviv to present the Hebrew version of her ?Shock Doctrine?. The fact that there is an (even small) Israeli voice to support the international BDS campaign makes a lot of difference, and, among other, helps to disarm the infamous accusation of Anti-Semitism raised by the Israeli propaganda machine against everyone who dare to criticize the colonial policies of the Jewish State. Moreover, ... the Israeli supporters of BDS are in fact expressing the true and long-term interests of the Israeli people. http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1733 Michel Warschawski is a journalist and writer and a founder of the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Israel. His books include On the Border (South End Press) and Towards an Open Tomb - the Crisis of Israeli Society (Monthly Review Press). -------------------------------------------------------------------- National Post October 8, 2009 * Jonathan Kay vs. David McNally on capitalism, communism, and what Michael Moore has to say about America* As part of the National Post's weekly Arts&Life "popcorn panel" feature, pundits are brought together to debate newly released films. This Saturday's installment will feature excerpts from an email debate between National Post comment editor Jonathan Kay and York University political science professor David McNally on Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A love story. What follows below is the full uncut version of their exchange. Jonathan Kay: I know why I was picked for this panel: because Terry Corcoran wasn't available, and you wanted a right-wing true-believer to batter America's iconic left-wing punching bag. But I'm not co-operating -- at least not entirely. Capitalism: A Love Story may be larded up with all sorts of gratuitous, intellectually dishonest stunts. Even so, Moore makes a strong case for his core thesis that unregulated capitalism has destabilized American middle class society in cruel and unsustainable ways. I'm a big fan of the free market. But when Moore introduces us to airline pilots making $17,000 a year, and selling blood plasma to make ends meet, it becomes clear that America's collective value system has gone off the rails. David McNally: Well, as the left-winger here, I agree that the ?collective value system? that dominates American life ?has gone off the rails.? But before we start turning warm and fuzzy and declaring our agreement, let?s cut to the chase. After all, Michael Moore is doing more than denouncing the obscenity of pilots living below the poverty line and selling their plasma to make ends meet. He is insisting that poverty, homelessness, disregard for the lives of working people are inherent in a system driven by the maximization of corporate profits. And this is the strength of the film. More than just expose injustice, it insists there is a social-economic system at fault: capitalism. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/08/336113.aspx --------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- From suzannedk at gmail.com Wed Oct 14 15:42:30 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:42:30 +0200 Subject: [R-G] YES to BDS! An answer to Uri Avnery ; Capitalism, communism, and Michael Moore In-Reply-To: <83904d240910141158h75932ad7kd509f02b7f7d93fa@mail.gmail.com> References: <83904d240910141158h75932ad7kd509f02b7f7d93fa@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: It is muchm uch more than just capitalism! The intgrety, financial and military crisis is built into the fabric of the country since it began. Read de Toqueville. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > *YES to BDS! An answer to Uri Avnery* > * Capitalism, communism, and what Michael Moore has to say about America* > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > > IV Online magazine : IV417 - October 2009 > > *Israeli state > > YES to BDS! > > An answer to Uri Avnery > > Michel Warschawski* > > The call for BDS ? Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions ? has finally reached > Israeli public opinion. The decision of Norway to divest capitals from > Israeli corporations involved in settlement buildings made the difference, > and provided the first big success to that important campaign. > > Moreover, the group of Israelis supporting BDS, under the label ?Boycott > from Within? is gaining some momentum, thanks, among other, to a public > appeal by Naomi Klein to Israeli activists when she came to Tel Aviv to > present the Hebrew version of her ?Shock Doctrine?. > > The fact that there is an (even small) Israeli voice to support the > international BDS campaign makes a lot of difference, and, among other, > helps to disarm the infamous accusation of Anti-Semitism raised by the > Israeli propaganda machine against everyone who dare to criticize the > colonial policies of the Jewish State. Moreover, ... the Israeli supporters > of BDS are in fact expressing the true and long-term interests of the > Israeli people. > > http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1733 > > Michel Warschawski is a journalist and writer and a founder of the > Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Israel. His books include On the > Border (South End Press) and Towards an Open Tomb - the Crisis of Israeli > Society (Monthly Review Press). > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > > National > Post > October 8, 2009 > * > Jonathan Kay vs. David McNally on capitalism, communism, and what Michael > Moore has to say about America* > > As part of the National Post's weekly Arts&Life "popcorn panel" feature, > pundits are brought together to debate newly released films. This > Saturday's > installment will feature excerpts from an email debate between National > Post > comment editor Jonathan Kay and York University political science professor > David McNally on Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A love story. > > What follows below is the full uncut version of their exchange. > > Jonathan Kay: I know why I was picked for this panel: because Terry > Corcoran > wasn't available, and you wanted a right-wing true-believer to batter > America's iconic left-wing punching bag. But I'm not co-operating -- at > least not entirely. Capitalism: A Love Story may be larded up with all > sorts > of gratuitous, intellectually dishonest stunts. Even so, Moore makes a > strong case for his core thesis that unregulated capitalism has > destabilized > American middle class society in cruel and unsustainable ways. I'm a big > fan > of the free market. But when Moore introduces us to airline pilots making > $17,000 a year, and selling blood plasma to make ends meet, it becomes > clear > that America's collective value system has gone off the rails. > > David McNally: Well, as the left-winger here, I agree that the ?collective > value system? that dominates American life ?has gone off the rails.? But > before we start turning warm and fuzzy and declaring our agreement, let?s > cut to the chase. After all, Michael Moore is doing more than denouncing > the > obscenity of pilots living below the poverty line and selling their plasma > to make ends meet. He is insisting that poverty, homelessness, disregard > for > the lives of working people are inherent in a system driven by the > maximization of corporate profits. And this is the strength of the film. > More than just expose injustice, it insists there is a social-economic > system at fault: capitalism. > > > http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/08/336113.aspx > > --------------------------------------------------------- > > --------------------------------------------------------- > > --------------------------------------------------------- > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From suzannedk at gmail.com Wed Oct 14 15:46:31 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:46:31 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Capitalism Message-ID: U.S. capitalism is not at fault, rather the ethos at the settling of the U.S. Read de Toqueville. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com From mstainsby at resist.ca Wed Oct 14 17:01:40 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:01:40 -0600 Subject: [R-G] [Fwd: URGENT: Tar Sands on Trial postponed due to bad weather] Message-ID: <4AD65854.9020607@resist.ca> We unfortunately must postpone the event tonight at John Dutton Theatre (scheduled for 5-7pm) - flights are delayed to the point that we can't get in on time. We are rebooking it for end of November. Will send details shortly. Thanks! Sue Susan Smitten, Director of Communications Woodward & Company 2nd floor, 844 Courtney Street Victoria, BC Canada V8W 1C4 t. 250.383.2356 f. 250.380.6560 c. 604.209.1535 skype: susan.woodward4 www.woodwardandcompany.com www.raventrust.com From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Oct 15 04:06:49 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:06:49 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Restrict Speculative Credit to Prevent Banking Crisis Message-ID: <20091015190649.2499c594.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Richard A Werner The Daily Yomiuri (October 06 2009) One of the topics on the agenda of the Group of Twenty leaders was how to deal with banks, in order to avoid banking crises in the future. "We are not going to walk away from the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and leave unchanged, and leave in place, the tragic vulnerabilities that caused this crisis", said U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. "Where reckless behavior and a lack of responsibility led to crisis, we will not allow a return to banking as usual", the G20 communique stated. Sadly, it looks like this is exactly what will happen. Many politicians have claimed in the past 200 years that their specific pet legislation will be the one that will end the endless recurrence of banking crises. Yet, banking crises have been one of the more reliable features of our economic systems - particularly reliable in their increasing occurrence in the past forty years. The key is, of course, a recognition of what actually caused the crisis. The policy proposals that editorial writers, opinion-makers and now G-20 leaders favor are the introduction of higher, "anti-cyclical" capital requirements for banks, a cap on "leverage" and "living wills" for their windup. Also discussed, as an outside option, is a so-called Tobin tax on short-term financial transactions, rules on bonuses and restrictions on hedge funds. Unfortunately, all of these proposals miss the mark; they won't prevent a recurrence of banking crises and may have unintended negative consequences. The higher capital adequacy requirements likely due in 2012 are feared by cooperative bank leaders in France and Germany to cripple the not-for-profit banks, which did not misbehave, and reduce their stable, long-term and badly needed lending to small firms. It is ironic, because it is exactly the not-for-profit cooperative banks and credit unions that some leaders - such as Pope Benedict XVI in his latest encyclical letter - have singled out as a viable and realistic alternative to the destructive for-profit short-term capitalism of the major banks. There are also problems with tighter regulation of hedge funds and the Tobin tax on financial transactions. It hardly makes sense in market-based economies to try to suppress speculation per se. These are but symptoms, while the disease continues to fester. Yet the patient could be cured with one, simpler policy response. Let us remember how hedge funds work. They employ trading teams or automated programs that execute vast numbers of transactions. A big secret of the hedge fund industry is that despite their intricate trading strategies they normally aim only at miniscule monthly returns of, say, 0.1 percent - but try to achieve those reliably. Where do the remaining returns come from, to make up the twenty percent annually that they aspire to? A bigger secret: These are due you and me. Yes, the general public deserves the credit for more than ninety percent of hedge funds' returns. Here is why. If hedge funds produce 0.1 percent per month through their trading, they can still earn ten or twenty times as much for their investors - and a big chunk in performance bonuses for themselves. How does their financial alchemy work? It has nothing to do with complex derivatives strategies, portfolio optimization by quantitative analysis wizards or fancy algorithms executed in split-seconds by supercomputers. It is due to something that is old-fashioned and has not changed for many centuries: plain old bank credit. Banks will provide a "loan" of, say, twenty times the money invested in the fund, so that the fund can multiply its bets and returns by a factor of twenty. Bank credit, however, is money creation: In the fractional reserve systems we employ, there is no such thing as a bank loan. When I lend out my car to my neighbor, I cannot drive it at the same time. That is not how banks work. When what is called a "loan" is granted, banks don't make a transfer of money, but create credit "out of nothing" and thereby increase the money supply. This is possible, because in our financial system privately owned banks have been given the public privilege to create money - which is something that affects us all. About 98 percent of the money supply is created and allocated by banks - private, short-term profit-oriented operators. The financial crisis is about the misuse of this privilege. Credit used for the creation of new goods and services is sustainable in the long run: it generates income streams that can service loans and repay principal, and it is noninflationary (more money is created, but more goods and services become available). Sadly, if given a choice, banks would rather not lend in this way: Unlike credit for financial transactions, it won't generate exponential growth of loan books, quick windfall profits and overflowing bonus pools for the bankers. Still, the fault is not really with the banks. Surprisingly, they had not been asked by governments to consider what type of loans are good for the economy, sustainable in aggregate or conducive for a stable financial system. They have only been told to maximize their short-term profits, on the theory that this will be best for all. This they did, and thus created much credit for use in speculative financial transactions. The trouble is the fallacy of composition: Such credit creation will push up the prices of the financial or property assets concerned, creating the familiar property and equity bubbles. Each transaction looks sound to bankers, auditors and regulators alike: It is backed by high and rising asset values. But these are a function of the speculative credit extended by banks. Thus speculative credit is never sustainable: When the music stops - when speculative bank credit stops - the asset bubble bursts. Speculators go bust. Banks with them. I warned in my 2005 book about the dangers of the "recurring banking crises", highlighting Britain. I also identified the simple regulation that would end the cycle of booms and busts and banking crises: Let the speculators continue to speculate - as is difficult to prevent anyhow. If the system is well-designed, they should only be able to harm themselves. But severely restrict bank credit used for speculative purposes. So let the hedge funds try to get their "leverage" elsewhere - for instance from the allegedly so efficient capital markets. (And let's see how much of their returns remain when they have to earn them themselves). So forget about a Tobin tax or stricter regulations of hedge funds. Forget about new caps on "leverage" or complex counter-cyclical capital requirements (who determines where we are in the cycle, anyway? how meaningful are leverage ratios, when banks create both loans and deposits simultaneously?). Instead, prohibit banks from lending for transactions that are not part of GDP. Our statisticians have long identified those: They are the financial transactions. And bank loan officers ask potential borrowers detailed questions about the use of loans and banks impose restrictions on it. It is not difficult for banks, therefore, to implement strict rules about which types of credit can be extended and which can't. It is credit for non-GDP transactions that busted the world's financial system, so let's prohibit it (or cap it). We shall not miss it. Is this workable? It has worked well for decades in many countries. Credit controls like this, which limit the speculative and hence wasteful use of newly created money and concentrate the use of newly created money on more productive activities such as investments in new technologies, can deliver high growth without either consumer price or asset price inflation. Such credit allocation and control is what created the Japanese and the Chinese economic miracles - and it is why China this year became the first country to emerge from the crisis: China used the "window guidance" mechanism (which it had copied from Japan) in order to increase credit creation. Until recently, all central banks controlled bank credit directly, and imposed quantitative and qualitative restrictions. That's because it is simply the most important macroeconomic factor in any economy. It is ironic that after the financial crisis, the governments of Britain, France and Germany imposed various - haphazard - forms of direct controls on bank lending in an effort to expand lending to small firms. Had proper controls on credit for non-GDP transactions been imposed on banks previously, there would not have been a financial bubble, or a global financial crisis. _____ Werner is author of "New Paradigm in Macroeconomics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and professor of international banking at the University of Southampton. (c) The Yomiuri Shimbun. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/commentary/20091006dy01.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Thu Oct 15 15:22:44 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:22:44 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Saving Face in Afghanistan ; Viewpoint from an Afghan woman ; US to send 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan ; Obama's new pastor a harsh critic of Islam ; Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth Message-ID: <83904d240910151422q65517c84kcb8caf41624abcdc@mail.gmail.com> *Saving Face in Afghanistan **Viewpoint from an Afghan woman **United States to send 'up to 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan' Obama's new evangelical pastor is harsh critic of Islam **Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth* ----------------------------------------------------- *Saving Face in Afghanistan * By Ron Paul We overthrew the Taliban government in 2001 with less than 10,000 American troops. Why does it now seem that the more troops we send, the worse things get? If the Soviets bankrupted themselves in Afghanistan with troop levels of 100,000 and were eventually forced to leave in humiliating defeat, why are we determined to follow their example? Most importantly, what is there to be gained from all this? We've invested billions of dollars and thousands of precious lives - for what? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23722.htm# ----------------------------------------------------- *Abolishing women?s rights: revisiting the Afghan Parliament?s "Shiite Family Personal Status (Rape) Law"* *Viewpoint from an Afghan woman* 15 October 2009 While the soldiers give their lives trying to protect a fragile state against Taliban extremists, another bunch of extremists sit in powerful and protected positions in the Afghan government and seek to implement Talibanization in a different name. A fundamentalist government, extremist legislators, Islamist warlords and Stone Age laws are not worth the commitment of the international community; persecutions of women and minorities as official policy, religious fundamentalism are not worth the lives and efforts being put in danger by the soldiers from the International community. http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article4147 ----------------------------------------------------- *United States to send 'up to 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan'* The US is expected to announce a significant surge of up to 45,000 extra troops for Afghanistan after Gordon Brown said that 500 more British troops would be sent to the country. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6330163/United-States-to-send-up-to-45000-more-troops-to-Afghanistan.html ----------------------------------------------------- Daily Telegraph 14 October 2009 Barack Obama's pastor is evangelical nephew of Johnny Cash President Barack Obama's new pastor is an evangelical Iraq veteran who has denounced Islam as a faith that "from its very birth has used the edge of the sword as a means to convert or conquer". By Toby Harnden in Washington http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6328502/Barack-Obamas-pastor-is-evangelical-nephew-of-Johnny-Cash.html ----------------------------------------------------- Truthdig October 14, 2009 *Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth* By Robert Scheer The health care issue should never even have been brought up at a time when the economy is reeling and we are running such immense deficits to shore up the banks. Instead of fixing the economy by saving Americans' homes and jobs, we are preoccupied with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric on a hot issue that should have been addressed in calmer times. It came up now because, despite all the hoary partisan posturing, it is a safer subject than the more pressing issue of what to do with Citigroup, AIG and General Motors, which the taxpayers happen to own but do not control. While Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plots in secret with the top bankers who got us into this mess, we are focused on the perennial circus of so-called health care reform. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091013_public_health_before_wall_street_wealth/ From mstainsby at resist.ca Thu Oct 15 20:40:02 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:40:02 -0600 Subject: [R-G] ENGOs vs. Corporate Fronts: Defining the difference Message-ID: <4AD7DD02.8000903@resist.ca> ENGOs vs. Corporate Fronts Defining the difference from "Offsetting Resistance: The effects of foundation funding from the Great Bear Rainforest to the Athabasca River", a special report by Dru Oja Jay and Macdonald Stainsby. Released September, 2009. http://www.offsettingresistance.ca/ There are two distinct ways that large environmental organizations are structured. Traditional ENGOs usually begin with some sort of grassroots mandate. As time goes on, many ENGOs become bureaucratized, as their activities become increasingly centred around maintaining funding to pay for salaries and office space rather than whatever pressing issue led the group to form in the first place. To varying extents, established ENGOs still have mechanisms that keep them accountable to a grassroots membership or base of support. Corporate front groups are distinguished by their lack of any such mechanisms. Corporate fronts are created to meet a political need, and are accountable only to those who provide the funding. Petr Cizek is a respected independent environmental consultant who worked for many years with several different First Nations at the community level, most notably in the Northwest Territories. He is also a long-time critic of the influence of groups he calls corporate fronts. ?Basically the front groups have no formal organizational structure. They?re not registered as a non-profit or a charity. They have no boards of directors, they are not accountable to anyone except their funders.? The funders of front groups include, says Cizek, the Pew Charitable Trusts, ?often in coordination with other very large American foundations, such as the Rockefeller, Ford, Hewlett, etc.? ?The basic issue isn?t whether or not compromises are made in these campaigns?the issue is to what extent any of these compromises are based on open and transparent negotiations that are based on some kind of democratic participation of members of these organizations. What we have is an extremely high-level, elite-based system which is designed and functions to spread green ideology, greenwashes with very little substance behind it,? states Cizek. Valhalla Wilderness Society director Anne Sherrod says the art of closed negotiations have been pushed forward by the foundation-backed conservation group ForestEthics. ?To all appearances,? says Sherrod, ?ForestEthics runs a real market campaign against logging old-growth forest, and may run a good public campaign on the issues such as protecting the endangered mountain caribou. But this market campaigning and public outreach all has one endpoint: FE engaged in private negotiations with the logging companies and government.? ?I lay the responsibility for this on governments. From the outside, these talks look very much like the multi-interest public planning processes that BC had in the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, the public may get some fa?ade of public process, while deals are being cut behind the scenes. But in the end, the public right of participation and free access to information are bulldozed.? ?In the mountain caribou issue, environmental groups had to sign confidentiality agreements to become privy to these secret talks. Everyone who cares for land use, democracy and protection of nature in BC should be scared that the BC government ever said, as it did at an Inland Rainforest conference here in New Denver, that ForestEthics and its ally Wildsight were the only environmental groups to which it would talk.? ?I ask again as I have asked before, since when did a government go around praising an environmental group that is waging a boycott against the BC forest industry, as ForestEthics claims to do?? http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/macdonald/1968 From srobin21 at comcast.net Thu Oct 15 22:52:52 2009 From: srobin21 at comcast.net (Steven Robinson) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:52:52 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Mexican Workers Protest Utility Shutdown Message-ID: <6465FEF55EC3498F97A168F1CC38252A@StevenPC> Laid-off Mexican workers protest utility shutdown By Robert Campbell Reuters October 15, 2009 MEXICO CITY - Tens of thousands of Mexican workers protested the closure of a money-losing power utility on Thursday in a challenge to President Felipe Calderon's plans to clean up the bloated public sector. Holding hand-scrawled placards damning Calderon, union members, leftists and students marched along Mexico City's main Reforma avenue to the Zocalo square in support of the laid-off power workers. The government shut down the state-run power company Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LFC) last weekend in a surprise move hailed by investors as a sign of fiscal discipline and a willingness to confront entrenched public sector interests. But union members have vowed to resist Calderon. "We've got to defend LFC because if we don't stop things here, we don't know where we will end up," said Miguel Contreras, a retired civil servant surrounded by banners reading "Don't turn off the lights." Police put the turnout at 35,000 people but protestors were still arriving in the Zocalo on Thursday evening. The union representing 40,000 LFC workers has called on its members to reject severance pay offered by the government. Small groups of protesters, some wearing devil masks and red shirts, gathered outside LFC offices and shouted at former employees waiting for their severance pay. "If you take your pay, you are losing your union rights and turning your back on the union," said protester Luis Alvarez, 36, who worked for LFC for 18 years. "You can't come back to the union and ask for work." Calderon has vowed to shake up the public sector, including state oil monopoly Pemex, and some investors hope the conservative leader will now take on oil and teacher unions that are seen as corrupt and inefficient. But political analysts say a wider clean-up is unlikely because angering the powerful unions would likely hurt Calderon's party in 2012 presidential elections [N15269298]. Mexico is mired in its worst recession since the 1930s and a drug war that has killed more than 14,000 people since Calderon took office in late 2006. (Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg; Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Kieran Murray) http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1531673820091015 This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Oct 16 07:15:43 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:15:43 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Monetary Power Resides in the Banks Message-ID: <20091016221543.85fc2481.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Louis Even {1} First published in the: Vers Demain Journal (January 1970 issue) The legislative power has its seat in parliaments, since this is where laws are discussed and voted upon. The executive power resides in the offices of ministers, since it is they - the Prime Minister and his Cabinet - who make the decisions which are carried out by the civil servants. The judiciary power resides in the courts, since that is where the judges practice their duties. And where does the superpower, the monetary power, reside? The monetary power resides in the banks. It is in the banks that financial credit is actually created and cancelled. It is when a bank grants a loan, either to an contractor, a retailer, or to a government, that new financial credit is created. The banker credits the borrower's account with the loan granted, just as if the borrower had deposited that amount. But the borrower actually neither brought in nor deposited any money, since he came to the bank to get money he did not have. The borrower will now be able to issue cheques on this account that he did not have when he entered the bank, but that he now has upon leaving the bank. No account of any other customer of the bank was reduced. This is therefore a new account, added to the accounts that already exist. The total credits in the total accounts of the bank are therefore increased by the amount of this new account. There is therefore an increase in financial credit, modern money, which will be put into circulation by the cheques of the borrower issued on this new credit. On the contrary, when a borrower comes to the bank to repay his loan (credit that had previously been borrowed), it reduces the quantity of credit in circulation accordingly. The total quantity of blood in the economic life is thus reduced by the same amount. A simple bookkeeping operation, made with one stroke of the pen, had created financial credit. Another simple bookkeeping operation, when the loan is repaid, cancels, destroys this credit. It is easy to see that, if during a given period of time, the total of the loans exceeds the total repayments, this puts more credit into circulation than what is cancelled. On the contrary, if the total of the repayments exceeds the total of the loans, it causes a period of reduction of credit from circulation. If the reduction period persists, the whole economic body is affected by it: it is called a crisis - a crisis caused by a restriction of credit. Since the borrower must pay back more than what was lent to him, because of the interest, he must withdraw from circulation more money than what was put into circulation. For this, he must withdraw from circulation extra money that has been put there by other borrowers. As every new credit comes from the banks, under the condition of paying back more money than the capital amounts loaned out, other people must also borrow, following the first borrowers. The latter have even more difficulties in repaying their loans, since they have to find extra money out of the credit in circulation, which is already reduced by the amount of money that the first borrower had to repay in interest. This chain goes on in the same way for the next borrowers, and eventually, some cannot pay back their loans. Then the banks restrict further loans, which slows down the whole economic life. But the banks put the blame for this situation on the population that suffers from it. In order to have the flow of credit that is required for economic life resume, the chain of loans will have to take place again, breeding a bigger and bigger chain of debts. A tool of the superpower The present banking system is the instrument used by the monetary superpower to maintain its supremacy over nations and their governments. The banks are supported in all this by the ridiculous, politico-financial rule that binds the distribution of purchasing power to employment, in a production that requires fewer and fewer employees to supply the goods necessary for life. You must not conclude from this that your local banker is part of this dictatorship. He is only a subordinate who, most likely, is not even aware that when he inscribes loans in the ledgers of his bank, he creates credit, and that the repayments inscribed in his ledger destroy, cancel, this credit. You may still hear backward scholars deny that the volume of credit in circulation depends upon the action of the banks. These backward scholars, who resist the obvious, are an invaluable support to the superpower, through their ignorance - if it is really ignorance on their part, or through vested interests that bind them, or through their collusion with a power which can bring them easy promotions. Upper-class bankers, on the other hand, know very well that financial credit, which makes up the bulk of modern money, is created and cancelled in the ledgers of banks. A distinguished British banker, the Right Honourable Reginald McKenna, one-time British Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Chairman of the Midland Bank, one of the Big Five (five largest banks of England), addressed an annual general meeting of the shareholders of the bank, on January 25 1924, and said (as recorded in his book, Post-War Banking): "I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. The amount of finance in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing or decreasing deposits and bank purchases. We know how this is effected. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment of a loan, overdraft, or bank sale destroys a deposit." Having also been Minister of Finance, McKenna knew very well where the bigger of the two powers - the power of the banks and that of the sovereign government of the country - resided. And he was frank enough to state the following, which is very uncommon among bankers of his level: "They (the banks) control the credit of the nation, direct the policies of governments, and keep in the palm of their hands the destinies of the peoples". This is a statement which is in complete agreement with what Pope Pius XI wrote in his Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno, in 1931, about "... those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will". Link {1}: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Even http://www.michaeljournal.org/plenty23.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Fri Oct 16 16:06:38 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:06:38 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Doubts about Pakistan's ability to handle rising Islamist insurgency ; Pentagon ramps up direct military aid to Pakistan ; Obama isn't helping ; U.S. home defaults threaten recovery ; Message-ID: <83904d240910161506v1295cd86m881b623196f1668a@mail.gmail.com> *Attacks raise questions about **Pakistan's **ability to handle rising Islamist insurgency **Pentagon ramps up direct military aid to Pakistan* *Obama isn't helping. At least the world argued with Bush* *U.S. home defaults threaten recovery* --------------------------------------------- Washington Post Thursday, October 15, 2009 *Gunmen, Bombers Hit 5 Sites in Pakistan; 38 Die* By Karin Brulliard Washington Post Foreign Service ISLAMABAD, Oct. 15 -- Pakistan came under a deadly, staccato series of attacks Thursday that left at least 38 people dead and raised questions about the ability of the nation's security and intelligence agencies to thwart a rising Islamist insurgency. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101500528.html?hpid=topnews --------------------------------------------- Reuters Oct 16, 2009 *Pentagon ramps up direct military aid to Pakistan * * Pentagon speeds funds to overhaul Pakistani helicopters * Plans for more trainers faces resistance from Islamabad By Adam Entous WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) - The Pentagon is ramping up delivery of military equipment long sought by the Pakistani army to fight militants, U.S. officials said on Friday. Some $200 million worth of equipment and services already in the pipeline for Pakistan has started to arrive but officials declined to provide full details, saying many of the more sophisticated items were classified. Some programs have run into resistance from Islamabad, which is wary of appearing too close to Washington, they said. The U.S. military aid is meant to help Pakistan mount a long-awaited ground offensive against Taliban fighters in their South Waziristan stronghold along the border with Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are fighting a growing insurgency. Hit by string of brazen militant attacks in the past 11 days that have killed about 150 people, Islamabad says a ground offensive by its troops is imminent. "Each one of these attacks is troublesome," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. "But the Pakistan government remains committed to addressing the threat there." Direct military aid from the Pentagon, officials said, would come on top of the equipment that Pakistan receives through normal foreign military sales overseen by the State Department. Officials say those sales vary year to year but generally total around $300 million annually. U.S. government aid is a highly contentious issue in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment runs high, and Islamabad has thrown up obstacles to some of the Pentagon's proposals, including one to expand counter-insurgency training for the Frontier Corps paramilitary force, officials said. http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSN16195078 --------------------------------------- The Guardian 16 October 2009 *Obama isn't helping. At least the world argued with Bush* For all the global love-in, the new president has led rich nations to neglect principled action and row back from climate deals Naomi Klein http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/16/obama-isnt-helping --------------------------------------------- Globe and Mail Report on Business October 15, 2009 ECONOMY *U.S. home defaults threaten recovery Americans are still losing their houses in record numbers amid tight credit and high unemployment* BARRIE MCKENNA WASHINGTON -- JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s fat investment banking profit masks a dark underside of the U.S. recovery - the housing market is still a mess and homeowners are defaulting at an alarming rate. http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/GAM.20091015.IBUSECONOMY15ART1945/TPStory/TPComment --------------------------------------------- From shniad at gmail.com Fri Oct 16 16:09:22 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:09:22 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Important reading on Afghanistan: Malalai Joya's memoir now available Message-ID: <83904d240910161509x3dfbc0d9nf7baad2899680ec8@mail.gmail.com> Important reading on Afghanistan: Malalai Joya's memoir now available *Please forward* Malalai Joya, the young woman who the BBC has hailed as the ?bravest in Afghanistan,? has published her memoirs, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out. You can purchase the book at your local independent bookstore, or online now at: http://www.amazon.com/Woman-Among-Warlords-Extraordinary-Afghan/dp/143910946X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255692565&sr=1-1 or http://books.simonandschuster.com/Woman-Among-Warlords/Malalai-Joya/9781439109465 Joya, now 31, was the youngest ever woman elected to the Afghan Parliament in 2005 and is an outspoken critic of the Karzai government and NATO occupation. She will be touring North America between Oct. 23 and Nov. 27 to speak about her new memoir, co-written with Canadian activist and writer Derrick O?Keefe. With U.S. President Obama considering escalating the war in Afghanistan with over 40,000 more troops -- and the Canadian government signaling that this country?s forces will in fact not be coming home at the end of 2011 -- Joya?s speaking tour and book release is timely. ?Afghan women like me, voting and running for office, have been held up as proof that the United States has brought democracy and women?s rights to Afghanistan,? Joya writes. ?But it is all a lie.? Her book tells the story of her life in the context of three decades of war. Joya details her reasons for opposing NATO's war and suggests concrete steps for building an independent and genuinely democratic Afghanistan. Malalai Joya, often compared to Burma?s Aung San Suu Kyi, has emerged as a symbol of Afghans? desire for freedom from corruption, warlordism and foreign occupation. Her father, who lost a leg fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, named her after a 19th century hero in the fight against the British Empire, Malalai of Maiwand. Today, Joya brings to a North American audience the lessons of Afghanistan?s long history of occupation and resistance. And she hopes her book will ?correct the tremendous amount of misinformation being spread about Afghanistan.? ?Afghans are sometimes represented in the media as a backward people, nothing more than terrorists, criminals and henchmen. This false image is extremely dangerous for the future of both my country and the West. The truth is that Afghans are brave and freedom loving people with a rich culture and a proud history. We are capable of defending our independence, governing ourselves and determining our own future.? For book tour details in the United States (Oct. 23 - Nov. 12), see: http://afghanwomensmission.org/awmnews/index.php?articleID=85 For a complete listing of events with Malalai Joya across Canada (Nov. 13 - 27), see: http://rabble.ca/malalai_joya_tour. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Oct 17 05:45:36 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:45:36 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Before Columbus: Black Explorers Message-ID: <20091017204536.6a134975.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Legrand H Clegg II www.normangirvan.info (October 12 2009) Every October Americans pause to celebrate Columbus Day. Children are taught that the Italian navigator discovered America. Parades are held in his honor and tributes tell of his skill, courage and perseverance. Historians, archeologists, anthropologists and other scientists and scholars now know that Columbus did not discover America. Not only were native Americans present when he reached the New World, but also Africans, Asians and Europeans, among others, had been sailing to the Americas thousands of years before Columbus ventured across the Atlantic. Of the various people who reached America before Columbus, Black Africans appear to have made the most contacts and to have had the greatest impact. During the 19th and 20th centuries, several scholars wrote books and articles about this subject and urged the academic establishment to change primary and secondary curricula across the country to reflect the great contributions of African people to early America. Unfortunately, such pleas fell on deaf ears; so again this October our children are being taught the myth that Columbus discovered America. In August of this year, a group of thirteen African Americans participated in a study-tour of numerous Mexican archeological sites. Led by the renowned Black historian and architect, Mathu Otir, and two Mexican guides, we visited numerous museums, temples, pyramids and cities, most of which reflected the genius of the native American Mayas and Aztecs. Toward the end of the tour, in southern Mexico, we began to see the remains of an ancient Black presence. Evidence of the early Africans is widespread and varied. Dozens of majestic stone heads have been found at ancient sacred sites, such as La Venta and Tres Zapotes in southern Mexico (See photograph). Ranging up to nine feet and four inches in height, with a circumference of 22 feet, and weighing thirty to forty tons, these colossal statues depict helmeted Black men with large eyes, broad fleshy noses and full lips. They appear to represent priest-kings who ruled vast territories in the ancient New World from provinces near the Gulf of Mexico. In the holy city of La Venta, dating back to at least 1500 BC, four of these large stone heads were discovered on a ceremonial platform featuring a miniature step pyramid and a conical pyramid - the earliest of such monuments to appear in the Americas. Other art-work also serves as evidence of Africans in America before Columbus. For years the late art historian, Alexander Von Wuthenau, collected ancient clay figurines that provide clues regarding the diversity of America's pre-Columbian population. His remarkable African collection depicts priests, chiefs, dancers, wrestlers, drummers, beautiful women and stately men - a collage of Black people who occupied every stratum of society from Mexico to South America. Negroid skulls and skeletons have also been found throughout the New World. Polish professor Andrzej Wiercinski has revealed the discovery of African skulls at Olmec sites in Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban. Furthermore, very ancient African skeletons have been unearth in California, Mexico, Central and South America. The best evidence of the Black presence in America before Columbus comes from the pen of the "great discoverer" himself. In his Journal of the Second Voyage, Columbus reported that when he reached Haiti the native Americans told him that black-skinned people had come from the south and southeast in boats, trading in gold-tipped medal spears. At least a dozen other European explorers, including Vasco Nunez de Balboa, also reported seeing or hearing of "Negroes" when they reached the New World. Nicholas Leon, an eminent Mexican authority, recorded the oral traditions of his people. Some of them reported that "the oldest inhabitants of Mexico were blacks[T]he existence of blacks and giants is commonly believed by nearly all the races of our sail and in their various language they had words to designate them." Early Mexican scholars were convinced that the impact of the Black explorers on the New World was profound and enduring. One author, J A Villacorta, has written: "Any way you view it, Mexican civilization had its origin in Africa". Modern excavations throughout Latin America appear to confirm Villacorta's conclusions. The Olmec civilization, which appears to have been of African origin or to have been dominated by Africans, was the Mother Culture of Mexico. Of this, Michael Coe, the leading American historian on Mexico, has written that, "there is not the slightest doubt that all later civilizations in [Mexico and Central America], rest ultimately on an Olmec base". Ivan Van Sertima, the foremost authority on the African presence in ancient America, has built a strong case demonstrating that many Olmec cultural traits were of African origin: "A study of the Olmec civilization reveals elements that so closely parallel ritual traits and techniques in the Egypto-Nubian world of the same period that it is difficult to maintain [that] all these are due to mere coincidence". Other scholars believe that Africans introduced a calendar, writing, pyramid and tomb construction, mummification, as well as certain political systems and religious traditions to the native Americans. Who were the Africans who sailed to America before Columbus? Indian scholar R A Jairazbhoy states that the earliest settlers were Ancient Egyptians led by King Ramesis III, during the 19th dynasty. Van Sertima also believes that most of the explorers sailed from Egypt, but during the much later 25th dynasty. Many other scholars insist that the navigators came from West African nations, such as Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Whoever these Black people were, they most certainly sailed to America in ancient and medieval times and left a profound imprint on New World soil. As Jairazbhoy notes: "The black began his career in America not as slave but as master". Our Mexican guides agreed. As we ended our tour and prepared to return to the US, one of them proclaimed: "I would like to thank the African people for bringing civilization to the New World". It is high time for the American media and academic establishment to admit the same. Attorney Legrand H Clegg II is producer of the award winning videotape "When Black Men Ruled the World". He may be reached at www.melanet.com/cleggseries or 1-800-788-CLEG. http://www.normangirvan.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/before-columbus1.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Sat Oct 17 14:26:32 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:26:32 -0700 Subject: [R-G] NYT: Roger Cohen - An Ordinary Israel Message-ID: <83904d240910171326o64fdb896mffff69fcdd709486@mail.gmail.com> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opinion/16iht-edcohen.html?bl New York Times October 15, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist *An Ordinary Israel* By ROGER COHEN NEW YORK ? Is Israel just a nation among nations? On one level, it is indeed an ordinary place. People curse the traffic, follow their stocks, Blackberry, go to the beach and pay their mortgages. Stroll around in the prosperous North Tel Aviv suburbs and you find yourself California dreaming. On another, it?s not. More than 60 years after the creation of the modern state, Israel has no established borders, no constitution, no peace. Born from exceptional horror, the Holocaust, it has found normality elusive. The anxiety of the diaspora Jews has ceded not to tranquility but to another anxiety. The escape from walls has birthed new walls. The annihilation psychosis has not disappeared but taken new form. For all Israel?s successes ? it is the most open, creative and dynamic society in the region ? this is a gnawing failure. Can anything be done about it? Perhaps a good place to start that inquiry is by noting that Israel does not see itself as normal. Rather it lives in a perpetual state of exceptionalism. I understand this: Israel is a small country whose neighbors are enemies or cold bystanders. But I worry when Israel makes a fetish of its exceptional status. It needs to deal with the world as it is, however discomfiting, not the world of yesterday. The Holocaust represented a quintessence of evil. But it happened 65 years ago. Its perpetrators are dead or dying. A Holocaust prism may be distorting. History illuminates ? and blinds. These reflections stirred on reviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?s speech to the U.N. last month. The first 30 paragraphs were devoted to an inflammatory conflation of Nazi Germany (the word ?Nazi? appears five times), modern Iran, Al Qaeda (a Sunni ideology foreign to Shiite Iran) and global terrorism, with lonely and exceptional Israel standing up against them all. Here?s Netanyahu?s summary of the struggle of our age: ?It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.? That?s facile, resonant ? and unhelpful. Sure, it?s an outlook that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?s unacceptable Holocaust denial and threats comfort. (Several Iranian leaders have also spoken of accepting any deal on Israel that the Palestinians agree to.) There?s another way of looking at the ongoing struggle in the Middle East ? less dramatic and more accurate. That is to see it as a fight for a different balance of power ? and possibly greater stability ? between a nuclear-armed Israel (an estimated 80 to 200 never-acknowledged weapons), a proud but uneasy Iran and an increasingly sophisticated and aware (if repressed) Arab world. Some of Israel?s enemies contest its very existence, however powerless they are to end it. But the death-cult terrorists-versus-reasonable-Israelis paradigm falls short. There are various civilizations in the Middle East, whose attitudes toward religion and modernism vary, but who all quest for some accommodation between them. One casualty of this view, of course, is Israeli exceptionalism. The Jewish state becomes more like any other nation fighting for influence and treasure. I think President Obama, himself talking down American exceptionalism, is trying to nudge Israel toward a more prosaic, realistic self-image. Hence the U.S. abstention last month at a U.N. nuclear assembly vote calling on all states in the Middle East to ?accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear weapons? (N.P.T.) and create a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East ? an idea Obama administration officials have supported in line with a nuclear disarmament agenda. A shift is perceptible in the decades-old tacit American endorsement of Israel?s undeclared nuclear arsenal. This is logical. To deal effectively with the nuclear program of Iran, an N.P.T. member, while ignoring the nuclear status of non-N.P.T. Israel is to invite accusations of double standards. President Obama doesn?t like them. I?d say there?s a tenable case for Israel ending its nuclear exceptionalism, coming clean on its arsenal and joining the N.P.T. as part of any U.S.-endorsed regional security arrangement that stops Iran short of weaponization. It?s also worth noting the sensible tone of Defense Secretary Robert Gates ? in flagrant contrast to Netanyahu. ?The only way you end up not having a nuclear capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons as opposed to strengthened,? Gates says. In other words, as I?ve long argued, Iran makes rational decisions. Rather than invoking the Holocaust ? a distraction ? Israel should view Iran coolly, understand the hesitancy of Tehran?s nuclear brinksmanship, and see how it can gain from U.S.-led diplomacy. Cut the posturing and deal with reality. This can be painful ? as with Justice Richard Goldstone?s recent U.N. report finding that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed possible crimes against humanity during Israel?s military operations in Gaza. But it?s also instructive. Goldstone is a measured man ? I?ve known him a long time. The Israeli response to his findings strikes me as an example of the blinding effect of exceptionalism unbound. Ordinary nations have failings. The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. ?Never again? is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world. From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sat Oct 17 15:55:43 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:55:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Alternative to Captialist Crowing Over Defeat Of Communism Message-ID: <284750.91464.qm@web43513.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Rebuttal to a Communist Debunker Fred Halliday wrote a piece on Open Democracy that is a debunking of communism or what he imagines communism to have been. I will reproduce it here and my rebuttal. ?What was communism? Fred Halliday, 16 - 10 - 2009 The twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism - as system, ideology and strategic challenger to capitalism - is an appropriate moment to assess its legacy. But this, says Fred Halliday, must discard triumphalism, and be rooted in an awareness of communism?s history, its myths, and its relation to capitalist modernity. 16 - 10 - 2009 Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary, improvement in relations between Russia and the west, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues history has given its ultimate verdict: the cold war, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914-91, will not return; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the west, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story - the worldwide communist movement - the verdict is, as yet, less clear. Fred Halliday is ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He was formerly professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He is a widely known and authoritative analyst of middle-eastern affairs who appears regularly on the BBC, ABC, al-Jazeera television, CBC and Irish radio. Among his many books are Revolution and World Politics: the Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Palgrave, 1999), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (2005) and 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005) This article is based on a more extended essay, ?The Cold War: Lessons and Legacies?, to be published in Government and Opposition (December 2009-January 2010)Communism, embodying the ideology and the social aspirations underlying the Soviet challenge, and the worldwide echo that challenge evoked remains to be interred. But to bury communism can only be done on the basis of recognising what it represented, why millions of people struggled for, and believed in, this ideal and what it was they were struggling against. It can also only be done when the legacy of this ideology and movement is assessed and not simply forgotten, or conveniently, and in violation of all historical evidence, dismissed as an ?illusion?. Judging from the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism, nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative, have carried out such an assessment: between (on one side) the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, and (on the other) the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated. A story foretold The question of what kind of political and social system was communism, too near to allow of an easy perspective, has occasioned several candidate explanations. These include, in summary terms: ? a dictatorial tendency whereby revolutionary elites seized control of societies ? a flawed movement for the self-emancipation of the working class ? an expression of messianism ? a product of oriental despotism ? a failed developmentalist project. Communism embodied features of modern politics that should not be abandoned: a belief in mass participation in politics, a radical separation of religion and state, a promotion of the public, political and economic, role of women, hostility to inter-ethnic conflict, and an insistence on the need for the state to intervene in economic and social affairs. Joseph Stalin and Gosplan may have discredited a particular form of ?planning?, but the general application of rational scientific, managerial and political thinking to human affairs, the better to manage the future, is an entirely legitimate and necessary aspiration, not least in an age of resource-depletion and looming ecological crisis. Communism had no monopoly on these ideas - any tough-minded liberal could have supported them - and the interpretation given to these values was authoritarian, bloody, in some cases criminal. This does not mean, however, that these goals, democratically and humanely conceived, are not necessary parts of a contemporary politics. Yet it is essential to look, without ambiguity, at the failure of communism, and not avoid the issue that too many retrospective analyses have avoided: the fact that its failure was necessary, not contingent. This system, denying political democracy and based on the command economy, did not just fail because of a false policy here or there, let alone because classical Marxist theory was abandoned. As even sympathisers like Rosa Luxemburg realised in 1917 itself, it was bound from the beginning to fail. It is common, and somewhat too easy, for defenders of Marxism in the contemporary world to argue that Marxist theory and communist practice were divergent, and that, hence, the theory bears no responsibility for the communist record. If by this question is meant whether another Marxism, a more liberal or ?genuine? or ?democratic? one, or, if you incline in the other direction, a more resolute, militant, disciplined one, could have prevented the collapse of the communist states then the answer is no. There were certainly, throughout its seventy-year history, choices for the Soviet system: the ?new economic policy? (NEP) could have been continued after 1928, there could have been a different trajectory in the middle 1930s if Stalin not Kirov had been assassinated, or Nikolai Bukharin had become party leader; if Nikita Khrushchev had not been ousted in 1964; if economic reform, of a kind Mikhail Gorbachev was to attempt after 1985, might have begun twenty years earlier. And so on. As for the final period, the Soviet system could certainly have continued for another generation, if another Soviet leader, a conservative like Grigory Romanov or Viktor Grishin, had come to power in March 1985 instead of Gorbachev. But, in the longer run, neither prevailing Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) ideology, nor (in my view) any variant of the Marxist tradition remotely related to 1917, could have saved, let alone developed that regime. It had reached a dead end; but that aporia, although contingent in timing and form, was inevitable sooner or later. A force in its time The revolutionary-socialist movement was not, however, some mistake, some aberrant illusion: it was at once a global movement of collective purposive action, across all continents, and a product of the structural tensions within the development of capitalism over the past two centuries. It is therefore pointless to begin a critique of it by seeing it as something that could, in its negative and positive features, have been avoided - or as, neo-liberal orthodoxy would claim, something that was just some historical illusion. True, it had its illusions; but so does the capitalist ideology which posits that everyone can become a millionaire, the newly fashionable ?well-being? fantasy that the process of ageing can be halted or reversed, or the irrational belief in divine beings, and afterlives, that much of humanity still espouses and, in many societies, east and west, tries to impose on others. Moreover, like these fantasies, socialism was also an inevitability, as much as the other features of the development of capitalist modernity - be they democratisation and scientific change, authoritarian capitalism, inter-state war, or colonialism. For that very reason, the revolutionary-socialist movement was, in its very illusions and delusions, itself a creature of its times, and of some of the chimeras that beset those times, not least a belief in a ?science? of human evaluation and action. That there were, and to some extent, remain elements in the Marxist tradition that contributed not just to the revolutions, but to the particular, bloody and criminal, record of these regimes is especially the case with regard to four central elements of the communist programme: ? the authoritarian concept of the state ? the mechanistic idea of progress ? the myth of ?revolution? ? the instrumental character of ethics. The four components First, and as central to revolutionary Marxism as it is to the radical politics of the Islamic world, is the anti-democratic, Jacobin, theory of politics and of the ?state?: this, not the self-emancipation of the masses, or workers, or oppressed Muslims, is the core concept, indeed the core goal, of all modern revolutionary politics, secular or religious, from Lenin to Osama bin Laden. Second, and equally central to modern revolutionary thought, is the supra-historical concept of ?progress?. Of course, it can, in certain ways, be defended: there has been progress in, for example, medical knowledge, or human wealth, or the development of capitalist democracy. This does not mean, however, that there is a destination of history, an ?end? in the sense of a goal or telos, and of the kind implicit in most 19th-century thought. Even less does it imply that the pursuit of such a telos guides, or legitimates, political action and, in some cases, more than a few, the killing of people for being ?reactionary?. Third, and closely related to the myth of ?progress? was the dangerous myth of revolution; not just ?revolution?, as a historical moment of transition, and a means of making the transition from one historical epoch to the other, but Revolution, indeed ?The Revolution?, as a historical myth, a cataclysm that was both inevitable and necessarily emancipatory. Part of the rethinking of the socialist tradition has to be a re-evaluation of this myth, one almost as powerful and for sure as destructive in modern times as that of ?nation?. As with nations it is possible to make a distinction between what one may term ?actually existing revolutions? (Russia, 1917, China, 1949, Cuba 1959, Iran 1979?) and the broader, ideological, myth: this latter myth, included within which was the idea of the ?irreversibility? of socialist revolutions, was shattered in 1989-91. The related myth, that somehow ?Revolution? in the mythic sense remained possible within developed capitalism, was disproved long ago, arguably by the failure of the German revolution in the early 1920s, in my view in the failure of revolutions of 1848. What Marx termed ?the sixth great power?, in contrast to the five powers that dominated 19th-century Europe, became more and more confined to the semi-peripheral world. Yet the reality of revolutions as historical moments - inevitable and voluntaristic, emancipatory and coercive - is central to the history of the modern world. Not only did these revolutions transform the countries in which they occurred, but, by forcing the dominant classes in the counter-revolutionary states to reform, they in considerable measure transformed capitalism as well. Fourth, underpinning these three ideas - ?state?, ?progress?, ?revolution? - lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension - whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class - was defended. However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of ?rights?, is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others. History?s verdict Communism failed and was, given its internal weaknesses as well as the vitality of its opponents, bound to do so. However, it should not be forgotten that this attempt to escape the conventional path of capitalist development was for a time remarkably successful, not least in the ideological and military challenge it posed to the west but was in the end forced to capitulate, and to do so almost without a semblance of resistance. If nothing else, the communist collapse deserves careful study from the perspective of those who believe in elite-led or state-dictated social and economic development. This is certainly one ?lesson? of communism. There is, however, another aspect of communism, of equal importance, that is too easily overlooked in triumphalist post-1989 accounts in the west. Communism was, as much as liberalism, itself a product of modernity, of the intellectual and social changes following on from the industrial revolution and of the injustices and brutalities associated with it - in the industrial revolution, whose early impact on the city of Manchester was described by Friedrich Engels so vividly in 1844, in the cycles of boom and slump that culminated in the 1930s, and in the violence of colonial occupation, exploitation and war. If Engels were to return today, to the shanty-towns of most Asian, African and Latin American cities, and not a few cities in the developed world, he would not be so surprised. The greatest achievement of communism may well turn out to have been not the creation of an alternative and more desirable system contrasted to capitalism, but its contribution to the modernisation of capitalism itself. No account of the spread of the suffrage, the rise of the welfare state, the end of colonialism, or the economic booms of Europe and east Asia after 1945 could omit the catalytic role which, combined with pressure from within, the communist challenge from without played. Communism was not just a utopian project: it was a dramatic response to the inequalities and conflicts generated by capitalist modernity. The continuation of many of these same inequalities and conflicts today suggests that further challenges, of an as yet indeterminate nature, will result.? This is my comment on his article. The author is glibly misinterpreting history. Communism as the Bolsheviks freely admit has not existed. It was the goal of the Bolshevik parties to achieve Communism. They failed in this attempt and rather than struggle on in a failed attempt the Russian Bolsheviks agreed to the end of their attempt. Russia was then subject to the worst form of neo-liberal capitalist rape as the resources were sold to the Yeltsin era oligarchs and the attempt to steer Russia to a Swedish style mix of socialism and capitalism as attempted by Gorbachev was sidetracked. Capitalism as the recent recession has shown us cannot exist without the interference of the state. The attempt by the early Bolsheviks to create a state model that would benefit the working majority succeeded for a time but because of structural defects it failed in the long run. It does not mean Communism as a goal is a mistake, only that the method chosen by the Soviet Union failed. China has reformed allowing for an expanded capitalist period of development but it is still to be seen if the Communist Party of China has given up on the goal of achieving communism or if it simply has determined that a less intrusive state apparatus in the market system is a better form of economic development than a centralized command model. Adam Smith Capitalism exists nowhere on this planet. What we have is a mixed form of state regulated economies in which a strong corporate element exists that uses the state to create a market environment in which these oligarchic bodies are able to thrive. To some extent there exists a less regulated smaller scale market capitalism that is closer to the Adam Smith model but the only place where there is a true free market is in the illegal underworld and extra legal peasant economies that are still the majority in the world. They exist outside the Capitalist model, they exist as a mixture of traditional economies tied to the land and the relationship of peasants with the land and with the gang economies that exist in the sprawling urban slums that have emerged around the world as more and more people are unable to sustain themselves on the land due to the dumping of cheap agricultural produce from the industrialized west. What we have in the world is a very mixed economy in which the irrational is accentuated by computer programs that accentuate swings in the market and where a traditional land based culture still exists. Communism is a desire on the part of all humans for equity and fair allocation of resources mixed with the acknowledged technological success of the industrial revolution. Why not distribute the wealth so abundantly generated by this technology in an equitable and rational manner? It is only because of the myth of capitalism that we have not progressed beyond this. The Liberal construct of the rights of the individual created in 18th century social theory and abrogated by the social Darwinists of the 19th century that was then repackaged as individualism and neoliberalism in the 20th and 21st centuries with its emphasis on contract law is in its own way doomed to failure as it enshrines certain values that are not sustainable in a ecologically stressed environment where rational distribution and planning are the only models that will work. Legal obstructionism with vast amounts of human energy wasted on contract law, patent law, corporate law all devised to insure the rights of an artificially created individual the corporation is ultimately unsustainable and a waste of valuable human energy. What is required is a fresh look at the value of the planet and the rights of all entities to live in balance with all others on this planet. As a model dependent on continued expansion of profit capitalism simply is a more prolonged path to disaster than the state structures of Bolshevism. Why do we need more efficient methods of self destruction by expansion of this cult of the individual and individual rights? Capitalism simply serves the small coterie of the corporate elites and their attendants and is no better a model than state bureaucratic capitalism was under the old soviet union. Both models led to ecological devastation and the cleanup from both is going to be the task increasingly of the next few generations of humanity. Can you imagine a world in which 6 or 7 billion humans live as wastefully as the average American? It would be a monumental catastrophe and that is where liberal capitalism will take us unless we intervene. It cannot happen in any case the question is how will we structure the social cleanup program and how will we allocate the cost and the distribution of the remaining wealth? Will we simply retain the model of the best damn wealth accumulation system that the elite have managed to create for themselves with a state apparatus that complies to the needs of this elite? Or will we move on and create a system that acknowledges the egalitarian values inherent in the desires of all humanity for a place in the sun balanced with a means of tempering desire with the limits imposed by a sustainable ecological system? A shared world is what we have and there is no reason why shared wealth does not come with shared responsibility. Capitalism simply does not do justice to the needs of this world. Can you imagine a world in which 6 or 7 billion humans live as wastefully as the average American? It would be a monumental catastrophe and that is where liberal capitalism will take us unless we intervene. It cannot happen in any case the question is how will we structure the social cleanup program and how will we allocate the cost and the distribution of the remaining wealth? Will we simply retain the model of the best damn wealth accumulation system that the elite have managed to create for themselves with a state apparatus that complies to the needs of this elite? Or will we move on and create a system that acknowledges the egalitarian values inherent in the desires of all humanity for a place in the sun balanced with a means of tempering desire with the limits imposed by a sustainable ecological system? A shared world is what we have and there is no reason why shared wealth does not come with shared responsibility. Capitalism simply does not do justice to the needs of this world. That is what I wrote. But more than that I am positing that we need to move beyond Marxist and capitalist analysis. We are in a world that is amazingly complex and yet we live by a model that is totally irrational. I agree with Halliday that religion is irrational but what is the answer? It is not cults of certain deities. Not unless these deities are willing to come down to earth and solve the problems here. But I don?t see Jesus or Krishna volunteering. So unless you have a personal assurance from one of these god beings that you are promised a ticket to paradise by giving lip service to their name, you and I are in this boat and we had better focus on rowing and not arguing about some imaginary being out there somewhere. On the other hand there may be beings out there that we simply are not aware of just as an ant is not aware of a human being as being more than a mound of flesh that vibrates, and crushes it inexplicably, sort of like a planet in relation to ourselves. Is the earth intelligent, probably in a way we would not even recognize. It would behoove us to become aware of what is in the interest of sustaining this film of biology on this huge seemingly solid rock. What we are is microbes on a huge life form that we are barely aware of. God exists, but not as some guy with a beard but as a large functioning entity that we are barely capable of understanding. Is he or it interested in us? Only to the degree that this protective layer of biology is required to keep the meteorites from bruising the surface like the moon is bashed by a bombardment with no atmosphere to protect it. The atmosphere is like a skin. We are like microbes on the skin of a planet we may be helpful, but then we may be like a virus, for instance if we were to somehow destroy the atmosphere that protects the planets surface, then we would be gone. Done in by our own stupidity. Perhaps it might be perceived as our self interest. Pollute to give ourselves a more plush lifestyle. Everyone drives a car and those cars destroy the protective layers of the planet and the earth gets irritated like we do when we have a rash, and the earth convulses, shakes, quakes and erupts with pimples. Well this disrupts our lives mightily like when I come into a dark room and start whacking away at the gathering of roaches. We are the roaches and the earth is the human. When we are not too noticeable we can coexist. when we show up everywhere we get swatted. Think about it. Tags: Ecological Imperative., End Of Capitalism and Marxism From mstainsby at resist.ca Sat Oct 17 20:27:09 2009 From: mstainsby at resist.ca (Macdonald Stainsby) Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:27:09 -0600 Subject: [R-G] Negotiated Surrender: Outcomes for the Nuxalk and the Rainforest Message-ID: <4ADA7CFD.1090107@resist.ca> Negotiated Surrender: Outcomes for the Nuxalk and the Rainforest from "Offsetting Resistance: The effects of foundation funding from the Great Bear Rainforest to the Athabasca River", a special report by Dru Oja Jay and Macdonald Stainsby. Released September, 2009. http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/macdonald/1973 The Great Bear Rainforest agreement has been promoted as an environmental success story, but critics of the process tell a different story. They note that, negotiating in secret, the Rainforest Solutions Project (made up for ForestEthics, Sierra Club BC, Greenpeace, and at the time, the Rainforest Action Network) originally accepted a deal that protected less than half of the 44-50 per cent recommended by scientists. One experienced observer says it should have been possible to achieve 40 per cent protection based on the recommendation. It was only when First Nations?excluded from negotiations?raised objections based on land use plans that the fully protected area was increased by about 2.1 million hectares. Valhalla Wilderness Society Director Anne Sherrod says that the lack of public input is a crucial concession. ?Both in the Great Bear Rainforest and in the mountain caribou recovery plan, the private collaborative partnership between government, industry, First Nations and ForestEthics and its coalitions has gone on for years,? says Sherrod. ?We have seen these partnerships result in issues of huge importance regarding public land and resources being taken out of public view for years; participation by confidentiality agreement in the mountain caribou plan speaks for itself.? Independent activist Ingmar Lee was campaigning in Germany to extend the boycott of BC forest products in 2003. Those he was trying to influence told him they had received notice of a deal that had already been worked out for the GBR. Lee explains, ?This deal had never been publicly announced. It was sort of like an inside, advance notice deal that had been sent out to industry and everything like that, well ahead of the first official announcement that they had achieved this ?great victory? in the Great Bear Rainforest.? At that point, the only numbers available were scientists? recommendations that 44-50 per cent of the forest be completely protected. By 2006, the area to be fully protected had dropped to 21.2 per cent as advanced by the now ForestEthics-dominated RSP. The new figure had no scientific backing as a benchmark for preserving the intact ecosystem of the Central Coast; the David Suzuki Foundation did not endorse the proposal. A new ?Ecosystem-Based Management? (EBM) plan was required to be ?phased in? by 2009. While policymakers haggle over definitions, logging has sped up, unopposed by blockades or disruptions. The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) disassociated itself from the Great Bear Rainforest deal after it was announced. It no longer promotes the deal as a ?victory?. ??[Commenters] who stick up for the plan really need to stop saying that people opposed to it wanted it all to be protected,? says Sherrod. ?A 17-member scientific panel composed of industry, government, and enviro scientists, recommended 44-50% full protection. When I started out as an environmentalist, you could not find ONE scientist that would dare recommend that. With 17 scientists saying it, the RSP had a straight shot at getting something like 40%. Their protocol agreement with the other groups had set 44-60% as the goal. Instead, in the private deal with industry, they settled for 21.2% full protection and 11.8% partial protection. It was the First Nations? land use plans that pushed the full protection up to 28%, plus about 5% protected from logging but not from mining.? ?The Valhalla Wilderness Society accepted that level of protection at that time because the government, First Nations and RSP partners promised that a good Ecosystem-based Management plan would regulate logging in an ecologically responsible way,? says Sherrod. ?But that too was developed in private confabs between government, First Nations and the RSP. It emerged in a form that was grossly inadequate and totally non-binding on logging companies. Believe me, we have learned why activists of many kinds worked hard in the past for open public process. Backroom deals can never be trusted; if the intent behind them is good, there won?t be a need to keep things secret from the public and the broader environmental movement.? The deal, some say, has been a disaster for the ecosystem of some of the most important temperate rainforests left on the planet. According to journalist and activist Zoe Blunt, the implications of the deal go beyond logging. ?In 2006, the final agreement was announced with fanfare by a provincial government eager to paint itself Green after years of cutting park budgets and opening wilderness areas to development and logging. However, the Great Bear Rainforest agreement only commits to a ?conservancy? designation for 32 per cent of the land ? part of which is open for mining and all of which may be open to roads, hydroelectric projects, tourism and other uses. ?The parties pledged to base the agreement on the best independent science available,? Blunt continues, ?and the province requisitioned a scientific review of the central and north coast flora and fauna to make recommendations about habitat protection. In 2005, the Coast Information Team found that a minimum of 44 to 50 per cent of the land area would have to be set aside to save ecosystems and wildlife. The decision to protect only 32 per cent may end up sacrificing the survival of the spirit bear.? According to Ingmar Lee, an area far more vast than 70% of the GBR may have been sacrificed. The RSP?s ?deals are secret, they?ve got confidentiality agreements and that?s their modus operandi. But suddenly Sierra Club [BC] disappeared from all of their Vancouver Island campaigns.... Suddenly they just walked on it. They abandoned the Quatsino who had gotten all excited that they were going to get some of their territory protected and [Sierra Club BC] just abandoned it. What the hell happened?... It was clear to me they had sacrificed Vancouver Island in order to get mileage on the Great Bear Rainforest. Subsequently my suspicions were confirmed by [the Rainforest Action Network]. RAN admitted... It was on their website for awhile that they found it really regrettable that Vancouver Island had to be sacrificed to the Great Bear Rainforest deal. So you must understand that the pathetic 30% protection that this magnificent, intact tract of primeval temperate rainforest was only part of the sacrifice.? ?One of the worst and most disgusting aspects of the whole Great Bear Rainforest deal was just how many times it has been strung along like these Fake Enviros, ForestEthics being the worst of them [...] they have been just groveling for [BC Premier Gordon Campbell?s] signature over the years and Gordo strung it along until like a month before the [May 2009 provincial] election and then finally endorsed it.? After Campbell?s signature put the Great Bear Rainforest deal to paper, a press conference and photo op was held with (among others) Gordon Campbell alongside Tzeporah Berman. Berman has since limited her role with FE and now directs PowerUP, a foundation-funded group advocating controversial run-of-the-river private hydro projects in British Columbia. Because the EBM was not defined for years, companies were allowed to log, using the practice of ?highgrading.? Highgrading means to selectively take the very best trees from a forested area, leaving the rest in the hope that it will recover if left to its own devices after the healthiest trees have been cut. ?Consider the years that the RSP accepted for the companies? logging before the EBM went into effect; The result has been the highgrading of prime coastal temperate rainforest,? explained Sherrod. She concludes that no environmental group should be allowed to negotiate behind closed doors with industry or government. ?Lastly, and this is overall what I think is the largest damage of these negotiations: No real environmental group needs to, or should, make agreements conceding vast areas of forest to be logged. Part of the shuck of this process is the pretense that environmental groups are forced to sign on the dotted line to get improvements in environmental protection. Pure hogwash. When we stand together in united resistance to environmental abuses we will gain real power to protect the environment, and we won?t have to sell out our ideals to do it. These are greenwashing deals. I am speaking out about this because there is evidence that the collaborative agreement industry may be moving to the tar sands. I want everyone to know that issues where people are dying of cancer from serious pollution is no place for this kind of thing. Open public process is your best friend in situations like this. Insist on it.? From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Oct 18 01:28:11 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:28:11 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Abraham Lincoln's Monetary Policy Message-ID: <20091018162811.cda84c19.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865. Preface and Postscript by Michael Rowbothham from his Grip of Death (1998) Preface At the end of the civil war, President Abraham Lincoln produced his justification for the government creation of money. His Monetary Policy is one of the world's great political declarations; a masterpiece of succinct advocacy and irrefutable justice. In it, he notes the inadequacy of gold and silver, and consequent need for an additional means of exchange. It proclaims the right and duty of government to create such currency, and supply this to the economy free of debt through government spending, thus reducing the need for taxation. Wages are declared to be a higher priority than bank interest, and the economy is to be protected from the "vicious currency" of banks. The creation and supply of money, he defined "not only the supreme prerogitive of government, but it is the government's greatest opportunity". Lincoln's Monetary Policy is included here in its entirety. Monetary Policy (1865) Money is the creature of law, and the creation of the original issue of money should be maintained as the exclusive monopoly of national government. Money possesses no value to the state other than that given to it by circulation. Capital has its proper place and is entitled to every protection. The wages of men should be recognized in the structure of and in the social order as more important than the wages of money. No duty is more imperative for the government than the duty it owes the people to furnish them with a sound and uniform currency, and of regulating the circulation of the medium of exchange so that labour will be protected from a vicious currency, and commerce will be facilitated by cheap and safe exchanges. The available supply of gold and silver being wholly inadequate to permit the issuance of coins of intrinsic value or paper currency convertible into coin in the volume required to serve the needs of the People, some other basis for the issue of currency must be developed, and some means other than that of convertibility into coin must be developed to prevent undue fluctuation in the value of paper currency or any other substitute for money of intrinsic value that may come into use. The monetary needs of increasing numbers of people advancing towards higher standards of living can and should be met by the government. Such needs can be met by the issue of national currency and credit through the operation of a national banking system. The circulation of a medium of exchange issued and backed by the government can be properly regulated and redundancy of issue avoided by withdrawing from circulation such amounts as may be necessary by taxation, re-deposit and otherwise. Government has the power to regulate the currency and credit of the nation. Government should stand behind its currency and credit and the bank deposits of the nation. No individual should suffer a loss of money through depreciation or inflated currency or Bank bankruptcy. Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as a means of financing government work and public enterprise. The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts, and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power. Abraham Lincoln, Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865. Postscript by Michael Rowbotham It is noteworthy that Lincoln issued this statement of his monetary policy in 1865, just before the end of the civil war. A matter of weeks later, he was assassinated. As the publication date and whole tenor of the document show, Lincoln's intention was to advance his monetary policy, based upon the government creation of money, and apply it more fully after the war. The motive behind Lincoln's assassination has never been established, and is usually attributed to the deranged actions of a lunatic. However, it has been speculated many times that Lincoln's death was connected with the fact that such a monetary policy as he was proposing, if pursued effectively, would have signalled the end of the banking and money power in the United States, and very rapidly everywhere throughout the developing world. Once that one government was seen to be capable of supplying its nation's monetary needs, others would certainly have followed. The power and profit which national debts and widespread private industrial debts provided to the would's most shadowy and powerful elite - bankers and financiers - would have soon vanished. _____ From bogus@does.not.exist.com Wed Oct 14 08:33:50 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:33:50 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Servitude, and Destructive Economics (Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1998), pages 220-221 TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From suzannedk at gmail.com Sun Oct 18 12:18:47 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:18:47 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Michael Morre in the Financial Times and the Balloon Boy Message-ID: A small article in the weekend FT mocks Mr. Moore's focus on the iconic city of Detroit, Michigan suggesting he should refocus on a more positive area of the world like Dubai. I suggest that Michael Moore's dissection of the Detroit power structure is an example of awesome courage in the face of criminal, genocidal greed. His mirror on that city shows clearly the national mindset and heartlessness of the corporate face of the once great countryof the U.S.,, once great state of Michigan, once great city of Detroit. As the Colorado coverage of the homemade balloon fiasco shows the world, when beaurocratic U.S. state officials get ahold of an embarrressing incident where the child in danger turned out to be hiding in the attic, not in danger, not tragically dead, they will dismember the whole family, putting all in prison over the age of twenty, charging them them the costs to the state for trying to save a non-airborn 6 year old's life! They will make sure that the children, the three of them, will be removed from their parents. The dismemberment of the Moore films, none ever allowed on U.S. television, and his demonization, is on a par with the Balloon Boy dismemberment of ambitious, iconic entrepreneurial American family. As the U.S. media does daily, the State of Colorado used the media to begin the destruction of the balloon family just as is done with Moore and his films since his first film. Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 18 15:25:34 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:25:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Horses & History, Founding Myths - Crows, Shewolfs and the Steppes Message-ID: <112238.9065.qm@web43509.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Horses And Humans, Crows, She-wolfs And Nation Builders Days turn into Nights turn into days again. Waves beat on the shores, the moon pulls and the Sun rises and falls. Monks chant and meditate, get drunk and fight over petty points of order. Gurus lead their communities in their endless round of escape attempts from this vessel. Women get impregnated by gods and angels while their men folk listen, scratch their heads, beat the women and then go on about their business. The baby is left out to the elements and is carried by some stream to a shore where wolves and birds tend to the child who returns to become a menial in the house of the king. He proves himself to be a great horseman and hunter with a bow, is forced to work in the stables and then rises up with the aid of loyal companions to slaughter the evil king and become in turn the founder of dynasties that are supported by a coterie of loyal warrior brethren. This clan or wolf pack then become the new nobility and conquer the surrounding peoples. It is a tale told over and over in the founding myths across Asia. Why wolves and birds? Birds usually crows are known spirit carriers of messages from the gods. Wolves are the model hunters. Forming packs that can defeat any other animals by their cunning and teamwork. It is this model of the alpha male that has provided the example for all hierarchies through history. A group of male hunters band around a successful leader. He has the wolves cunning and the crow?s vision being able to fly over the human condition and commune with the heavens. Why the horse? Horses and humans have been allied for millenia conquering vast spaces together as a team the horse accepts the dominant position of the rider there is no biological reason for horses to want to accept humans. It would not seem to have any basis in a monkeys past to become horse riders, yet here we have this teamwork. I come from a family of horse people and the love of horses dominates the females in my family. They have only passing relations with men but with horses they have relations that go on for life. It is because as I see it the horse is always there, reliable, non judgemental. As a child I spent many an hour watching the horses interact. I would sit on the back of one and simply observe. The stallion if he was there would be constantly herding and chasing away other males, protecting his interest in the females and mounting them when they were in heat. His was a hectic round of battle and vigilance. The gelded males were relativly passive, they would form friendships play games such as sword fights with sticks they would put in their mouths and spar with one another, or they would scratch each others backs. They were socially not much different from the females except they were seen as irritants to the stallion to be chased away. The females would interact with one another as a sort of sisterhood, bearing the colts, swatting flies off one another head to tail. Mostly I remember then hanging out in the shade of trees in the hottest part of the day durring the summers. They would graze separately in the early morning and then gather in the mid day to socialize and swat flies off one another. Horses stand all the time, they almost never lie down except to roll occasionally in the water or the dirt to get rid of flies. They had their mild hierarchy, the stallion if he was around was the testosterone dictated master, but when he was not around, as often he was kept separate to keep him from biting and kicking the other horses then the elder gelding ruled. He had pride of place. It was a subtle thing. More a respect than an actual rule. We called him chief and he was. More of a benign ruler, where as the stallion was the hard taskmaster and if there was the slightest challenge he was there to do battle. Showing the whites of his eyes, barring his teeth and charging the competition real or imagined. He was fun to ride. You never knew when he would go off on you to chase a female. I had him once roll out from under me in a river with a saddle on his back. He just wanted to roll. I kicked and hit him and swore at him but he didn?t care. But mostly like all the horses he accepted human direction and authority. Interesting. Horses will work with people. They like humans it seems and we like them. It has been the case for thousands of years in the great Asian steppes. When did this relationship first develop? This is a list from an article in Discovery about the domestication time frame known for animals. Below it are excerpts from an article about research on what may be the earliest known horse riders central Asian Kazakhs from 6000 BC, or whomever lived at that location back then. ?Tamed Kingdom Humans have domesticated numerous animal species over the past 12 millennium, beginning with man?s best friend, the dog. Here is a sampling of roughly when and where the taming of some familiar critters occurred. 10,000 B.C. ? Dog: Israel/Iraq 7000 B.C. ? Goat: Iran ? Sheep: northeast Syria/southeast Turkey ? Pig: northeast Syria/southeast Turkey 6000 B.C. ? Cat: northeast Africa ? Cattle: Turkey ? Chicken: southeast Asia 4000 B.C. ? Horse: Eurasian steppe 3500 B.C. ? Donkey: North Africa ? Dromedary camel: southern Arabia ? Bactrian camel: south Asia 3000 B.C. ? Duck: southeast Asia 2500 B.C. ? Guinea pig: Andes A.D. 100 ? Turkey: Mexico A.D. 500 ? Honeybee: Europe A.D. 1000 ? Goldfish: China A.D. 1500 ? Rabbit: Europe Living World / Prehistoric Culture First to Ride Archaeologist Sandra Olsen doesn?t care much for living horses?it?s their bones she likes. And no wonder: they may have led her to one of the most important finds in the history of humankind by William Speed Weed, From the March 2002 issue, published online March 1, 2002 Sandra Olsen stands knee-deep in summer grass on a sprawling plain in northern Kazakhstan, peering at horse herders creeping ant like over a golden hill miles away. Kazakhs have roamed this cold dry grassland on horseback for centuries and are renowned for their ability to shoot arrows with accuracy while bouncing atop galloping steeds. As Olsen watches mammoth clouds gathering on the horizon, she envisions a time thousands of years ago when these plains were inhabited by hardy hunter-gatherers who lived on horse meat but did not know how to ride the horses they hunted. She muses on how radically their world must have changed when one of them finally climbed aboard a horse, tamed it, and rode like the wind. ?Prior to horseback riding, most people carried all their cargo on their shoulders, or they were restricted to using boats along rivers and coastlines,? says Olsen, an archaeologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. ?Horses were swift of foot, could easily support one or two human passengers, carry heavy loads, and survive on very poor quality vegetation or fodder. They were our first form of rapid transit.? Temporarily freed from a small corral, Kazakh horses test their legs. ?No animal has made a greater impact on societies than the horse,? says archaeologist Sandra Olsen. Ultimately, the taming of horses turned out to be a momentous turning point in human history. ?Horses caused the first globalization,? says Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. ?They allowed cultures to grow from isolated pockets to interconnected spheres of influence.? Archaeologists generally agree that this historical upheaval began in the only region on Earth where horses survived in significant numbers after the Ice Age: the vast Eurasian steppe that stretches from the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary to the Alta? Mountains in Mongolia thousands of miles away. Researchers also agree that domestication occurred before 3000 B.C., when horses suddenly started showing up in distant places like Turkey and Switzerland. But one of the most enduring archaeological mysteries has yet to be resolved. Who were the original horsemen, and what inspired them to straddle a 1,000-pound beast that could kick out their brains with one blow? Every summer Olsen returns to this spot in the heart of the Eurasian steppe, hoping to prove that her version of history is correct. Beneath her black Reebok?s and the knee-high grass lies a village that a primitive people known as the Botai lived in 6,000 years ago. Excavations at this site, dubbed Krasnyi Yar, and another site less than 100 miles to the west, have revealed that the Botai endured a harsh existence. They lived in pit houses dug into the ground and half-covered with some structure that has since rotted away. During winter, which lasts nearly nine months of the year, they dressed in the furs of various small mammals, huddled around fires, and ate horse meat. And they left behind some clues: Their pit houses are chock-full of bones, 90 percent of them from horses. What?s not immediately evident is whether those horses were wild or tame, or both. But after eight years of careful detective work, Olsen thinks she has deciphered the tale the bones have to tell. The Botai people not only hunted and herded horses for food, she says, they also used them as a means of transport. If she?s right, then she has found the earliest-known horsemen and, quite possibly, the inventors of riding. Humans have hunted horses across the Eurasian steppe for at least 100,000 years. Analysis of bones found at two sites near Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, suggests that 6,000 years ago, the Botai people were the first to turn their prey into a means of transport. In the process of measuring the Botai horse bones, Olsen says she found other, very large clues staring her in the face: ?Full skeletons of horses, entire vertebral columns, and pelvises. The Botai didn?t just leave behind horse parts. They?ve got whole horses.? Olsen is tall and fit enough to lug water crates, dig trenches, and perform the various chores of running a dig in the middle of the wide-open steppe. But the muscle power required to heft giant horse bones on and off the measuring table made her think of the Botai in the same spot 6,000 years ago: How far would they have been willing to move whole horses? ?I don?t think they went out, miles overland on foot, killed a horse, and dragged the whole 1,000-pound thing back here,? she says. They?d more likely butcher a wild horse in the field, divide up the meat for easy carrying, and leave heavy and non-nutritious parts behind. In that case, she argues, you wouldn?t find the spine and hips in the Botai village pit houses. ?Yet we find them,? says Olsen, who suggests that the full skeletons are the remains of domesticated horses as well as wild horses hauled home whole by means of living horses. She calls this bit of reasoning ?the schlep effect.? The schlep effect should also extend to other materials. Olsen is curious about quartzite stone scrapers she found at Krasnyi Yar, so she has sent out graduate students on geological surveys to find the quarry, which, even after 6,000 years, should still be visible. They haven?t found it, and if it turns out to be a great distance away?more than 50 miles?she?ll argue that the Botai must have had horses to go so far on a regular basis. But stone chips and flakes unearthed in recent excavations indicate that the Botai were carrying home chunks of rock larger than a human could carry long-distance. ?They probably had a simple bridle made of hide or hemp,? she says, drawing a little schematic of a rope looped around the front teeth of a horse?s skull. They might also have had lassos, whips, tethers, and hobbles of the same material. Most of the tackle we now associate with horses, from saddles to stirrups, are sophistication?s that were invented well into the history of riding. Hundreds of jawbones have tiny rubbing marks on them. These marks aren?t evidence of riding, Olsen says. That part of the jaw is covered in flesh when a horse is alive. But Olsen thinks the Botai may have used tools fashioned out of horse jawbones as a tool to make their riding ropes. She grabs a boomerang-shaped horse jaw to explain. ?This is a thong smoother,? she says, pointing to the inside curve of the boomerang. ?Using a scanning electron microscope, we?ve looked at this notch on dozens of these jawbones, and they?ve all been worn down by the rubbing of some sort of leather,? she says. ?If you put a strip of hide in the notch and pull it back and forth, any bendy piece will straighten out into strong usable leather,? she explains. Without a thong smoother, the longest piece of straight leather one can make is the same length as a horsehide, about six feet. With a thong smoother, the hide can be cut in a spiral, then straightened to create a strip of leather a dozen yards long. Olsen points out that the Botai had more thong smoothers than cooking pots. ?It?s a regular thong factory out here. I don?t think they built their homes with them.? Botai houses are 175-square-foot pits that would have been covered with thatch or adobe mud. ?It?s a deductive argument to say that they?re making horse tackle. But they used them for something,? she says. Most archaeologists dismiss as hindsight the notion that a people invented something because they knew the range of its benefits. Like the inventors of gunpowder, the cotton gin, or the Internet, the first horseback riders likely had no idea of the power of their discovery. Perhaps it was merely a daydreamer loafing in summer grass who envisioned mounting a horse. Perhaps it was a daredevil showing off to his friends, leaping from a tree onto the back of a colt and hanging on to the mane for his life. And, muses Olsen as the distant horse herders emerge from the storm, ?perhaps it happened here.? Anyway I don?t know, perhaps it was in that area. From the horses viewpoint perhaps it was a deal they made to get humans to stop hunting them for food. Perhaps some extra-wise horse came up with the idea that if they could get a human to see horses as other than an easy meal, then perhaps they would be able to coexist. The trick would be to convince a human to climb aboard instead of aiming an arrow at the horses heart. Horses had to find a way to get humans to fall in love with them. It is interesting that there are tales of humans like Alexander and his beloved Bucephalus, whom nobody could ride but Alexander because he realized that Bucephalus was affraid of his shadow. Pegasus the winged horse used by Bellerophon to defeat the Chimera and the Amazons. Interesting that Pegasus allowed Bellerophon to ride him upon seeing he had a bridle given to him by the goddess Athena. Moderns forget how much a man was associated with his horse. As a child I was taught to ride at about age 4. I learned to ride and never really learned how to ride a bike. I taught myself when I was 19, just as I taught myself to drive a car. Horseback riding was for me second nature as with most people of the steppes today. But all famous generals in history were associated with their horses. Cesar had his horse. This from Suetonius as excerpted on a web site called ?The Pet Museum? ?Caesar?s horse The ancient historian Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars makes for a very diverting read (he assures us that Caligula smelled strongly of goat), has this to say about Julius Caesar?s most unusual horse: ?He rode a remarkable horse, too, with feet that were almost human; for its hoofs were cloven in such a way as to look like toes. This horse was foaled on his own place, and since the soothsayers had declared that it foretold the rule of the world for its master, he reared it with the greatest care, and was the first to mount it, for it would endure no other rider. Afterwards, too, he dedicated a statue of it before the temple of Venus Genetrix (my note: Julius Caesar?s family was said to be descended from the goddess Venus). ? It?s also said he called his horse? Toes.? General Lee with Traveler. This is a rather long excerpt ?General R. E. Lee?s War-Horses, Traveller. Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. XVIII. Richmond, Va., January-December. 1890. The following communication from Major Thomas L. Broun, Charleston, Kanawha county, West Virginia, appeared in the Richmond Dispatch August 10, 1886: ?In view of the fact that great interest is felt in the monument about to be erected to General Lee, and that many are desirous that his war-horse should be represented in the monument, and as I once owned this horse, I herewith give you some items respecting this now famous war-horse, Traveller. ?He was raised by Mr. Johnston, near the Blue Sulphur Springs, in Greenbrier county, Virginia (now West Virginia); was of the ? Gray Eagle? stock, and, as a colt, took the first premium under the name of ?Jeff Davis? at the Lewisburg fairs for each of the years 1859 and 1860. He was four years old in the spring of 1861. When the Wise legion was encamped on Sewell mountain, opposing the advance of the Federal Army under Rosecranz, in the fall of 1861, I was major to the Third regiment of infantry in that legion, and my brother, Captain Joseph M. Broun, was quartermaster to the same regiment. ?I authorized my brother to purchase a good serviceable horse of the best Greenbrier stock for our use during the war. ?After much inquiry and search he came across the horse above mentioned, and I purchased him for $175 (gold value), in the fall of 1861, from Captain James W. Johnston, son of the Mr. Johnston first above mentioned. When the Wise legion was encamped about Meadow Bluff and Big Sewell mountains, I rode this horse, which was then greatly admired in camp for his rapid, springy walk, his high spirit, bold carriage, and muscular strength. ?He needed neither whip nor spur, and would walk his five or six miles an hour over the rough mountain roads of Western Virginia with his rider sitting firmly in the saddle and holding him in check by a tight rein, such vim and eagerness did he manifest to go right ahead so soon as he was mounted. ?When General Lee took command of the Wise legion and Floyd brigade that were encamped at and near Big Sewell mountains, in the fall of 1861, he first saw this horse, and took a great fancy to it. He called it his colt, and said that he would use it before the war was over. Whenever the General saw my brother on this horse he had something pleasant to say to him about ?my colt,? as he designated this horse. As the winter approached, the climate in the West Virginia mountains caused Rosecranz?s army to abandon its position on Big Sewell and retreat westward. General Lee was thereupon ordered to South Carolina. The Third regiment of the Wise legion was subsequently detached from the army in Western Virginia and ordered to the South Carolina coast, where it was known as the Sixtieth Virginia regiment, under Colonel Starke. Upon seeing my brother on this horse near Pocotalipo, in South Carolina, General Lee at once recognized the horse, and again inquired of him pleasantly about ?his colt.? ?My brother then offered him the horse as a gift, which the General promptly declined, and at the same time remarked: ?If you will willingly sell me the horse, I will gladly use it for a week or so to learn its qualities.? Thereupon my brother had the horse sent to General Lee?s stable. In about a week the horse was returned to my brother, with a note from General Lee stating that the animal suited him, but that he could not longer use so valuable a horse in such times, unless it was his own; that if he (my brother) would not sell, please to keep the horse, with many thanks. This was in February, 1862. At that time I was in Virginia, on the sick list from a long and severe attack of camp fever, contracted in the campaign on Big Sewell mountains. My brother wrote me of General Lee?s desire to have the horse, and asked me what he should do. I replied at once: ?If he will not accept it, then sell it to him at what it cost me.? He then sold the horse to General Lee for $200 in currency, the sum of $25 having been added by General Lee to the price I paid for the horse in September, 1861, to make up the depreciation in our currency from September, 1861, to February, 1862. ?In 1868 General Lee wrote to my brother, stating that this horse had survived the war?was known as ?Traveller? (spelling the word with a double l in good English style), and asking for its pedigree, which was obtained, as above mentioned, and sent by my brother to General Lee.? This is an excerpt about General Washington?s horses from Valley Forge Historical Society. ?Mr. John Hunter, an English visitor to Mt. Vernon in 1785, in a letter to a friend makes the following reference to the horses: ?When dinner was over, we visited the General?s stables, saw his magnificent horses, among them ?Old Nelson,? now twenty-two years of age, that carried the General almost always during the war. ?Blueskin,? another fine old horse, next to him, had that honor. They had heard the roaring of many a cannon in their time. ?Blueskin? was not the favorite on account of his not standing fire so well as venerable ?Old Nelson.? The General makes no manner of use of them now. He keeps them in a nice stable, where they feed away at their ease for their past services.?? My mother was the same way with her show horses, ?Apache Chief? a paint was black and white, had an easy disposition and a slow steady gallop. He was her favorite for trickriding. My mother did stunts on horesback in the rodeos in her youth. She still rides even now daily in her eighties. When Chief was too old to ride he was allowed to go out to pasture and was treated with respect as were all of her horses as they grew old. This is a traditional value among horse people. They treat their riding horses with respect and honor. Farmers and more pedestrian users of horses would sell their older horses for meat and horsemeat is still popular in France and Belgium in particular. But for horse lovers like my mother that would be an anathema, like eating your relatives when they were to old to work. But we should not forget that for most of recorded history the horse has been the main means of transportation in the world. They may be again as we run out of dinosaour bones. Tags: Birds and She Wolfs Aid Foundlings. Founding Myths, Horses and Humans In History From shniad at gmail.com Sun Oct 18 19:01:05 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:01:05 -0700 Subject: [R-G] National Breast Cancer Awareness Month ; Has the "peace movement" become part of the war machine? Message-ID: <83904d240910181801m65d04d7cne998877001e59650@mail.gmail.com> *Profits in Pink - National Breast Cancer Awareness Month **Has the "peace movement" become part of the war machine?* --------------------------------------------------- *Profits in Pink - National Breast Cancer Awareness Month* National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) is dedicated to breast cancer education through namely ?the importance of detecting the disease in its earliest stages through screening mammography, clinical breast examination, and for women 20 years of age and older, breast self-examination.?9 Little if nothing is said about true breast cancer prevention ? finding the causes of breast cancer in our environment and eradicating those carcinogens that enter our bodies every day. One of the reasons environmental carcinogens are not part of the discussion during NBCAM is because AstraZeneca, the makers of tamoxifen, are NBCAM?s primary sponsors. Sharon Batt, co-founder of Breast Cancer Action Montreal, writes this of AstraZeneca in her article ?Cancer Inc.?, 2000: AstraZeneca (formerly known as Zeneca), is a British-based multinational giant that manufactures the cancer drug tamoxifen as well as fungicides and herbicides, including the carcinogen acetochlor. Its Perry, Ohio, chemical plant is the third-largest source of potential cancer-causing pollution in the United States, releasing 53,000 pounds of recognized carcinogens into the air in 1996. When Zeneca created Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, it was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, paper, and plastics. State and federal agencies sued ICI in 1990, alleging that it dumped DDT and PCBs-both banned in the United States since the 1970s - in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Any mention of what role such chemicals may be playing in rising breast cancer rates is missing from Breast Cancer Awareness Month promos.10 http://tinyurl.com/yfn8342 --------------------------------------------------- Has the "peace movement" become part of the war machine? By John Stauber Published: Sunday March 29th, 2009 PR Watch?s John Stauber took on the Obama administration and the ?antiwar? movement in a recent series of posts on his blog. I?ve compiled them here: *Afghan Escalation OK with MoveOn, Anti-War Insiders* Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent noted last week that ?President Obama?s announcementof an escalation in the American presence in Afghanistan is being met with mostly silence ? and even some support ? from the most influential liberal groups who opposed the Iraq War. ... MoveOn.org ? declined to make any public statement about Obama?s Afghan policies in response to my queries. An official close to the group confirmed to me that MoveOn wouldn?t be saying anything in the near term. ... Nor will we hear anything from Americans United for Change, which ran $600,000 worth of TV ads against the Iraq War in the summer of 2007. ?Americans United for Change doesn?t plan to comment on President Obama?s new strategy,? a spokesperson for the group, Lauren Weiner, just emailed. Jon Soltz, the head of VoteVets ? came out in support of Obama?s Afghan strategy in an Op Ed with The Huffington Post. ... Liberal groups don?t want to distract from passing Obama?s enormous domestic agenda. ... And officials with some of these groups don?t want to lose inside influence with the White House.? Source: The Plum Line Blog, March 27, 2009 *Progressive Media ? A PR War Room for Obama* Liberal think tanks and advocacy organizations formed during the Bush/Cheney regime are working in close and well-funded coordination as a PR messaging machine for the Obama Administration?s foreign and domestic policies. A Washington Post blog noted that the Center for American Progress is now running Progressive Media which was begun by Tom Matzzie and David Brock in 2008 and now ?represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars.? Progressive Media is a joint project with CAP and Brock?s Media Matters Action Network and ?headed by well-known liberal operative Tara McGuinness.? Matzzie recently reminisced about his work with MoveOn?s ?Tara McGuinness, Eli Pariser and others? organizing Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. Today MoveOn, USAction and others in that coalition are working hard to push Obama?s policies, including rationalizlng or defending his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan as ?sustainable security? *How Obama Took Over the Peace Movement* John Podesta?s liberal think tank the Center for American Progress strongly supports Barack Obama?s escalation of the US wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is best evidenced by Sustainable Security in Afghanistan, a CAP report by Lawrence J. Korb. Podesta served as the head of Obama?s transition team, and CAP?s support for Obama?s wars is the latest step in a successful co-option of the US peace movement by Obama?s political aids and the Democratic Party. CAP and the five million member liberal lobby group MoveOn were behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war. AAEI was operated by two of Barack Obama?s top political aids, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, and by Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change and USAction. Today Woodhouse is Obama?s Director of Communications and Research for the Democratic National Committee. He controls the massive email list called Obama for America composed of the many millions of people who gave money and love to the Democratic peace candidate and might be wondering what the heck he is up to in Afghanistan and Pakistan. MoveOn built its list by organizing vigils and ads for peace and by then supporting Obama for president; today it operates as a full-time cheerleader supporting Obama?s policy agenda. Some of us saw this unfolding years ago. Others are probably shocked watching their peace candidate escalating a war and sounding so much like the previous administration in his rationale for doing so. http://gnn.tv/articles/3982/Obama_s_War --------------------------------------------------- From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Oct 19 05:20:55 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:20:55 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Twilight of Money Message-ID: <20091019202055.8de15601.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> The Archdruid Report (October 14 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society I've commented before in these essays that one of the least constructive habits of contemporary thought is its insistence on the uniqueness of the modern experience. It's true, of course, that fossil fuels have allowed the world's industrial societies to pursue their follies on a more grandiose scale than any past empire has managed, but the follies themselves closely parallel those of previous societies, and tracking the trajectories of these past examples is one of our few useful sources of guidance if we want to know where the current versions are headed. The metastasis of money through every aspect of life in the modern industrial world is a good example. While no past society, as far as we know, took this process as far as we have, the replacement of wealth with its own abstract representations is no new thing. As Giambattista Vico pointed out back in the 18th century, complex societies move from the concrete to the abstract over their life cycles, and this influences economic life as much as anything else. Just as political power begins with raw violence and evolves toward progressively more subtle means of suasion, economic activity begins with the direct exchange of real wealth and evolves through a similar process of abstraction: first, one prized commodity becomes the standard measure for all other kinds of wealth; then, receipts that can be exchanged for some fixed sum of that commodity become a unit of exchange; finally, promises to pay some amount of these receipts on demand, or at a fixed point in the future, enter into circulation, and these may end up largely replacing the receipts themselves. This movement toward abstraction has important advantages for complex societies, because abstractions can be deployed with a much smaller investment of resources than it takes to mobilize the concrete realities that back them up. We could have resolved last year's debate about who should rule the United States the old-fashioned way, by having McCain and Obama call their supporters to arms, march to war, and settle the matter in battle amid a hail of bullets and cannon shot on a fine September day on some Iowa prairie. Still, the cost in lives, money, and collateral damage would have been far in excess of those involved in an election. In much the same way, the complexities involved in paying office workers in kind, or even in cash, make an economy of abstractions much less cumbersome for all concerned. At the same time, there's a trap hidden in the convenience of abstractions: the further you get from the concrete realities, the larger the chance becomes that the concrete realities may not actually be there when needed. History is littered with the corpses of regimes that let their power become so abstract that they could no longer counter a challenge on the fundamental level of raw violence; it's been said of Chinese history, and could be said of any other civilization, that its basic rhythm is the tramp of hobnailed boots going up stairs, followed by the whisper of silk slippers going back down. In the same way, economic abstractions keep functioning only so long as actual goods and services exist to be bought and sold, and it's only in the pipe dreams of economists that the abstractions guarantee the presence of the goods and services. Vico argued that this trap is a central driving force behind the decline and fall of civilizations; the movement toward abstraction goes so far that the concrete realities are neglected. In the end the realities trickle away unnoticed, until a shock of some kind strikes the tower of abstractions built atop the void the realities once filled, and the whole structure tumbles to the ground. We are uncomfortably close to such a possibility just now, especially in our economic affairs. Over the last century, with the assistance of the economic hypercomplexity made possible by fossil fuels, the world's industrial nations have taken the process of economic abstraction further than any previous civilization. On top of the usual levels of abstraction - a commodity used to measure value (gold), receipts that could be exchanged for that commodity (paper money), and promises to pay the receipts (checks and other financial paper) - contemporary societies have built an extraordinary pyramid of additional abstractions. Unlike the pyramids of Egypt, furthermore, this one has its narrow end on the ground, in the realm of actual goods and services, and widens as it goes up. The consequence of all this pyramid building is that there are not enough goods and services on Earth to equal, at current prices, more than a small percentage of the face value of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other fiscal exotica now in circulation. The vast majority of economic activity in today's world consists purely of exchanges among these representations of representations of representations of wealth. This is why the real economy of goods and services can go into a freefall like the one now under way, without having more than a modest impact so far on an increasingly hallucinatory economy of fiscal abstractions. Yet an impact it will have, if the freefall proceeds far enough. This is Vico's point, and it's a possibility that has been taken far too lightly both by the political classes of today's industrial societies and by their critics on either end of the political spectrum. An economy of hallucinated wealth depends utterly on the willingness of all participants to pretend that the hallucinations have real value. When that willingness slackens, the pretense can evaporate in record time. This is how financial bubbles turn into financial panics: the collective fantasy of value that surrounds tulip bulbs, or stocks, or suburban tract housing, or any other speculative vehicle, dissolves into a mad rush for the exits. That rush has been peaceful to date; but it need not always be. I've argued in previous posts here that the industrial age is in some sense the ultimate speculative bubble, a three-century-long binge driven by the fantasy of infinite economic growth on a finite planet with even more finite supplies of cheap abundant energy. Still, I am coming to think that this megabubble has spawned a second bubble on nearly the same scale. The vehicle for this secondary megabubble is money - meaning here the entire contents of what I've called the tertiary economy, the profusion of abstract representations of wealth that dominate our economic life and have all but smothered the real economy of goods and services, to say nothing of the primary economy of natural systems that keeps all of us alive. Speculative bubbles are defined in various ways, but classic examples - the 1929 stock binge, say, or the late housing bubble - have certain standard features in common. First, the value of whatever item is at the center of the bubble shows a sustained rise in price not justified by changes in the wider economy, or in any concrete value the item might have. A speculative bubble in money functions a bit differently than other bubbles, because the speculative vehicle is also the measure of value; instead of one dollar increasing in value until it's worth two, one dollar becomes two. Where stocks or tract houses go zooming up in price when a bubble focuses on them, then, what climbs in a money bubble is the total amount of paper wealth in circulation. That's certainly happened in recent decades. A second standard feature of speculative bubbles is that they absorb most of the fictive value they create, rather than spilling it back into the rest of the economy. In a stock bubble, for example, a majority of the money that comes from stock sales goes right back into the market; without this feedback loop, a bubble can't sustain itself for long. In a money bubble, this same rule holds good; most of the paper earnings generated by the bubble end up being reinvested in some other form of paper wealth. Here again, this has certainly happened; the only reason we haven't see thousand-percent inflation as a result of the vast manufacture of paper wealth in recent decades is that most of it has been used solely to buy even more newly manufactured paper wealth. A third standard feature of speculative bubbles is that the number of people involved in them climbs steadily as the bubble proceeds. In 1929, the stock market was deluged by amateur investors who had never before bought a share of anything; in 2006, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who previously thought of houses only as something to live in came to think of them as a ticket to overnight wealth, and sank their net worth in real estate as a result. The metastasis of the money economy discussed in previous posts here is another example of the same process at work. Finally, of course, bubbles always pop. When that happens, the speculative vehicle du jour comes crashing back to earth, losing the great majority of its assumed value, and the mass of amateur investors, having lost anything they made and usually a great deal more, trickle away from the market. This has not yet happened to the current money bubble. It might be a good idea to start thinking about what might happen if it does so. The effects of a money panic would be focused uncomfortably close to home, I suspect, because the bulk of the hyperexpansion of money in recent decades has focused on a single currency, the US dollar. That bomb might have been defused if last year's collapse of the housing bubble had been allowed to run its course, because this would have eliminated no small amount of the dollar-denominated abstractions generated by the excesses of recent years. Unfortunately the US government chose instead to try to reinflate the bubble economy by spending money it doesn't have through an orgy of borrowing and some very dubious fiscal gimmickry. A great many foreign governments are accordingly becoming reluctant to lend the US more money, and at least one rising power - China - has been quietly cashing in its dollar reserves for commodities and other forms of far less abstract wealth. Up until now, it has been in the best interests of other industrial nations to prop up the United States with a steady stream of credit, so that it can bankrupt itself filling its self-imposed role as global policeman. It's been a very comfortable arrangement, since other nations haven't had to shoulder more than a tiny fraction of the costs of dealing with rogue states, keeping the Middle East divided against itself, or maintaining economic hegemony over an increasingly restive Third World, while receiving the benefits of all these policies. The end of the age of cheap fossil fuel, however, has thrown a wild card into the game. As world petroleum production falters, it must have occurred to the leaders of other nations that if the United States no longer consumed roughly a quarter of the world's fossil fuel supply, there would be a great deal more for everyone else to share out. The possibility that other nations might decide that this potential gain outweighs the advantages of keeping the United States solvent may make the next decade or so interesting, in the sense of the famous Chinese curse. Over the longer term, on the other hand, it's safe to assume that the vast majority of paper assets now in circulation, whatever the currency in which they're denominated, will lose essentially all their value. This might happen quickly, or it might unfold over decades, but the world's supply of abstract representations of wealth is so much vaster than its supply of concrete wealth that something has to give sooner or later. Future economic growth won't make up the difference; the end of the age of cheap fossil fuel makes growth in the real economy of goods and services a thing of the past, outside of rare and self-limiting situations. As the limits to growth tighten, and become first barriers to growth and then drivers of contraction, shrinkage in the real economy will become the rule, heightening the mismatch between money and wealth and increasing the pressure toward depreciation of the real value of paper assets. Once again, though, all this has happened before. Just as increasing economic abstraction is a common feature of the history of complex societies, the unraveling of that abstraction is a common feature of their decline and fall. The desperate expedients now being pursued to expand the American money supply in a rapidly contracting economy have exact equivalents in, say, the equally desperate measures taken by the Roman Empire in its last years to expand its own money supply by debasing its coinage. The Roman economy achieved very high levels of complexity and an international reach; its moneylenders - we would call them financiers today - were a major economic force, and credit played a sizeable role in everyday economic life. In the decline and fall of the empire, all this went away. The farmers who pastured their sheep in the ruins of Rome's forum during the Dark Ages lived in an economy of barter and feudal custom, in which coins were rare items more often used as jewelry than as a medium of exchange. A similar trajectory almost certainly waits in the future of our own economic system, though what use the shepherds who pasture their flocks on the Mall in the ruins of a future Washington DC will find for vast stacks of Treasury bills is not exactly clear. How the trajectory will unfold is anyone's guess, but the possibility that we may soon see sharp declines in the value of the dollar, and of dollar-denominated paper assets, probably should not be ignored, and cashing in abstract representations of wealth for things of more enduring value might well belong high on the list of sensible preparations for the future. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/10/twilight-of-money.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 19 10:23:48 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:23:48 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Fantasising Israel Message-ID: <83904d240910190923y3ef4f5d2w1ff300624b32c041@mail.gmail.com> http://australiansforpalestine.com/mendel-fantasising-israel London Review of Books 25 June, 2009 *Fantasising Israel Tel Aviv?s Centenary Good morning Israel! It is very late, and you have overslept. One can?t call a country peaceful when it has an extreme right-wing government and Ariel Sharon?s party in opposition. One can?t ? not logically ? describe any criticism of Zionism as anti-semitism and at the same time concede that 75 per cent of Israeli Jews wouldn?t want to live in the same building as an Arab. One can?t teach high-school students about the dangers of racism and discrimination, and the next day lecture them about the Israeli government project to Judaise the Galilee. One can?t describe ending the military occupation and handing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to its rightful legal inhabitants as a ?painful Israeli compromise?.* *Yonatan Mendel* At this very moment, long queues are probably forming outside Tel Aviv?s latest culinary thing: the yoghurterias. Even in the middle of the night you have to wait in line to get a cold and refreshing ice-cream yoghurt from the busy shop on Rothschild Boulevard. Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, the ice-cream parlours have allowed the ?white city? of Tel Aviv to experience the white revolution of the yoghurt. It is sweet and sour, made of natural ingredients, both healthy and tasty, with only 1.6 per cent fat, and topped with pieces of fresh fruit freshly cut up. Mangoes and pineapples, kiwis, strawberries, pomegranates, dates, melons and watermelons, red, yellow and green, are generously placed on top of the thick white yoghurt. A small cup of the local delicacy costs 18 shekels (about ?3), a medium-size cup is 21 shekels, and a huge cup is 27 shekels. This is the best gastronomic response to the humidity that prevails in Israel?s ?first Hebrew city?. The State of Tel Aviv, as other Israelis call it, is a lively, eventful and happy city. It is the centre of Israeli business activity, a relatively liberal, young, educated, secular and rich metropolis, with a long Mediterranean beach to escape to in the summer. It has a wide and diverse range of restaurants, caf?s and pubs, more and more of them as demand grows. The city serves everything, from lobsters to falafel, from Weihenstephan to the local brew, Goldstar. According to the Economist, Tel Aviv is ranked 32nd in the list of the world?s most costly cities; it is the most expensive city inthe Middle East. It is the home of Israeli opera, the philharmonic orchestra, the national theatre, and Israel?s largest university. Every year it hosts the biggest gay pride parade in the Middle East, as well as some of the world?s most prominent musicians and artists. Depeche Mode just came back from Tel Aviv; Madonna is on her way. However, it seems that it is exactly these positive, ?normal? and likeable characteristics of Tel Aviv that make it a paradigm of the moral and political blindness of Israeli society. Tel Aviv is not only one hour away from a European time zone, it is also one hour?s drive from the Gaza Strip. This year the city is celebrating its 100th anniversary. However, it didn?t just ?emerge from the sand? in 1909, as the Zionist myth tells us. Al-Sumayil, Salame, Sheikh Munis, Abu Kabir, Al-Manshiyeh: these are the names of some of the villages that made room for it and the names are still used today ? Tel Avivians still talk about the Abu Kabir neighbourhood, they still meet on Salame Street. Tel Aviv University Faculty Club used to be the house of the sheikh of Sheikh Munis. It?s an amazing feat, a tribute to the Israeli imagination, to be able to pronounce the Arab names without making the connection to the original Arab population, to think of Tel Aviv as the ?first Hebrew city?, and refuse to acknowledge its indigenous non-Hebrew inhabitants. This is a city where people speak French and English, but where hardly anyone speaks Arabic, one of the two official languages of Israel. There is no ?liberal? rhetoric when Tel Avivians need to rent their house to an Arab student or become the neighbours of an Arab family. Tel Aviv, the most ?liberal? and ?tolerant? city in Israel, as its residents like to imagine it, is not only 100 years old, but almost 100 per cent Arab-free. Then there is Jaffa. Located just a few miles south of Tel Aviv, it was probably the most prosperous and cosmopolitan of all Palestinian cities, with a port, an industry (Jaffa oranges), an international school system and a lively cultural life. In 1949, after Jaffa had been almost completely emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants (only 3600 were left out of a population of 70,000), the Israeli government decided to unite the two cities in one metropolis, to be called ?Tel Aviv-Jaffa?. In doing this, Ben-Gurion not only created a new Tel Aviv that was ?part of? biblical Jaffa, he erased thePalestinian city. As the years passed, it became known that the city of Tel Aviv, which is called ?Tel Aviv-Jaffa? only in official publications, had a beautiful and romantic southern ?district? called Jaffa. Tourist signs on the streets describe its history ? in Hebrew, English, French, German and Spanish, but not in Arabic. I was brought up in a small Jerusalemite quarter called Givat Oranim, which borders the neighbourhood of Old Katamon. In school we weren?t told about the history of Katamon, but we were taken a few times to St Simon?s Park. Beyond the park?s cypress and pine trees there was a small memorial to the Israeli soldiers who died in the 1948 Katamon battle: a battle, we dimly learned, between Haganah fighters and Arab rioters. On the way back we used to see the old Arab houses, now repopulated by Jewish families, but this didn?t trouble us, since the whole neighbourhood was Jewish and, as far as we were concerned, Arabs, let alone Palestinians, had nothing to do with the place. Besides the licence to fantasise that we received from our teachers ? to speak about the Katamon Arab rioters and never the Katamon Arab people ? I now believe that the whole landscape of the neighbourhood was recruited to encourage our imagination. The street names, for example, all have to do with the 1948 war. The Street of the Convoys, the Water Distributors, the Women?s Corps, the Guard Corps, the Conquerors of Katamon: these were the meeting points of my childhood. The place had no past prior to 1948, and the people who had lived there had no names. Nobody thought to tell the new kids on the block the story of the people of Katamon, and none of them had any reason to ask. It was 20 years before I finally toured Katamon, with two foreign friends, using a very old guidebook. Since there is no indication of what used to be there we consulted the pictures in our guidebook as we walked around the old Arab houses. It didn?t take long to find the former Iraqi Embassy, the Greek Consulate, the Czechoslovakian Embassy, the Lebanese Embassy and the Syrian Consulate, all of them now regular residential houses, showing no trace of their past. I also found the house of Khalil al-Sakakini, perhaps the most important Palestinian intellectual of his time, about whom I learned nothing in school. A sign next to the door reveals that it is now a day-care centre run by the Women?s International Zionist Organisation (Canada). Katamon, I discovered, was once a wealthy, mostly Christian Palestinian neighbourhood with two hotels in its centre: the Semiramis and the Park Lane. I had never heard of them, or heard that in January 1948 Haganah gunmen planted a bomb at the Semiramis, killing 26 people, including the Spanish vice-consul. This was one of the main factors which caused the flight of the Palestinian residents. Today, in the place where the Semiramis used to be, there?s a new house. It is a normal house. Absence can help Jerusalemites fantasise, sometimes even more than presence. An average Jewish Israeli can live an entire life without personally knowing, let alone befriending, a single Palestinian citizen of the same country. In kindergarten, primary school, middle school and high school, the two education systems are entirely separate: Jewish Israelis study with Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel study with Palestinian citizens of Israel. As teenagers we learned about the great projects of Aliya (Jewish immigration to Israel) and Kibbutz Galuyot (the ?ingathering of the Diasporas?). We learned about the establishment of the state, and I particularly liked the lesson dedicated to Israel as a ?society of immigrants?. The Palestinians, I never realised then, had not immigrated to Israel from anywhere. But this didn?t stop us from dreaming. For some Israeli sociologists, the army is the country?s ?melting pot?, but Palestinian citizens by and large are not inside the pot. They don?t want to fight their Palestinian brothers and sisters, and Israel doesn?t trust most of them to do so. So the ?melting pot? is made up of Jews only. One can argue that this encourages us to dream about a Jewish land for a Jewish people. It alsohelps us to forget that the Palestinians are part of Israeli society and citizens of the same state. Tel Aviv University showed the power of its imagination when, in May 2008, the student council decided to hold the fun and enjoyable annual Day of the Student on the exact day that Palestinians commemorate the Naqba. The excuse given by the student council was that ?we were not told of the problematic timing of the celebrations.? This is arguably even more dangerous than saying that it was done on purpose: it makes it plain that for the Jews in the country, even the educated and ?liberal? citizens of Tel Aviv, the Palestinian people are invisible. The bill that would make it illegal for Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel to commemorate the Naqba was initially approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in May this year. I don?t know if the bill will become law, but the Naqba undoubtedly took place; it is not a day of celebration for many people. A recognition of the Naqba, taking responsibility for the fate of the 700,000 Palestinians who escaped or were expelled in 1947-48, a willingness to try and compensate these refugees, now numbering several million: these gestures, even if symbolic, even if too late, would mean the beginning of the end of Israeli denial. But soon, the bill suggests, anyone who dares to express their feelings on this day will be imprisoned, in the ?only democracy in the Middle East?. The claim to be the ?only democracy?, as well as to have ?the most moral army in the world?: these phrases are great examples of the Israeli fantasising project. Another term that belongs in the twilight-zone, and helps Jewish society to maintain a liberal veneer over a very un-liberal attitude, is ?coexistence? (Du-Kiyum). It is applied to those cultural or sporting occasions when Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel actually meet. In other words, it is used when two very different forms of existence come together. Strikingly, when a school contains the children of Jewish Israelis and new Jewish immigrants from countries as diverse as Russia and Argentina, the term ?coexistence? is never used. The common existence of a Tel Avivian Jew and an Argentinian Jew is apparently obvious. However, when the Tel Avivian student meets a Palestinian colleague from across-the-street Jaffa, it comes under the heading of coexistence. This ?liberal? terminology acts like a sleeping pill for a society that wishes to dream about being liberal and democratic. Maybe it is time for someone to wake it up. Good morning Israel! It is very late, and you have overslept. One can?t call a country peaceful when it has an extreme right-wing government and Ariel Sharon?s party in opposition. One can?t ? not logically ? describe any criticism of Zionism as anti-semitism and at the same time concede that 75 per cent of Israeli Jews wouldn?t want to live in the same building as an Arab. One can?t teach high-school students about the dangers of racism and discrimination, and the next day lecture them about the Israeli government project to Judaise the Galilee. One can?t describe ending the military occupation and handing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to its rightful legal inhabitants as a ?painful Israeli compromise?. ?A villa in the jungle? is how Ehud Barak described Israel?s position in the Middle East. It?s a fantasy that the whole of Israel takes part in. In the heart of Tel Aviv one can find the Ha-Kirya complex, the headquarters of the Israel Defence Forces. The fact that Tel Avivians can calmly walk past this building without making a connection between their army and the occupied Palestinian territories, between their independence and the continued Palestinian suffering, is alarming. Israeli decadence isn?t measured in crime rates or corruption, but in their opposite: in having a prospering society and democratic elections while directly abrogating the Palestinians? most basic human, national and political rights. The way of fantasising another Israel ? peaceful and moral, Jewish and democratic, not perfect but not harmful ? has brought into being a virtual reality in which historical and contemporary events are blurred by wishful, deceitful and blinkered thinking. In order to recruit Israeli Jewish society to this mission, no induction orders were needed. Everything has come together ? Israel?s political and religious institutions, its media, its ?friends? around the world, its borders, its terminology, its collective memory, its imagination and also its ice-cream parlours ? to enable Israel to reach the stage where it has completely lost any connection with reality. Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on Israeli security and the Arabic language, at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge. LINK: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/mend01_.html From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 19 10:29:36 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:29:36 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Karzai fails in attempt to achieve Florida electoral standard Message-ID: <83904d240910190929i8f4e222l1070b527fa03068e@mail.gmail.com> AFP October 19, 2009 * Karzai vote cut to 48%: US monitor* KABUL ? Investigations into fraud in Afghanistan's elections have cut President Hamid Karzai's share of the vote to 48 percent, below the threshold for outright victory, a US election monitor said on Monday. Democracy International said figures released by Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) showed that almost 1.3 million votes cast in the August 20 poll were invalid, cutting Karzai's share of the vote from about 55 percent in the preliminary result. Following investigations into alleged fraud, the vote for Karzai's main rival Abdullah Abdullah rose to almost 32 percent, from the 28 percent he won according to official preliminary results, Democracy International said. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iEGQ6R5h5yVJrXTmITIMvmJkvqtA From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 19 20:18:25 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:18:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Pakistan, India and Secular Capitalism Message-ID: <886494.54896.qm@web43502.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Pakistan, India and Secular Capitalism Today I have been thinking about the recent events in Pakistan. This is how I think they played out. The Pakistani government wanted more American Aid. The Obama administration driven by Biden and his concern for Pakistan decide that the Pakistani government has to give up something big to get a decent aid package. There have been reports in the media about the Pakistani intelligence services being in bed with the Taliban. So someone over there gives up the head of the Taliban. A US Drone is sent in and it blows up the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan. The USA sends a major aid bill through congress but the congress gets cute and puts some stipulations on it saying that the Pakistani Army must show some reform results. This pisses off the Pakistani military. In the mean time the Taliban are upset about losing their leader so the word goes out as the new leadership takes charge that they want payback. The Pakistani military wants the USA to understand that this is serious business and not some kind of game they are playing. So boom go the bombs, bodies start flying and the media has a series of sensational stories of attacks on supposedly secure military facilities among other places in Pakistan. Collusion? Perhaps, we know that Punjabi and perhaps Kashmir?s groups are also involved in these attacks. We know that Pakistani Intelligence has a connection with these groups using them for their clandestine war against India. India in its turn has its operatives in Afghanistan and among the minorities in the Baluchistan etc where it foments resistance to the Pakistani regime. These are both nuclear powers. They are the number two and three Islamic nations in terms of population in the world. What does this mean to us in the west. Well it means that if one or the other side gets pissed off enough there could be a nuclear blast. The likelihood of one of the fundamentalist groups either Hindu or Muslim gaining control of either country exists. Both nations have large and very poor under classes. The majority of the people in India are peasants living in rural villages and it is not much different in Pakistan. They have plenty of reasons to not be happy with their governments. Both nations are democracies, with India more successful than Pakistan at maintaining the trappings of what is called a modern democratic government. Both nations are attempting to make headway in the post cold war world seeking a position between the two leading power blocs of China and the USA. Russia has slid to an ancillary position as a resource rich and potentially dangerous but economically weak player. Europe may break away from the American orbit but for now it is still firmly in the American camp. For now the USA is dominant still but with the increasing debt load in the hands of other nations, it is becoming more vulnerable just as the Soviet Union was when it needed to borrow money from the west and it was told to dismantle its empire if it wanted the loans. The Soviet Union collapsed because it could no longer finance itself successfully. If it had been willing to allow for the suffering that the people underwent as a capitalist Russia, it might have sustained itself but short of a war such as World War 2 when it was fighting for survival the leadership could not justify forcing the people to suffer and call it Communist readjustment. So they gave it up and played the captialist game. A few of them came out on top and many of them suffered. But back to Pakistan. The fundamentalists are offering an alternative path to the encroachment of modern capitalism. The people there do not want to be the exploited labor for the west to get cheap textiles and other products of the labor of the toiling masses. Consumerism although it has its advocates there, also has its enemies. What they see as the western disease is what they call immorality. It is the same immorality that the fundamentalist Christians rail against, the break up of the family, homosexuality and feminism. These issues are played by fundamentalists to gain popular support to oppose the machine of the current ruling class. They simply want to replace the liberal democratic model with a model based on the Koran or the Bible. Depending on if you are a Muslim Fundamentalist or a Christian one. The Christians have made no bones about being part of the capitalist system, hell capitalism was born out of protestantism. It was this group that in western Europe led the way to the industrial revolution. But the contradiction between the needs of capital for both parents to work and the Christian emphasis on the family has not been able to be resolved. The Christian Fundamentalists cannot deal with this contradiction and thus fail as a model. In the Muslim world the relationship to capitalism is more complex. Capitalism is associated with the western Crusader in the mind of many Muslims. They have been in the past in favor of trade and commerce. Mohammed was a merchant after all and the values of the Koran are the values of a trading people. So there is nothing in theory that would make Muslims anti capitalist, except for the restrictions on usury and charging interest to fellow Muslims. But that is easily gotten around by disguising interest as a fee. When you come right down to it there seems to be nothing in particular about Islam that is a threat to the west any more than Protestantism was to the Catholic Powers of Europe in the 16th century. It is merely a shifting of affiliations from one group to another. Smart players simply change the color of their uniform and move on. Vices under Islam exist they are simply controlled in such a manner that participants have to be more discreet than in the west for certain kinds of activities such as sexual play. To say that Moslems don?t get horny is absurd. They simply have a different method of sublimating it than in the west. Where there are serious differences is in regard to the rights of women and gays. In both the systems women have had to battle oppression and being treated as property or chattel and not as full individuals. In the west women have now been forced to play an equal part in the economy with men. This may be for the good in some respects but it has its downside, children have no parents. Both men and women are forced to participate in the economy to earn enough money to support the children who are now living without parents. This has caused serious social problems in the west. The radical increase in drug use among youth can be to a large degree attributed to there not being adequate supervision of children in the west. This is one of the reasons why the western model is so frowned upon in the Muslim countries and in India. They don?t want their kids turning into drugged out hip hop freaks. In the west we have commodified this underground culture and have paths to success for participants in this cultural underground to become part of the mechanism to market products to the youth. Drugs and alienation, antisocial behavior is seen as a side effect of western freedom not a result of the economy forcing adults to spend so much time working. The effect of capitalism in the family is accepted in the west, it is resisted in the east. That is a major difference. Feminism is a threat to the family. Until the west can provide a model that does not involve such a huge social cost it will continue to be resisted in the rest of the world where traditional cultures and alternatives exist. Tags: Fundamentalism East And West, Resistance to Capitalism and Western Secularism From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 19 23:13:52 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:13:52 -0700 Subject: [R-G] US will end up dealing with Taliban, tolerating warlords, to end Afghan fighting Message-ID: <83904d240910192213h31f8264bj91fdd5dee80a948d@mail.gmail.com> *US will end up dealing with Taliban, tolerating warlords, to end Afghan fighting *------------------------------------------------- *Taliban's Afghan allies tell Barack Obama: 'Cut us a deal and we'll ditch al-Qaeda' President Barack Obama's review of strategy in Afghanistan means America will end up making a deal with the Taliban, and tolerating warlords, to end the fighting.* By Nick Meo in Kabul http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6359601/Talibans-Afghan-allies-tell-Barack-Obama-Cut-us-a-deal-and-well-ditch-al-Qaeda.html ------------------------------------------------- From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 19 23:28:27 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:28:27 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Obama's Peace Message-ID: <83904d240910192228v44714d1cy42be711e74a2471b@mail.gmail.com> http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/968/op12.htm Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 October 2009 *Obama's Peace* By Joseph Massad ------------------------------------------------------------------------ For his continued wars against Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Iraqis, his support for the overthrow of democracy in Honduras, his abetting dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim worlds (which his government finances, arms, and trains in torture methods), his planning for a possible invasion of Iran, and his enthusiastic support for the racist Israeli settler colony (and its colonial wars and occupations against Palestinians), President Barak Obama received the Nobel "Peace" Prize. This comes as no surprise, as Obama joins a long list of recipients of this sham of a prize, who are distinguished for similar "peaceful" pursuits. These include terrorists like Menachem Begin, war criminals like Henry Kissinger, ethnic-cleansing colonial generals like Yitzhak Rabin, dictators like Anwar Sadat, corrupt politicians like Yasser Arafat, and imperial presidents like Jimmy Carter. Granting this overambitious power-hungry man the recognition of the Nobel committee is therefore most apt. Obama's most recent pursuit of peace has been to force the corrupt Palestinian Authority to discard the United Nations-issued Goldstone Report which detailed the war crimes committed by Israel in its murderous war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza ten months ago. Indeed, the first Black American President has just enjoined the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim countries from the pulpit of the United Nations to recognize Israel's right to be a racist "Jewish State." One wonders what the American reaction would be if Palestinian and Arab leaders would call on Obama and on African Americans to recognize the right of the United States to be a white state. This is the same Obama whose hubris was of such caliber that when he gave his infamous speech in Cairo several months ago he did not grieve the tens of thousands of Arab, including Egyptian, civilians killed by Israel's six decade-long wars and massacres against them; nor did he show solidarity with the millions of Arabs who were rendered refugees (including one million Egyptians during the War of Attrition) by Israel's barbaric bombings. Instead, Obama chose to give Arabs a lesson in European Jewish history and enjoined them to appreciate the holocaust committed by European Christians against European Jews and not the ongoing Nakba committed by European Jewish colonial settlers against Arabs. He has even forbidden Palestinians or other Arabs from ever attempting to destroy Israel's racist structures to end its racist rule. Indeed, Obama threatened Arabs that any attempt by them to destroy the racist basis of the Jewish state would be seen as tantamount to a holocaust. One wonders if he thinks ending segregation in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were tantamount to the extermination of white people! This is also the same Obama who, in order to fend off the accusation of being Muslim, told us during his electoral campaign that not only was he a Christian, but that he prays to Jesus every night and that the blood of Jesus Christ will redeem him. But general wisdom in the US has it that the election of Obama, even if it did not instantiate any change in US imperial policy abroad, has been the best thing that happened to most Americans, or at least to white liberal Americans and all African Americans, at the domestic level. This is a largely mistaken conclusion. Obama in my estimation is the worst thing that happened in recent years to African Americans, who continue to face institutional, structural, economic, cultural, social, and personal discrimination on a daily basis. The racism that informs US domestic policy and causes the poverty of African Americans is not unrelated to the racism that informs US imperial policies that impoverish Egyptians, Palestinians, Hondurans, Iraqis, and Afghanis. Obama's election has been best for white liberal Americans whose conscience can be assuaged by pretending that they are not racist at all and that indeed America is no longer a racist place evidenced by the election of a black man to the presidency. The fact that today African Americans are less educated and poorer than they were in the 1960s is immaterial to this self-congratulatory logic. Neither is the fact that there are more African American men today (in relative and absolute numbers) in America's racist jails than there had been at the height of Apartheid in South Africa. As for Obama's ongoing policies on education and racialized crime, they of course continue the policies of his white predecessors in pushing for more corporatization of schools and jails and busting teachers unions in the interest of the white business class. But Obama is the culmination of white liberal hopes entertained since the early seventies when the language of racism was transformed, as an effect of the cooptation of the Civil Rights movement, into a culturalist language. Black people were not inferior racially, white liberals averred, "their problem" was diagnosed as "cultural." The feeling was that if black Americans would simply speak and act like a fantasized white middle class and adopt its social and cultural values, they would cease to face discrimination and they would break the "cycle of poverty." Reform, it was decided, should aim to effect such transformation. The black middle class, formed in the late nineteenth century in the wake of the abolition of slavery, though a small minority among African Americans, was seen as a model to be emulated. Indeed white liberal remedies like Affirmative Action (the largest beneficiaries of which were and still are white women and not African Americans) when it benefited any blacks at all, it did so by benefiting the established small black middle class. It was conservative members of this class who, after reaping its benefits, would advocate against Affirmative Action. Thus, white women and middle class African Americans benefited from a program that improved little in the lives of most African Americans, while the latter would increasingly be blamed for benefiting from it at the expense of white men --a refrain used by most white conservatives and not a few white liberals! As Derrick Bell has eloquently demonstrated, Affirmative Action is a cover for a system by which racism continues to be institutionalized and African Americans continue to be blamed for refusing to improve their lives despite alleged Herculean efforts on their behalf. Some of the culturalist arguments of white liberals centered on Affirmative Action's production of white-acting black folks who would join the ranks of "hard-working Americans," a racist code that refers to white people which Obama often invokes in his speeches. The fantasy of low-grade American television programs in the late 1970s and 1980s like "Different Strokes" and "Webster" was to demonstrate that if white families were afforded the opportunity to raise black kids, these kids would end up as model citizens; indeed, they could grow up to become presidents one day. It was culture, you see, not race! Obama was of course not only raised by his white Christian mother and her family (something he --and Joe Biden --never tired of reminding us during his electoral campaign to fend off his paternal Muslim contamination), but even his black father was African and not African American. Passing him off as an example of what happens when African Americans are raised the "right way" is the pride and joy of white liberals enamored of their own culturalist-cum-racist ideology and inebriated by virulent American nationalism. Obama's continuation of America's imperial wars and aggressions is proof that if you put an African American in office who is raised "the right way," he will perform his imperial duties as well as any white president. Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize was therefore a major gain for white liberal Americans who can bask in the sun of their achievement. For after all, producing a few African Americans in the form of Barak Obama can and will silence whoever can still muster the courage to criticize this thoroughly racist system dubbed "American democracy" which continues to victimize most African Americans and much of the Third World. The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. From tchilds at resist.ca Mon Oct 19 23:32:41 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:32:41 +0000 Subject: [R-G] A Nobel Prize for Evo Morales - by Fidel Castro | countercurrents.org Message-ID: <1488087896-1256016708-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1934369852-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> A Nobel Prize For Evo Morales By Fidel Castro 19 October, 2009 Countercurrents.org If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native and his having delivered on his promises. For the first time, in both countries a member of their respective ethnic groups has won the presidency... Full article here: http://www.countercurrents.org/castro191009.htm Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From shniad at gmail.com Mon Oct 19 23:54:15 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:54:15 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Israel in Canada: Promised lands Message-ID: <83904d240910192254i2417e7fdsb9d38d17d23f7db1@mail.gmail.com> http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/968/cu3.htm Al Ahram 15 - 21 October 2009 *Israel in Canada: Promised lands* On the occasion of filmmakers withdrawing last month from the Toronto Film Festival in protest of Israeli involvement in the event, Eric Walberg takes a radical look at Israel's cultural and political connections in Canada ________________________________ The Teflon cloak Israel has tried to wrap itself in since Operation Cast Lead, the invasion of Gaza in December 2008, looks as strong as ever in Canada. "Canada is so friendly that there was no need to convince or explain anything to anyone. We need allies like this in the international arena," gushed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in July. Toronto's new Israeli consul, Amir Gissin, recently announced his Toronto staff would be expanded, despite the fact that Canada already has more Israeli diplomatic staff per capita than any other country in the world, due to "the city's large Israeli population" and the fact that Toronto is "an arena for Israel from a PR, cultural and commercial point of view". He also said it "reflects the importance of the Toronto Jewish community" in supporting Israel. Indeed, there are an estimated 100,000 Israelis who prefer the joys of living in Canada to facing the violence-charged daily life of Israel, and many Canadian Jews who opt for instant citizenship in Israel. Toronto Jews have been generous in their support of Israel since its founding. Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life. First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park -- built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law -- as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel's occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park's creation as an act of complicity in "ethnic cleansing" and Canada's involvement as "cover to a war crime". About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen's name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Then there is the wildly popular exhibition "Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,"at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum's ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Fran?aise between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA. Under international law and in accordance with Canada's and Israel's obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the "Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict", Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation -- the Cultural Property Export and Import Act -- which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that "museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken." The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to "take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory" and "return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory." Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, "almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country". Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God's Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don't matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has "cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its 'prehistory'." The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all "Arab" and "Muslim" archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region's shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that "the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition." The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival's "City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv", in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre-piece of Israeli Consul Gissin's special Canadian "Brand Israel" campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of "The Israel Project", launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more "benign" vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses "grassroots" encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project's Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. "Brand Israel" is intended to take the focus off Israel's treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In "The Israel Project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary", Frank Luntz explains: "Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel ... The language of Israel is the language of America: 'democracy', 'freedom', 'security', and 'peace'". Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to "make Israel relevant" to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be "an attack on all the senses." The idea was to see "how to introduce a brand into Toronto" with emphasis on "grassroots" exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv. *** But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro-Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian "grassroots" are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada's vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this "so friendly" country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue. There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada's official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecifically Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign "Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel", which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, "organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them." Allen's support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel's ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park "a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada." Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country's internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants' expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance."We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions," he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village's name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. "In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign," he said. "Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace." With Zochrot's efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF's charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park "Ayalon Park" over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country's involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel's 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use "West Bank (Israeli-occupied)" and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME's Thomas Woodley said, "We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There's no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today." ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum's brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM's PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer Al-Ahram 's questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME's concerns. Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient "Israelis" inhabited the kingdom of "Judea", that their "descendants" heroically prevented the "pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin" and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine -- for which there is no conclusive evidence -- are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin's "Brand Israel". The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of "The Israel Project" in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that "there is no such thing as Palestinians," Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, "In the case of a political identity that's being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse. Finally, TIFF's cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic "Toronto Declaration". Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film "Covered" in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut "Heliopolis", as did Ahmed Maher ("The Traveller"). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called "opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm-troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters" acting "effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's local fifth column" by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate's "Brand Israel" campaign. "I'm reminded of last year, when the opening night party for 'Passchendaele' featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn't TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What's the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor's presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?" Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. "It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s," enthused one activist to the Weekly. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel's best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, "a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa's apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: 'Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.'" Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that "Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it's imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation. http://ericwalberg.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Oct 20 03:15:33 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:15:33 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Marching Toward Zombieland Message-ID: <20091020181533.c8b0d912.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (October 19 2009) When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as "an enemy of the people" you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company, which last week announced third-quarter earnings of over $3 billion largely derived from converting zero percent loans from taxpayers into zero risk profits off of anything paying more than zero percent in interest, revenue, or dividends. The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the content of their dreams, but you can't argue with the fact that they are heavily armed to an extreme. And although it may be hard to measure with precision, one might venture to state that they are increasingly pissed off. How else explain popular entertainments like "Zombieland"? The political part of what has to date appeared to be an economic problem is resolving into a crisis of authority and legitimacy. When those in charge of a nation's livelihood prove to be comprehensively false and dishonest, the economic automatically turns political. Nobody believes the bankers anymore, of course, and nobody believes the interlocutors of the bankers - the Federal Reserve chairman, the Secretary of the Treasury, the heads of the SEC and a dozen other regulatory bodies - and increasingly the charming figure in the White House cannot be believed on these issues of the nation's livelihood. The questions lately revolve around whether the nation is destroying itself by inflation or deflation - by the willful destruction of the value of our currency to evade the repayment of debt, or by the hapless destruction of households, companies, and governments by default and bankruptcy. It's a fire-or-ice debate. Either way the nation is going down as a viable enterprise. The fiction that we can return to a Crate-and-Barrel credit card orgy has sustained the false of heart and mind for some months now, but even that pleasant reverie will come to an end as the foreclosures mount. Only remember, men living in their cars who have lost nearly everything else will still have guns. All these tensions beat a path into the holiday season when emotions run high, when blessings are counted and sorrows taste most bitter. So the big question now floating above the sheer data of Goldman Sachs profit announcement is: what kind of year-end bonuses will they dare to pay their executives and minions, and how will the "people" react? It seems to me that conditions are ripening for a bloodbath. The kind of heinous acts that we have feared emanating from foreign "evildoers" since the awful stunt of 9/11/01 are now most likely to come from among our own "people" - a few pounds of Semtex in the lobby of Goldman Sachs's New York headquarters ... a few men with market-grade small arms converted to full-automatic outside on the Wall Street sidewalk one evening at holiday time when the suits are leaving work for the day ... It won't take much. President Obama had better strike first. He's about the only figure left in the whole termite mound who has a shred of even potential credibility left because he still has the power to act. He can instruct the people who work for the executive branch to "claw back" any and all ill-gotten bank bonuses; he can direct the Justice Department to investigate everything from the uses of federal bailouts to grand-scale accounting fraud; he can fire people in high places who have failed to act and lost legitimacy. If he doesn't do these things soon then he's finished, too. In the wake of such a failure things will get fractal fast. The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d'etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans. I can't say how much it reflects reality. Even if it is a result of sheer happenstance - the tragic evolution of an industrial economy into a financial finagling economy - the citizens will still experience it as a stealing of their future. Whatever else one might say about American culture, it is keenly attuned to a sense of heroes and villains. We take great pride in our ability to blow away the bad guys. And life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde observed. If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein! Woody is on his way ... _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/10/marching-toward-zombieland.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Tue Oct 20 09:53:40 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:53:40 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor Message-ID: <83904d240910200853w2fc89151k1f0edfd08531dab3@mail.gmail.com> Business Week October 16, 2009 *Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor *by Bruce Einhorn The U.N. Development Program recently came out with a report looking, among other things, at income inequality worldwide. The UNDP ranked countries and regions based on a number of factors, including their Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini. We have listed the world's most advanced economies based on their Gini score, with zero marking absolute equality and 100 absolute inequality. Scandinavian countries, Japan, and the Czech Republic have the least amount of inequality. The U.S. is among the most unequal, but it's not No. 1. To see which economy is, read on. *Top 11 Countries With the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor * *No. 1 Hong Kong* *Gini score:* 43.4 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 207.2 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.0 Richest 10%: 34.9 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 17.8 Renowned for its high concentration of Rolls-Royces, expensive real estate, and posh shops, the Chinese special administrative region has plenty of rich who enjoy showing off their wealth. However, Hong Kong also has one of the largest public housing sectors in the world, with about half the population living in government-supported or -subsidized housing estates. The city has no minimum wage?except for domestic helpers from the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries. *No. 2 Singapore* *Gini score:* 42.5 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 161.3 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 1.9 Richest 10%: 32.8 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 17.7 Singapore is one of the world's most open economies, and it suffered badly following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers last year. Recently, though, the city-state's economy has rebounded, with GDP growing an annualized 14.9% rate in the third quarter compared with the previous quarter. *No. 3 U.S.* *Gini score:* 40.8 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 13,751.4 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 1.9 Richest 10%: 29.9 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 15.9 The share of income for the top percentile of Americans was 23.5% in 2007, the highest since 1928, according to Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist who won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in April. Income for the top 0.01% hit a record-high 6.04%. And the recession may be exacerbating income inequality. *No. 4 Israel* *Gini score:* 39.2 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 164.0 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.1 Richest 10%: 28.8 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 13.4 Gone are the days when Israel was one of the world's most egalitarian societies. Early Labor Zionist pioneers built kibbutzim for Jewish immigrants, but those collectives have fallen on hard times. The growing number of /haredim/, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, with large families and men who study the Torah rather than work has worsened the inequality problem. *No. 5 Portugal* *Gini score:* 38.5 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 222.8 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.0 Richest 10%: 29.8 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 15.0 While Portugal emerged from recession in the second quarter, the unemployment rate tops 9%. The ruling Socialists retained power in elections last month but lost seats to parties on the far left. *No. 6 New Zealand* *Gini score:* 36.2 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 135.7 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.2 Richest 10%: 27.8 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 12.5 According to the OECD, New Zealand had the biggest rise in inequality among member nations in the two decades starting in the mid-1980s. The country's economy emerged from recession in the second quarter, but with growth of just 0.1%, the central bank is likely to keep interest rates low until well into 2010. *No. 7 (tie) Italy* *Gini score:* 36.0 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 2,101.6 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.3 Richest 10%: 26.8 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 11.6 Italians are focused now on the melodrama surrounding embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The political crisis comes at a time when the economy is still mired in recession even as countries like Germany and France are growing again. *No. 7 (tie) Britain* *Gini score:* 36.0 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 2,772.0 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.1 Richest 10%: 28.5 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 13.8 According to Britain's Institute of Fiscal Studies, a government-funded think tank, the average national income, adjusted for inflation, grew 0.5% between 2004 and 2008. In contrast, the same figure for the top 90% income bracket jumped 1.2% over the same period. That was predominantly driven by large salaries and bonuses from the financial services sector in the pre-credit crunch era. *No. 9 Australia* *Gini score:* 35.2 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 821.0 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.0 Richest 10%: 25.4 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 12.5 While developed economies elsewhere fell into recession, the Lucky Country's good fortune held out, with Australia continuing to grow thanks in part to strong demand from China for its resources. This month the central bank raised interest rates, making Australia a leader among countries moving away from monetary easing. *No. 10 (tie) Ireland* *Gini score:* 34.3 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 259.0 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.9 Richest 10%: 27.2 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 9.4 Put aside the old comparisons to Asia's tiger economies. Ireland's workers are suffering badly from the recession; the unemployment rate soared in August to 12.5%. That's the second-worst in the EU, behind only Spain. *No. 10 (tie) Greece* *Gini score:* 34.3 *GDP 2007 (US$ billions):* 313.4 *Share of income or expenditure (%)* Poorest 10%: 2.5 Richest 10%: 26.0 *Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%:* 10.2 Newly elected Prime Minister George Papandreou's government faces potential disciplinary action from the European Union, which has reprimanded Greece for a budget deficit of 6% of GDP, twice the EU limit. The IMF projects the economy will shrink 0.8% this year. From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:22:43 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:22:43 -0500 Subject: [R-G] The Oceans are Coming Message-ID: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=533&Itemid=1 The Oceans are Coming by Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov 19 October 2009 This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer. Part I: The Global Mistake In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that?s a balmy 7.2?F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter ? the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest -- will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like: In a 4?C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100? in a 4?C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India... the people most vulnerable to a 4?C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4?C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape. And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there? The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world?s potential ice melt ? the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland ? simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets? contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC. Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world?s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what?s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject. What Do We Know? There are some things that we do know. Based on the volume of ice lying upon the landmass of Greenland, it is quite possible to estimate how far the oceans would rise, should all of it melt away: something in the region of 7.2 metres. That may not seem like a lot, but, as you will see in Part 2 of this series, it will be enough to have devastating consequences for the lower lying parts of the world, which, not coincidentally, are the locations of some of the world?s largest cities. (In fact, there is something you can do to make reading this article more exciting: find out how high above sea level you live, and, as you read along, keep checking to see if your head is still above water.) Rapid, dramatic change beggars the imagination. The Greenland Ice Sheet is massive, having formed during the first cycle of the most recent major glacial period, and our instinct tells us that it should remain stable in all but the most extreme conditions. It is disconcerting to know that the onset of an ice age can take as little as two decades, implying that an equally sudden melt cannot be ruled out. It is also disconcerting to know that the conditions required for a sudden melt are pretty much guaranteed to occur, and that, in fact, the ice sheet is already melting. We don't have to imagine it. All we have to do is observe: For the first time since measurements were started [in 2002], the extremely warm summer of 2007 saw a decrease in the ice mass at high altitudes (above 2,000 metres). It also became clear that the ice loss is advancing towards the North of Greenland, particularly on the west coast. The areas around Greenland, particularly Iceland, Spitsbergen and the northern islands of Canada, seem to be particularly badly affected. This analysis, by the team controlling the GRACE satellite system, is essentially saying that conditions like those in 2007 are able to counteract the damping effect of even the thickest parts of Greenland?s ice sheet. So, when will all the ice melt? There are two schools of thought, but they basically come down to when the temperature of Greenland increases by either 4?C or 8?C above the mean global average of the last 100 years. Four degrees... haven?t we seen that first figure before? In fact, a global rise of 4 degrees corresponds to a considerably larger rise of Arctic temperatures: conventionally this is between 5 and 6 degrees, but if you look at the 2009 Hadley Centre forecasts, a global rise of 4 degrees actually corresponds to an 8 degree rise across much of Greenland. Pick any number you like, but Greenland is melting. WAIS To Go? We can take some comfort in the thought that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would take at least 100 years once it reached that temperature. But it accounts for just 10% of the global ice volume, the other 90% being locked away in the seemingly impermeable heart of Antarctica. Or not: the East Antarctic ice sheet (that?s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries, but West Antarctica (the peninsula that reaches north toward South America) is not stable at all. The WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) is largely below sea level, having over several million years pushed down and scoured out the bedrock beneath it, but because of its huge area, the part of it that is above water still manages to comprise around 10% of the total Antarctic ice volume. If this were to melt then the oceans would rise by another 5 metres, in addition to the thermal expansion of 1.4 metres, plus whatever has been sloughed off the Greenland ice sheet, giving us 13.6 metres, or close to 45 feet. (Is your head still above water? Please check again now.) Icebergs and glaciers have been calving from West Antarctica at an accelerating rate over the last decade, which groups such as the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have been carefully monitoring, with increasing alarm. In 2002, to most glaciologists? horror, the entire Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It consisted largely of floating ice, and so despite the immense size of the shelf, this development had no effect on sea levels. But it did presage a new era of rapid ice movement, never before recorded in the modern era. It also had another, even more sinister side-effect on West Antarctica: An ice bridge connecting the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula to Charcot Island has disintegrated. The event continues a series of breakups that began in March 2008 on the ice shelf, and highlights the effect that climate change is having on the region. Images from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on the Terra and Aqua satellites showed the shattering of the ice bridge between March 31, 2009 and April 6, 2009. The loss of the ice bridge, which was bracing the remaining portions of the Wilkins ice shelf, will now allow a mass of broken ice and icebergs to drift into the Southern Ocean. The Wilkins is following a pattern of instability and rapid collapse that many Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have experienced in recent years. Scientists think that the dramatic loss of these ice shelves, which have existed for hundreds to thousands of years, is an important sign of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere. The loss of an ice shelf can also allow the glaciers that feed into it to start flowing ice into the ocean at an accelerated rate, contributing to a rise in global sea levels. The last phrase is the most important one; at the moment there is no major concern about the status of most of the WAIS, and the temperature seems to be holding, but if the ice shelves are no longer able to hold back the progress of the glaciers, then they will accelerate towards the sea, themselves causing further instability within the WAIS. Going back to the Hadley Centre article again, it was thought that Greenland was invulnerable to change not so many years ago, but the map produced by the Centre shows warming of between 4 and 10 degrees by 2055. This would still keep the vast majority of Antarctica well below freezing; but ice under extreme pressure can exhibit unusual patterns of behaviour, including increasing internal temperature and self-lubrication. This is what often happens at the bases of deep glaciers, allowing them to slide even when temperatures are well below freezing. The results may continue to confound and horrify glaciologists for years to come while sending the rest of us scampering for higher ground. A Storm Surge of Forecasts 2001 was the first year we were able to say with any scientific certainty what was likely to happen to global sea level. It seems strange that it should take so long to provide forecasts, but until a consensus on global temperature rise had been achieved, via the IPCC?s Third Assessment Report (TAR), then the (supposedly) largest element of the sea level rise equation -- the aforementioned thermal expansion -- could not be included. So what did the IPCC say back in 2001? If you read their report, you will discover that of the absolute maximum 0.5 metre rise by 2090, predicted by this august group of scientists, a whopping 74% was due to thermal expansion, with 11cm (22%) dependent on glacier and ice cap melting (mountaintops, essentially), and a miserly 2cm attributable to the possible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But then in this report the absolute worst case ?business as usual? model shows a 2?C rise by 2050, which we now know to have been a bit shy of the mark. Then, in 2007, the landmark 4th Assessment Report raised the bar in both possible temperature rise (from 5.6?C to 6.4?C by 2100) and global sea level rise, to... wait for it... 0.57 metres! Of this new figure, which hardly seems to reflect the immense strides made in feedback loop analysis in the intervening six years, 38 cm or 67% of the rise is attributable to thermal expansion. With this in mind, it would pay to reflect on the types of changes described in this essay, and consider what the IPCC would have predicted had ice sheet melt been included in the final version. Forward to 2009, and two papers jump out. The first, from the relatively conservative Dr Mark Siddall at the University of Bristol is now talking about a possible rise of 0.82 metres by the end of this century, which is based on the IPCC 4AR maximum temperature of 6.4?C. The second paper, by Grinsted, Moore and Jevrejeva, again based on the IPCC maximum, suggests that a 1.3 metre rise by 2100 is not out of the question. How much of this can be attributed to Greenland and Antarctica is uncertain, but predicting the future based on thermal expansion plus a paleological record of a few thousand years, during which both ice sheets remained fully intact and temperatures never rose above 1.5?C seems a pretty poor basis upon which to predict future tipping points! If we are to take the two papers at face value and strike a mean of 1.06 metres, by overlaying the latest predictions of temperature rise ? which are double the IPCC predictions ? we get at least 2 metres globally. That?s just thermal expansion plus a few hundred glaciers and mountaintop ice caps. Now consider what happens when you include the following: * Tipping point effects above 8?C in Greenland * Unknown effects of similar temperature increases on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet * Increases in storm surge height and storm intensity caused by a rise in oceanic and atmospheric energy levels due to temperature rise * Increases in inland flooding due to convectional storms upon hardpan (parched clay soils) and more energetic rainstorms from temperature increases The last two are the inevitable effects of increasing atmospheric energy due to higher temperatures, and are critical because most coastal flooding is the result of either coastal storm surges and high winds, inland flooding inundating river catchments, or a combination of the two. The flooding of eastern England and the Netherlands in 1953, which resulted in the deaths of around 2,500 people, was a combination of a low pressure storm surge, an intense North Sea storm and a high spring tide. Without any inference of global sea level rise, the water rose along the North Sea coast by 4.5 metres. Via Denmark and the German curve, the storm got closer to the Dutch coast. On the night of the 31st of January, the storm over the North Sea got even stronger, reaching gales of force 11. The Dutch coast was being hit with force 10 winds. The storm continued, and in the south-western Netherlands, wind speeds of force 9 were measured for 20 consecutive hours. The power of the storm drove the water so high that the water was unable to retreat away sufficiently. There was no ebb tide. Shortly after midnight, the maximum whip up of the water was measured - the wind drove the water up to 3.1 metres. Three hours later, there was a spring tide. Through the combination of this spring tide, and the huge whipping up of the water, at 3hr24, the highest recorded water level was reached - 4.55 metres above NAP (Normal Amsterdam Water Level). The dikes were not designed to hold such high water levels, and [at] around 3 o?clock that night, the first dikes broke through... And so there we have it. A few degrees warmer, a few metres higher, and a couple of decades later, and there we will be, floating about, holding on to other things that float, perching in tree limbs and on rooftops, and hoping to be rescued. We know where we are going to end up eventually: at least 20 metres (65 feet) higher. The one thing we still do not know is how long it will take for us to get there. We could keep waiting for the scientific community to settle on a consensus forecast, but this may take so long that it will have to be delivered through a snorkel. However, we can already observe that the doubling period of scientific climate forecasts is uncomfortably short, and, to provide for a margin of safety, we should at least double the latest estimates. If the latest forecast is for 2 metres this century, let us assume that we will see at least 4, and plan accordingly. But do the exact forecasts even matter? We already know enough to say that there is a high probability that ocean levels will rise, significantly, within the lifetimes of most of the people alive today, disrupting the patterns of daily life for much of the world's population, which tends to be clustered along the coastlines and the navigable waterways. We also know that ocean levels will continue to rise far into the future, until they are 20 to 36 metres higher than they are today. We know that continuous coastal erosion and salt water inundation, coastal flooding and displacement of coastal populations, which number in the billions, toward higher ground, will be normal and expected. We also know that there is a high chance these changes will occur based on present carbon dioxide levels, regardless of what is being currently proposed by the governments of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, what we do not know is perhaps most important of all if you are in the middle of all this. We have not considered what ways of inhabiting the changing coastal landscape will remain viable. How will we have to adapt if any of us are to avoid being swept up in a continuous, endless surge of refugees feeling for higher ground, abandoning all they own and all they know? These are the questions that the next two parts of this series of articles will examine. * * * * * Keith Farnish is author of Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis ( timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things. Dmitry Orlov is author of Reinventing Collapse from New Society Publishers. He has several articles on Culture Change, viewable at CultureChange.org Search The above article appeared on cluborlov.blogspot.com Culture Change Editor's comment on ClubOrlov: One of the most relevant positive feedback loops regarding sea level rise is the engulfing and killing of vegetation on land by the unwelcome salt water. The affected vegetation becomes a carbon-emissions source which in turn causes more global warming and thus additional sea level rise, inundating more land and killing more plants and trees that used to be out of the harmful ocean's way. Then that vegetation becomes a source of more carbon for global warming and sea level rise. This causes even greater inundation of land areas and the vegetation on them. What happens then is more carbon emissions from the dead plant material, adding to global temperature rise. In turn... Oh, thank Goddess Gaia I finally fell off that merry-go-round. There was a play in the '60s, "Stop the World I Want to Get Off." Jan Lundberg, at sea level http://culturechange.org ============== Join the alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:25:13 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:25:13 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Baffin Island reveals dramatic scale of Arctic climate change Message-ID: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/baffin-island-reveals-dramatic-scale-of-arctic-climate-change-1805623.html Baffin Island reveals dramatic scale of Arctic climate change Study delves back into 200,000 years of history to demonstrate the devastating impact of global warming By Steve Connor, Science Editor Tuesday, 20 October 2009 A frozen lake on a remote island off Canada's northern coast has yielded remarkable insights into how the Arctic climate has changed dramatically over 50 years. Muddy sediment from the bottom of the lake, some of it 200,000 years old, shows that Baffin Island, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, has undergone an unprecedented warming over the past half-century. Scientists believe the temperature rise is probably due to human-induced warming. It has more than offset a natural cooling trend which began 8,000 years ago. Instead of cooling at a rate of minus 0.2C every 1,000 years ? a trend that was expected to continue for another 4,000 years because of well-known changes to the Earth's solar orbit ? Baffin Island, like the rest of the Arctic, has begun to get warmer, especially since 1950. The Arctic is now about 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900, confirming that the region is warming faster than most other parts of the world. Baffin Island, the largest island in the Arctic Canadian Archipelago, is subjected to prevailing northerly winds that keep average temperatures at about minus 8.5C, well below similar Arctic locations at a comparable latitude. Polar bears, arctic fox and arctic hares walk the island's territory while narwhal, walrus and beluga whale patrol its coastline. The island is dotted with lakes, the bottoms of which have been periodically scoured by glaciers with each passing ice age. However, scientists have found that the sediments at the bottom of some of the lakes, which build up each year rather like tree rings, have survived this scouring process intact. This has enabled the scientists to take core samples going back tens of thousands of years. One such lake on Baffin Island, known as CF8, has been found to have layers of sediment dating back 200,000 years, which makes it the oldest lake sediment bored from any glaciated parts of Canada or Greenland, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is the CF8 lake that has provided scientists with the sediment core showing the unprecedented warming of Baffin Island over the past few decades, compared with a time span going back 200,000 years, a period which included two ice ages and three interglacial periods ? and roughly the time that Homo sapiens has been on earth. "The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores," said Yarrow Axford of the University of Colorado at Boulder. "We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes." The scientists found that certain cold-adapted organisms in the layers of sediment have decreased in frequency since about 1950. Larvae from species of Arctic midge, which only live in cold conditions, have abruptly declined and two species in particular have disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, a species of lake alga or diatom that is better suited to warmer conditions has increased significantly over the same period, indicating longer periods when the lake's surface was free of ice, the scientists said. Other sediment measurements support a dramatic reversal of the natural cooling trend, they said. As part of a 21,000-year cycle, the Arctic has been receiving progressively less summertime energy from the Sun for the past 8,000 years because of a well-established "wobble" in the Earth's solar rotation ? the Earth is now 0.6 million miles further from the Sun during an Arctic summer solstice than it was in 1BC. This decline will not reverse for another 4,000 years, but changes to the climate of Baffin Island show that the cooling it should have caused has gone into reverse in the past few decades. A separate team of scientists analysing Arctic lakes in Alaska found a similar warming trend in recent years compared to sediment records going back a few thousand years. They, too, concluded that the warming was unprecedented and could be explained by human activities, namely the build of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. "The amount of energy we're getting from the Sun in the 20th century continued to go down, but the temperature went up higher than anything we've seen in the last 2,000 years," said Nicholas McKay of the University of Arizona in Tucson . "The 20th century is the first century for which how much energy we're getting from the Sun is no longer the most important thing governing the temperature of the Arctic," said Dr McKay, when the study was published last month in the journal Science. ============== Join the alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:27:03 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:27:03 -0500 Subject: [R-G] A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction Message-ID: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/19 CommonDreams.org Monday, October 19, 2009 Published on Monday, October 19, 2009 by TruthDig.com A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction by Chris Hedges We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee. ?If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won?t be anything left,? author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. ?If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.? The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response. The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward. ?All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given,? said Jensen, who wrote ?Endgame: The Problem of Civilization? and ?The Culture of Make Believe.? ?The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What?s real is real. Any social system?it does not matter if we are talking about industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people?their way of life, is dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you don?t have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life. How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship with? We have forgotten what is real.? The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history. We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting the power of corporations. The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation?s water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world. ?If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because your life depends on it,? said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the country called Deep Green Resistance [click here and here] to build a militant resistance movement. ?If your food comes from a land base and if your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important than life.? Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the ?planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.? He has determined that the world must stop burning coal by 2030?and the industrialized world well before that?if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States. ?We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is killing the planet,? Jensen said. ?We need to get really serious. We are talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil infrastructure. I don?t care, and the trees don?t care, if we do this through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12 hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to stop the oil economy.? The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform. We are left powerless. Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were not there to rescue the system. ?We think we are the doctors,? Herzen said. ?We are the disease.? Copyright ? 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. ============== Join the alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:29:10 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:29:10 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture? Message-ID: http://www.monthlyreview.org/091019kirschenmann.php Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture? Frederick Kirschenmann Let us accept the current challenge ? the next great energy transition ? as an opportunity not to try vainly to preserve business as usual (the American Way of Life that, we are told, is not up for negotiation), but rather to re-imagine human culture from the ground up, using our intelligence and passion for the welfare of the next generations, and the integrity of nature?s web, as our primary guides. ? Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything1 One of the great missteps in most of the future energy scenarios propagated in the popular media is the notion that we can transition to ?alternative, renewable energy? and thereby ?wean ourselves from Mideast oil.? The underlying assumptions in this scenario seem to be that energy supply is an isolated challenge that can be solved without major systemic changes, that we can meet that challenge by simply switching from one energy source to another ? from fossil fuels to wind, solar, biofuels or a host of other alternatives ? and that our current industrial culture and economy then can continue on the present course. Probably nothing could be farther from the truth. As Richard Heinberg points out, ?Making existing petroleum-reliant communities truly sustainable is a huge task. Virtually every system must be redesigned ? from transport to food, sanitation, health care, and manufacturing.?2 As Heinberg implies, the transition we now must contemplate is a shift from an oil dependent society to an oil independent society. Such a transition must include, but is clearly not limited to, our food system. The transition must be comprehensive. We must ?re-imagine human culture from the ground up.? The ?transition movement,? which was launched by Rob Hopkins, a permaculture teacher schooled in ecological design, acknowledges such a comprehensive approach, and the movement is designed to help communities make that transition. Originally focused on transitioning towns, the movement has now expanded to transitioning islands, peninsulas, and valleys, and it may serve as a model for the kind of transition we need to contemplate in our food and agriculture systems. In his new book, Hopkins points out that the ?transition initiatives are based on four key assumptions?: 1.Life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise. 2.Our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil. 3.We have to act collectively, and we have to act now. 4.By unleashing the collective genius of those around us to design our energy descent creatively and proactively, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching, and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.3 While ?virtually every system must be redesigned,? the redesign of our modern industrial food and agriculture system is particularly urgent because food is essential and our current food system is almost totally dependent on vast petroleum inputs at every level. As Dale Allen Pfeiffer has put it, in our modern food system we are, in effect, ?eating fossil fuels.?4 All of our fertilizers and pesticides are either made from, or acquired by means of, fossil fuels. Farm equipment is manufactured and operated with fossil fuels; irrigation is carried out using fossil fuels; and our food is processed, packaged, and transported from farm to table with fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels, our industrial food system likely would collapse. The Limits of Industrial Agriculture While the industrialization of agriculture was somewhat successful in achieving its limited goals of maximizing market-based production and providing short-term economic returns, it largely ignored many of its unintended negative consequences. Some of these unintended consequences now have been documented in the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report. The most critical negative consequences include soil and water degradation and the loss of both human capital (farmers) and social capital (vibrant rural communities). Industrial agriculture also largely overlooked the need for resilient production and a long-term view of the economic returns. Consequently, it ignored the erosion of the very capital that enabled it to be so successful ? cheap energy, abundant, fresh water, stable climates, healthy soil, and vibrant communities. Since these resources are wholly interdependent, it is imperative that we account for the impact (costs) of their widespread depletion, even as we explore the possibility of bringing about a new agriculture. Industrial agriculture finds itself in a predicament: how does it fulfill its stated goal of ?feeding the world? when the resources on which it depends are being depleted, and the social and physical infrastructure on which it has relied is collapsing? As the authors of the recent United Nations report, the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), have indicated, ?Agriculture [is] at a Crossroads.?5 The global expansion of industrial agriculture was based on a set of core assumptions, namely that technology, trade, and aid could successfully address global food shortages and inequities, and that maximum production, short-term economic return, unlimited growth, the free market, and labor efficiency were the key components that would bring about this industrial food miracle. As we begin to assess its overall results, many questions are now being raised about our industrial food system. These issues are of concern, not only to food activists, health care professionals, nutritionists, and farmers, but increasingly to the scientific community, as well. As the authors of the IAASTD report put it: Recent scientific assessments have alerted the world to the increasing size of agriculture?s footprint, including its contribution to climate change and degradation of natural resources. By some analyses, agriculture is the single largest threat to biodiversity. Agriculture requires more land, water, and human labor than any other industry. An estimated 75% of the world?s poor and hungry live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. As grain commodity prices rise and per capita grain production stagnates, policy-makers are torn between allocating land to food or fuel needs. The authors then propose that ?The governance of agriculture requires new thinking if it is to meet the needs of humanity now and in the future.?6 At the same time that we recognize the many negative, unintended consequences of our industrial agriculture, we must take note of the fact that the planet?s human population has tripled in our lifetime, and is reportedly headed toward a peak of nine billion people by mid-century. This burgeoning human population is also rapidly increasing its rate of consumption as individuals change diets. According to some estimates, global meat consumption will double or triple by 2070. The production of meat using grains such as corn and soybeans that could be directly consumed by humans as food is an inefficient way to supply both calories and protein to people.7 Furthermore, Jared Diamond has calculated that, if everyone on the planet now consumed at the rate we do in the United States, our agriculture would need to be capable of supporting 72 billion people.8 We know that over half the world?s population lives on landscapes classified as marginal. We also know that agricultural systems based on the long-term needs, both of people and the environment, need knowledge and attention from more people than those involved in highly mechanized industrial agriculture. But the large number of small farmers that would be needed to design and implement the new agricultural systems that regenerate the soil and local habitat has shrunk dramatically, especially in the regions of the world where industrial agriculture has been practiced. For example, as of 2002, in the United States, there were only a little more than 400,000 farmers producing over 94 percent of our total agricultural commodities, and only 5.8 percent of all farmers were under age thirty-five.9 In the poor countries of the world, the decades-old mass migration to the cities, in which people mainly ended up in slums without work, has seriously depleted the farming population, as well. This means that, by mid-century, we may be trying to feed almost twice as many people with half the topsoil, and very little experience-based wisdom in managing that soil. Challenges and Opportunities of Establishing a More Sustainable Agriculture All of this leaves us with formidable challenges. How do we put a ?sustainable? agriculture on the landscape in the decades ahead, assuming that: as oil becomes more scarce, its price could well be $300 a barrel; we will only have half the fresh water available to produce and process our food, fuel, and fiber; we will have twice as many severe weather events; and we will have a tiny fraction of the human population possessing the acquired skills to grow food, conserve water, manage soil restoration, or imagine new production systems that are less dependent on all the natural resources that so effectively fueled our industrial economy? Fortunately, there are some hopeful developments on the horizon that may provide us with new directions. Health care professionals and nutritionists have begun to point out the necessary changes in the quality of our food, if we are to address some of the day?s critical health issues. We are discovering that fresh, diverse, whole foods, less meat, and foods produced on biologically healthy soils may offer very beneficial health effects. Experiments conducted in some of our school systems (such as the Appleton, Wisconsin public schools) where junk food, sodas, and highly processed foods were replaced with fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, fruit juices, and whole grain breads, dramatically changed the behavior and academic performance of students, and saved the school system money at the same time.10 Meanwhile, small farmers around the world have been abandoning high-energy input monoculture farming systems that are especially vulnerable to unstable climates. In their place are diverse, biological polyculture farms wherein there are biological synergies that tend to store energy, are highly productive, and use very few energy inputs from off the farm.11 Research is now beginning to corroborate the benefits from these diverse farming systems that farmers are introducing.12 Another positive movement on the horizon is the dramatically increased interest in urban farming. Urban farming is evolving in cities throughout the world, from Havana, Cuba to New York City, Detroit, and many other urban centers. New York City recently hosted a ?Food Summit? organized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city leaders that attracted more than 500 food activists who rolled up their sleeves to begin developing a new ?food charter? for the city. The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit entity located on eighty donated acres on the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, just outside New York City, has been exploring ways to produce food in an ecologically sound way in urban and suburban settings. Stone Barns is now demonstrating, in suburban surroundings, how vegetables can be grown year-round with minimal energy inputs and how animals can be produced on grass to the benefit of both animals and the environment. All of these activities are creating interest among a new generation of farmers who want to grow healthy foods, by means of intensive growing strategies, based on low-energy input and requiring limited acreage. Evolving along with this food revolution is a new paradigm that may replace the technology, trade, and aid system with a new approach suggested in the UN IAASTD report. That new direction is grounded in principles articulated at the New York City food summit: food justice, food democracy, and food sovereignty. This underlying new concept has been framed as a food system based in ?foodsheds.? A foodshed is a regional food concept that is based on a new set of priorities. The first priority of a foodshed is to feed people within the foodshed by people in the foodshed, making them as food self-sufficient as possible, and only then fulfilling other needs through trade.13 This new vision of our food future gives people in each community (?foodshed?) much more authority over the food they will produce and consume, and allows them to determine how it will benefit their own communities. This new movement has the potential to grow rather rapidly and eventually evolve into effective rural-urban food coalitions with farmers and consumers working together as food citizens to create food systems that are based on resilient production and long-term return. This can benefit their own communities economically, ecologically, and socially, rather than making them totally dependent on distant enterprises from which they gain little and over which they have little control. And, as John Cobb put it some time ago, they will recognize that trade is only free when they are free not to trade.14 Since agriculture is now at a crossroads, it provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to initiate some of the changes we need to make if agriculture is going to be sustainable in the future. And our new energy future will likely be one of the principal drivers contributing to those changes. For reasons already mentioned, the end of cheap energy will be especially challenging to our industrial food enterprise. Since petroleum provides the energy for almost every aspect of industrial agriculture, costs will spiral upward, rendering industrial agriculture increasingly untenable ? especially for farmers. For example, as the cost per barrel of oil climbed from $50 to $140 in 2007, the cost of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer for Iowa farmers went from $200 per ton to over $1,300 per ton. When oil climbs to $300 a barrel, as it is expected to do sometime during the next decade, it may well render industrial agriculture cost-prohibitive. Our New Energy Future Provides an Opportunity to Design a Better Food System There are no alternative, renewable sources of current energy that can produce anywhere near the energy efficiency ratio of stored, concentrated hydrocarbons that accumulated over millions of years. The energy return for energy invested that we have enjoyed with fossil fuels simply cannot be achieved with any alternative energy source. This is the principal reason that our agriculture ?systems must be redesigned.? The popular media also almost never mention the laws of thermodynamics when they discuss our energy future. Those laws are another important reason why we must redesign the agriculture of the future. Writing eloquently in his book, The Myth of Progress, Tom Wessels describes the essential components of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and how they determine our energy world. The first law ?simply states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.? ?The second law, also known as the law of entropy, states that, although energy can?t be created or destroyed, it can be transformed from one form to another.? In other words, although energy is neither destroyed nor created during transformations, nevertheless ?within the system where the transformation occurs, some of the energy is lost from that system during the transformation. The energy isn?t destroyed; it simply leaves the system in which the transformation takes place?the loss of energy from a system results in entropy? and ?entropy is a process where things naturally move from a state of order toward disorder.?15 It will be especially important for us to pay close attention to the first and second laws of thermodynamics as we consider food and agriculture systems for a post-petroleum world. These laws present us with at least three important realities that can guide us in redesigning our food system. First, the laws tell us that energy cannot be fully recycled, therefore perpetual motion machines are impossible. There is, as Wessels puts it, no ?free energy ride.? So, we should be skeptical about hypotheses that assure us that someone will invent a new miracle technology that will save us from the challenges of the end of cheap energy. Second, it will be important to acknowledge that, while entropy is ?a process in which things move from a state of complexity toward simplicity, or from concentration to diffusion,? it is equally true that ?whenever energy is stored within a system, it is stored in ways that increase the system?s complexity or concentration of materials.? All of this suggests that when we create highly specialized, simplified systems that require large infusions of energy (the industrial model), we will experience a high degree of entropy. Conversely, complex systems ?can take in energy from the larger system in which they are nested? since complex systems have ?fuzzy boundaries.?16 This aspect of the laws of thermodynamics suggests that complex systems employing biological synergies nested in nature?s larger system likely will be the best way to produce food in our new energy future. Third, as Wessels notes, we now also need to take ?biospheric entropy? into consideration as we design our systems of the future. Wessels points out that, up to about a quarter of a billion years ago, the biosphere was an anti-entropic system. At that point, it entered a state of dynamic equilibrium as all systems do. However, since the nineteenth century the increasing use of energy by humans, particularly fossil fuels, has pushed the biosphere out of its dynamic equilibrium state into one that is increasingly more entropic. Human activity on this planet is countering trends that have been developing for over 3.5 billion years. For the first time in the Earth?s history, a single species is responsible for the entropic degradation of the biosphere by releasing more energy through transformation than is being replaced by global photosynthesis.17 As we design our agriculture of the future, it is imperative that we consider this additional biospheric phenomenon if we want to have an agriculture that is sustainable for the long term. We can no longer simply position the development of a sustainable agriculture as an isolated activity that ?greens up? our current agricultural activities. We now need to create a new agriculture and food system that is part of a much larger redesign that factors in the carrying capacity of the biosphere. We must balance the population of the human species as one member of the biotic community that lives in synergy with all of the other species to form a self-renewing and self-regulating biosphere, and that captures and retains more of the energy in the system. Therefore, it is imperative that we begin to recognize that our future energy challenge is not an isolated phenomenon that we can solve by simply finding alternatives to our present sources. Agriculture remains a key player with respect to biospheric entropy ? not only because of the entropic degradation it unleashes, but also by virtue of the sheer number of humans and their rate of consumption on the planet. Again, as Wessels points out, ?every environmental problem we witness today is the result of entropy within the biosphere,? and how we carry out agriculture, to a large extent, determines that entropic scenario. The loss of natural forest cover or its replacement with monocrop plantations results in simplification of ecosystems ? entropy. The conversion of semiarid woodlands to desert through overexploitation results in ecosystem simplification ? entropy. The erosion of topsoil results in diffusion of nutrients ? entropy. The eutrophication of aquatic and marine environments from the diffusion of nutrients results in decreased biotic diversity and ecosystem simplification ? entropy. The depletion of the world?s fisheries results in ecosystem simplification ? entropy. The loss of global biodiversity results in simplification ? entropy. Global climate change due to the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels in a process of diffusion of carbon ? entropy.18 This cogent analysis of entropy in our industrial world makes it clear that industrial agriculture, and the new agriculture we must design to replace it is not an isolated phenomenon. The new systems we design need to envision ways of addressing, not only our immediate food, fiber, and fuel needs, but also the more complex issues surrounding those needs so that our agriculture can truly be part of our new efforts to restore the health of the biosphere. This likely means that we have to address this issue in stages, with each stage making at least a beginning contribution to the larger goal of the ultimate health of the biosphere. Designing the transition to take place in stages is also the strategy suggested by Rob Hopkins?s transition movement. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Wed Oct 14 08:33:50 2009 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:33:50 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: ion raised in this essay=2E Do increased energy costs offer opportunitie= s to bring about a new agriculture=3F The short answer is=2C doubtlessly= =2C yes=2E As the costs of fossil fuels escalate=2C our energy input-int= ensive agriculture will simply become unaffordable=2E This situation wil= l give an initial comparative economic advantage to agricultural designs= that are based on complex biological synergies nested in the larger com= plex systems of nature=2E Fortunately=2C a few farmers are already succe= ssfully exploring such complex biological farming systems=2E19 We would = do well to put more of our scarce resources into research that further e= xplores the possibilities of such systems in various eco-regions=2E That= will likely be the first phase of the dramatic transition we will need = to make=2E = Once we start down this path=2C we will no doubt experience many of the = economic benefits of such redesigned systems=2E We already know from res= earch that once we restore the biological health of the soil we dramatic= ally reduce the need for irrigation as well as synthetic inputs=2C and=2C= to some extent=2C we can also reduce machinery use =97 all energy input= s=2E = A few farmers are already disposed to move in these more ecological dire= ctions=2E Ecological farmer organizations have sprung up all over the Un= ited States in recent decades=2E These farmers are experimenting with mo= re diverse rotation systems=2C exploring the advantages of cover crops a= nd incorporating perennial pasture grazing into their cropping systems r= otations=2E = Increasingly=2C we will have to perform full life cycle analyses of thes= e new systems to make sure they are contributing to the ultimate goal of= restoring the health of the biosphere by restoring complex natural syst= ems that store more energy than they release=2E The object should be to = reestablish=2C as much as possible=2C the larger self-renewing and self-= regulating capacity of the biosphere=2C a critical component of any long= -term sustainability scenario=2E = This brings us back to Aldo Leopold=92s observation that conservation is= not about preserving things=2C but about restoring the =93health=94 of = the land =97 land health being the enhanced capacity of the =93land =5Bt= he biotic community=5D to renew itself=2E=9420 = Since this new=2C diverse agricultural system=2C embedded in the larger = system of nature=2C can take in more energy=2C it will likely have a com= parative economic advantage over industrial systems=2E However=2C in the= last analysis=2C all this cannot be driven by economics alone=2E Leopol= d=2C again=2C articulates the issue clearly=3A =93To sum up=3A a system = of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lop= sided=2E It tends to ignore=2C and thus eventually to eliminate=2C many = elements in the land community that lack commercial value=2C but that ar= e (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning=2E=9421 = A New Ethical Imperative = Ultimately=2C in addition to the economic drivers that our new energy fu= ture will likely impose on us=2C we will need to develop social and huma= n capital=2E That implies an ethical imperative that we must encourage a= s part of a new culture and a new post-industrial economy=2E = Throughout this paper there has=2C in fact=2C been an implicit=2C two-fo= ld ethical imperative=2E On the one hand=2C our post-industrial understa= nding of the world (that it is a complex=2C highly interdependent biotic= community replete with unanticipated and unpredictable new =93emergent=94= properties) suggests an ethical imperative similar to Aldo Leopold=92s = =93ecological conscience=2C=94 which embraces the value of the entire bi= otic community=2E On the other hand=2C the practical necessity of conser= ving our soil=2C water=2C climate=2C human=2C and social resources in or= der to feed our human population under challenging circumstances suggest= s a utilitarian ethic=2E I think both ethical perspectives will be impor= tant to our future=2C and must be incorporated into any economic incenti= ves strategy=2E = As with all externalities of production=2C the depletion of our human an= d social capital =97 perhaps the worst toll exacted by our industrial ag= riculture =97 is a consequence of an economic system that promotes short= -term profits for individuals and corporations at the expense of long-te= rm sustainability=2E Industrialization of our farming systems has system= atically eliminated the very farmers who were most closely connected to = their land=2E Market forces in our capitalist industrial economy favor c= entralized farm management of large=2C consolidated operations that can = reduce the transaction costs of transferring raw materials to large manu= facturing firms=2E But our culture still seems to be largely oblivious t= o the impact that this erosion of indigenous human know-hot and creativi= ty may have on our ability to address the challenges ahead=2E Here=2C an= appeal to an ethic that stresses the outcomes (or consequences) may be = the most compelling=2E = Wendell Berry has perhaps articulated most clearly and succinctly the co= nnection between human/social capital and our ability to maintain our pr= oductive capacity=3A = If agriculture is to remain productive it must preserve the land=2C a= nd the fertility and ecological health of the land=3B the land=2C that i= s=2C must be used well=2E A further requirement=2C therefore=2C is that = if the land is to be used well=2C the people who use it must know it wel= l=2C must be highly motivated to use it well=2C must know how to use it = well=2C must have time to use it well=2C and must be able to afford to u= se it well=2E Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution o= f the past fifty years has disproved or invalidated these requirements=2C= though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them=2E22 = Berry reminds us that we cannot reasonably expect ecological or agro-eco= logical systems to be managed well without people living in those ecolog= ies long enough and intimately enough to know how to manage them well=2E= And he correctly asserts that we need social=2C cultural=2C and economi= c support systems in place to sustain such wise management=2E Proper lan= d management=2C in other words=2C is a practical=2C ethical imperative n= ot provided for in industrial-capitalist economies=2C which are focused = solely on maximum production and short-term economic returns=2E = The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has articulated a similar positio= n=2E Over a decade ago the NAS asserted that =93soil degradation is a co= mplex phenomenon driven by strong interactions among socioeconomic and b= iophysical factors=2E=94 The NAS recognized that proper soil management = is a key factor in improving soil quality and that healthy soils provide= the opportunity =93simultaneously =5Bto=5D improve profitability and en= vironmental performance=2E=9423 Long-term productivity and profitability= =2C in other words=2C is not a simple business arrangement but is ground= ed in social and cultural factors that attend to the long-term care of t= he soil=2E A sustainable farm economy is ultimately tightly linked to so= cial=2C cultural=2C and ethical commitments that safeguard the health of= the land=2E = The core strategy of industrial farming systems has been to specialize i= n one or two crops with little or no biological diversity=2C and reduce = production management practices to the use of one or two single-tactic i= nputs such as commercial fertilizers and pesticides=2E This approach has= yielded production systems that are extremely labor saving but tend to = be so focused on maximizing production and short-term economic returns t= hat little consideration is given to the need for long-term resilience=2E= = Another hallmark of agribusiness has been the systematic elimination of = the very farmers with the ecological and cultural wisdom and commitment = required to restore the physical and biological health of our soils=2E T= hese farmers owned their land=2C lived on their land=2C were intimately = related to their land=2C and planned to pass it on to future family memb= ers =97 all factors that nurtured a culture of caring for the land=2E = Fortunately=2C in the wake of this loss of human know-how and community = (with the land=2C as well)=2C some research continues to demonstrate the= broad principles we must employ to restore soil health=2E Science magaz= ine reported on a research project in Switzerland that traced the biolog= ical and physical properties of soils by comparing soils under conventio= nal industrial management with soils under ecological management=2C over= a twenty-one-year period=2E The researchers found that ecologically man= aged soils=2C using complex green manure and livestock manure to repleni= sh soil nutrients=2C showed remarkably higher soil quality=2C including = =93greater biological activity=94 and =9310 to 60 percent higher soil ag= gregate stability=94 (promoting better intake and storage of water for p= lants to use) than the conventional industrially managed soils=2E24 = Such information suggests a critical ethical imperative=2E Since we have= been able to conceal the decline in productive capacity arising from th= e loss of soil health over the past half century by applying cheap fossi= l-fuel based ingredients to the soil=2C we have not confronted the fact = that ultimately soil health is crucial to maintaining productivity=2E Th= e NAS study reminds us that =93soil degradation may have significant eff= ects on the ability of the United States to sustain a productive agricul= tural system=2E=9425 That statement takes on new significance in light o= f the depletion of the very conditions that have allowed us to ignore th= e importance of the health of our soil=3A namely=2C cheap energy=2C surp= lus water=2C and stable climates=2E So one could argue that there is now= a compelling=2C practical imperative for exploring nature=92s ways of r= estoring soil health and employing the cultural=2C social=2C and economi= c incentives to put people on the land who know the land well and know h= ow to use it wisely=2E = All of this indicates=2C I think=2C that we are increasingly recognizing= that the health of the soil is=2C as Sir Albert Howard noted seventy ye= ars ago=2C an indicator of the health of the entire living community=2E = Hopefully=2C the dual drivers of increased energy costs and a renewed la= nd ethic will bring about the sustainable agriculture our children and g= randchildren will need=2E = Notes = 1=2ERichard Heinberg=2C Peak Everything (Gabriola Island=2C BC=3A New So= ciety Publishers=2C 2007)=2C 65=2E 2=2ERichard Heinberg=2C =93Resilient Communities=3A A Guide to Disaster = Management=2C=94 Museletter 192 (April 2008)=2C http=3A//www=2Erichardhe= inberg=2Ecom/museletter/192=2E 3=2ERob Hopkins=2C The Transition Handbook (White River Junction=2C Verm= ont=3A Chelsea Green Publishing=2C 2008)=2C 134=2E 4=2EDale Allen Pfeiffer=2C Eating Fossil Fuels (Gabriola Island=2C BC=3A= New Society Publishers=2C 2008)=2C 7=2E 5=2EE=2E Toby Kiers=2C et al=2E=2C =93Agriculture at a Crossroads=2C=94 = Science 320 (April 18=2C 2008)=2C 320-21=2E 6=2EKiers=2C et al=2E=2C =22Agriculture at a Crossroads=2C=22 321=2E 7=2EHowever=2C when ruminants such as cows are raised exclusively on pas= tureland that cannot be converted to produce crops there is no conflict = between meat production and grain production for direct human use=2E In = addition=2C raising animals on integrated crop/livestock farms poses man= y ecological advantages and synergies that can both increase food produc= tion and enhance the capacity for self-renewal and self-regulation=2E 8=2EJared Diamond=2C =93The Consumption Factor=2C=94 New York Times=2C J= anuary 2=2C 2008=2E 9=2ESome early media reports have been euphoric about the increase in th= e number of farmers since 2002 based on the 2007 census data released on= February 4=2C 2009=2E However=2C these reports do not take into account= the fact that the USDA still uses the 1974 definition of a farm that co= unts anyone who produces a thousand dollars in gross sales=2C or who =93= could have=94 produced that much=2C as a farmer=2E Consequently=2C the p= resumed increase in the number of farmers is not being adjusted for infl= ation=2E 10=2ESee =93Impact of Fresh=2C Healthy Foods on Learning and Behavior=2C= =94 2004=2C http=3A//www=2Enaturalovens=2Ecom=2E 11=2EFor a brief description of this new farming phenomenon=2C see Frede= rick Kirschenmann=2C =93Potential for a New Generation of Biodiversity i= n Agroecosystems of the Future=2C=94 Agronomy Journal 99=2C no=2E 2=2C (= March-April 2007)=3A 373-76=2E 12=2EErwin Dwiyana and T=2E C=2E Mendoza=2C =93Comparative Productivity=2C= Profitability and Efficiency of Rice Monocultures and Rice-Fish Culture= Systems=2C=94 Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 29=2C no=2E 1 (2006)=3A= 145-66=3B Elizabeth A=2E Ogunlana=2C Vilas Salokhe=2C and Ranghild Lund= =2C =93Alley Farming=3A A Sustainable Technology for Crops and Livestock= Production=2C=94 Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 29=2C no=2E 1 (2006= )=3A 131-43=2E 13=2EJack Kloppenburg=2C Jr=2E=2C John Hendrickson=2C and G=2EW=2E Steve= nson=2C =93Coming Into the Foodshed=2C=94 Agriculture and Human Values 1= 3=2C no 3 (1996)=3A 33-42=2E 14=2EJohn Cobb=2C Sustaining the Common Good (Cleveland=3A The Pilgrim P= ress=2C 1994)=2E 15=2ETom Wessels=2C The Myth of Progress (Burlington=3A University of Ve= rmont Press=2C 2006)=2C 41-42=2E See=2C also=2C Jack Hokikian=2C The Sci= ence of Disorder (Los Angeles=3A Los Feliz Publishing=2C 2002)=2E 16=2EWessels=2C The Myth of Progress=2C 43-44=2E 17=2EIbid=2E 49-50=2E 18=2ETom Wessels=2C The Myth of Progress (Burlington=3A University of Ve= rmont Press=2C 2006)=2C 51=2E 19=2ESee Kirschenmann=2C =93Potential for a New Generation=2E=94 20=2EAldo Leopold=2C A Sand County Almanac (New York=3A Oxford Universit= y Press=2C 1949)=2C 221=2E 21=2ELeopold=2C Sand County Almanac=2C 214=2E 22=2EWendell Berry=2C What Are People For (San Francisco=3A North Point = Press=2C 1990)=2C 206-07=2E 23=2ENational Research Council=2C Soil and Water Quality (Washington=2C = DC=3A National Academy Press 1993)=2E = 24=2EPaul Maeder=2C Andreas Fliessbach=2C David Dubois=2C Lucie Gunst=2C= Padruot Fried=2C and Urs Niggli=2C =93Soil Fertility and Biodiversity i= n Organic Farming=2C=94 Science 296 (May 31=2C 2002)=3A 1694-97=2E 25=2ENational Research Council=2C 1993=2C Soil and Water Quality (Washin= gton=2C DC=3A National Academy Press) 196=2E = =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Join the alternative news service - =22Fresh Ink=22 Subscribe=3A http=3A//booksinternationale=2Einfo/mailman/listinfo/freshi= nk =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:31:10 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:31:10 -0500 Subject: [R-G] A house-heating solar greenhouse Message-ID: http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/JF/JF_OTHER/SMALL/A%20house-heating%20solar%20greenhouse...By%20Don%20Fallick.pdf A Backwoods Home Anthology A house-heating solar greenhouse By Don Fallick Victorian houses often had a heated, greenhouse style room, called a solarium, for sitting in during inclement weather. And many an old farmhouse had a greenhouse attached, so heat from the living space could moderate the cold in the greenhouse. But modern glazing materials and building techniques make it practical to reverse the heat flow and use the greenhouse to heat the living space. This creates a large volume, passive solar, heat collector and storage unit, or solar greenhouse for short. My wife Jj and I designed one to convert our hundred year old, Wisconsin city house to solar heat. We built it ourselves, for under $1,000 and it reduced our winter fuel use, for a 9- bedroom house, to less than one cord of firewood and about $50 worth of natural gas. Southern exposure Before you can build such a solar greenhouse, you must evaluate your site. Two factors will influence your decision: the direction your house faces, and local obstructions to light, if any. Most of the heat energy associated with sunlight comes from the south during the cold months, so it?s best if your house has a long, southfacing wall, but it?s not essential. A wall angled as much as 20 degrees from true south loses less than 5% of the heat gain from direct sunlight, even less if most of the light during fall, winter, and spring is diffused by cloudy weather. The cloudier your weather during the heating season, the less important a perfect southern orientation becomes. Note that these orientations are relative to ?true? south, not ?magnetic? south, which is shown by a compass. Aeronautical navigation maps and many topographical maps show the magnetic variation throughout north America. Translation: They show the number of degrees you must add to or subtract from the true direction to get the magnetic direction. Since we want to convert magnetic directions to true ones, we must reverse the signs, adding negative variations and subtracting positive ones. So a magnetic variation of + 3 degrees means you have to subtract 3 degrees from the compass reading to find out the ?true? orientation. One way to beat this confusing situation is to go outside on a clear night and find the North Star. Lay a straight stick on the ground so it points toward the North Star. Its opposite end will point directly ?true? south. Avoid sun obstructions If your house has a south-facing corner instead of a south-facing wall, it?s probably more important to pay attention to local obstructions than to worry about which side faces nearest to true south. Major obstructions to sunlight can shorten your effective ?day,? reducing the total amount of energy reaching a greenhouse much more than a few degrees of orientation would. You might not mind cutting down a tree or two to get more sunlight, but it can be real inconvenient to move a barn, for example. Sun charts There are two ways to tell if obstructions will seriously affect your greenhouse. You can use sun charts, or you can plot the actual position of the sun every couple of hours from dawn till dusk, on the 21st of every solar heating month. The great advantage of sun charts is time. You can figure where the sun will be any time during the year, right now. The disadvantage is that many people find sun charts confusing, including me. The most lucid instructions for using sun charts I?ve ever found are in The Food & Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse, by Rick Fisher and Bill Yanda. There are also devices you can buy that will plot your obstructions for you, ?right on the charts, making them much easier to use I?m told. I?ve never actually used one, since they hadn?t been invented when we designed our greenhouse. They are not cheap. Sun positions can be plotted on ordinary graph paper using only a ruler, a protractor, and a level, and even I can interpret them easily. The worst disadvantage of plotting actual sun positions is that it takes an actual heating season to do it. Whichever way you plot obstructions, you?ll end up with 3 groups of them -the visual horizon (distant obstructions), medium range obstructions, and close ones. The close ones are probably the only ones you can do anything about. If the main business of your greenhouse is heating your dwelling, you may very well want to leave some deciduous (leaf-dropping) trees nearby. The energy they save in summertime cooling may far overshadow the few fall and spring heating hours they cost. Growing seedlings require light as well as heat, so you may wish to eliminate close-in trees if your greenhouse will be primarily used for growing and only secondarily for heating. We left a 60-foot tall cottonwood right in front of our greenhouse and still raised plenty of seedlings every spring. In deciding whether obstructions will prevent you from getting a useful amount of heat energy from your greenhouse, remember that more sun energy reaches the earth during an hour near noon than during an hour near dawn or dusk, when the sun is low on the horizon and there?s more dust or haze in the way. So an obstruction that blocks the sun during midday in January for 2 hours is much more serious than one that obscures it for an hour at dawn and dusk. Once you know how much energy you?ll lose to unavoidable obstructions, you can decide whether or not to go ahead with the project. Thermal efficiency When they think of thermal efficiency, most people think in terms of total BTUs of heat input, and high ?R factor? insulation. These are ways of measuring some of the effects of ?insolation? (solar energy entering the greenhouse) and of measuring the thoroughness with which the system is isolated from the ambient air and ground temperatures. Judging by these criteria alone, local engineers employed by Wisconsin Natural Gas & Electric Company determined that our greenhouse couldn?t possibly produce,a usable amount of heat for us, and our request for a special ?alternative energy? payment schedule was denied. Fortunately, these two measurements do not reflect the total energy picture around a greenhouse. They contain unstated assumptions that may not always be true. BTUs, for example, measure the energy needed to raise a given volume of fluid (such as air) a given number of degrees F. This assumes that the ambient temperature around the fluid has no effect, which is never true in practice. The engineers further assumed that the air would be heated in a cold (initially) container, then the heat would be transferred to a different volume of air (in the house), with loss of energy at every exchange. We avoided these inefficiencies by heating a large volume of air in a pre-warmed container just a little bit, then exchanging it for the air in the house. Since the process is continuous, we didn?t have to raise the air temperature much. The 40 degree floor Another assumption made by standard thermal engineering is that it?s necessary to isolate the collector (greenhouse) from all ambient temperatures. True, the air is cold, and so is the ground near the surface. But lower down, the earth rarely drops below about 40 degrees F. In central Wisconsin, this level is about 5 feet below the surface. It varies throughout the country, but your local extension agent, U.S. Soil Conservation Agent, or county building inspector should be able to provide this information. To provide a ?warm? environment for the greenhouse air, we dug down 5 feet below grade and built a foundation of cement blocks, insulated on the sides, but not on the bottom. We filled the open box thus formed with rock for good thermal conductance, and poured concrete on top. Even when the air outside was 30 degrees below 0, our concrete floor was radiating at 40 degrees, because concrete and rock are good conductors of heat. With a 40-degree floor, it never actually froze in our greenhouse, so even on cloudy days it was no trouble heating the air up another 20 degrees or so. True, many people don?t think of 60 degrees as a comfortable temperature, but in the middle of winter, when the body is adjusted to cold outdoor temperatures, 60 degrees feels like a nice, warm Spring day! Our preference is to heat people with sweaters rather than houses with fuel, so most days 60 degrees was fine for us. There were times, though, when illness or the presence of guests dictated higher indoor temperatures. At such times, it required very little fuel to raise the air temperature another 15 degrees to 75 degrees F. Passive air circulation Since hot air rises, many greenhouse designs incorporate features whose only purpose is to bring it back down to a useful level. Once again, we did the opposite. We lowered the greenhouse, -making the floor 2 feet below ground level, with the peak of the ceiling just above the windows on the old south side of the house. Whenever our greenhouse thermometer indicated 60 degrees, we just opened the windows. For passive air heating to work, there must be good circulation of air throughout the house. For circulation to occur, there must be some way for hot air to enter each room, and some other way for cold air to return and be heated. Many old houses have upstairs rooms which are cold, because there are no cold air returns. We converted such a room to the warmest in the house,just by cutting a hole in the floor and covering it with a grate. With good circulation, the volume of air in a 9 x 30 foot greenhouse is great enough to keep an 1800 square foot house warm as long as the sun shines. There is no need for a heat storage system in this kind of greenhouse. The earth?s heat is virtually inexhaustible, and there?s nothing one greenhouse can do to raise or lower its temperature. Specific designs There are lots of different designs for greenhouse/solariums available, but in general they tend to fall into three types of structures: angled walls, curved wall/roofs, and vertical walls with glazed or partly glazed roofs. The further north you are, the less difference the angle of glazing makes. The rule of thumb for glazing angle is supposed to be ?latitude plus 20 degrees. With a latitude of 49 degrees N, our best angle for receiving solar radiation would have been right around 70 degrees. This angle is hard to build and results in a tall thin greenhouse that concentrates all the heat at the top. Instead, we built a 5-foot tall south wall, vertically, topped by a 40 degree roof with the lower 4 feet glazed. These were easy to build, fit on our house, and didn?t cost us much energy. Even a difference of 20 degrees only cuts insulation by 2-3%. To prevent leaks and hail damage, we glazed the roof with one continuous sheet of Kalwall ?Sunlite? greenhouse plastic. For strength, we braced the plastic with cross-braces between the rafters every 2 feet, glued it to rafters and braces with 100% silicone, and nailed it with caulked, gasketed roofing nails. During the five years we lived there it never leaked. We framed the end walls conventionally, with openable vent windows up high on the down-wind side and low on the windward side. The south wall was post-and-beam construction, with windows framed right in between the posts. The last 2 feet at each end were skinned with plywood to resist racking. All the south wall windows were removable, and could be replaced with screens in summer, converting the greenhouse into a summer kitchen. The large cottonwood tree provided shade in summer yet lost its leaves in the fall. We used to refer to it as our, ?automatic, solar powered, organic, self-deploying sun shade.? Details All walls were covered in sheetrock, including what used to be the exterior of the house. There was no actual north wall of the greenhouse. We just nailed a 2x6 across the exterior of the house to support the north ends of the rafters. All exterior walls were insulated with fiber glass batts, and all surfaces within the greenhouse were painted. This is very important, as greenhouses ?sweat? like cold-water pipes, and unpainted wood or plasterboard will quickly rot or dissolve. If I had realized just how much water we were going to collect in the greenhouse, I?d have installed a drain when we poured the slab. It would have saved a lot of bailing. We painted the slab floor dark green, to absorb heat and not show dirt, but the rest of the greenhouse was painted gloss white, to reflect as much light as possible. It?s only storage that needs to be painted dark. We wanted to reflect as much light as we could, so it would heat up the air. The foundation we built of cement block on top of a poured concrete footing. We stacked the blocks in a brickwork pattern, but without mortar, then plastered both sides of the wall with Shurwall, a surface bonding cement. It?s easy to do, but the stuff eats skin worse than fiber glass, which it contains. We wore rubber gloves under cotton work gloves (to protect the rubber). It worked. We laid 4 courses of blocks, filled them with sand, backfilled, filled the box thus formed with rocks, and poured a slab on top of everything. Then we laid 3 more courses of blocks, filled them with cement, and set L-bolts in the top course. The easy, way to lay this is to lay the bottom plate of your wall on top of the foundation first, and drill holes for the bolts so they?ll come out in the right places. Build the wall, loosely attach the bolts, pour the last 8 inches of concrete, and set the wall in place, forcing the bolts down into the concrete. After the concrete is dry, tighten the nuts, and the wall won?t move. We insulated the outside of the foundation with 2 inches of foam board. The kind that?s covered with foil won?t deteriorate, and is well worth the extra expense. If you must economize, as we were forced to do, switch to 1 inch of insulation for the bottom foot or two. We did not insulate between the foundation of the house and the new foundation, along the north wall of the greenhouse, because our house had a basement. If it had had a crawlspace instead, we?d have insulated there too. Analysis Performance turned out even better than we hoped. All windows were single- glazed, and some of the recycled storm windows we used for glazing were cracked, yet we were able to maintain ?frost hardy? vegetables, even with outdoor temperatures in the minus 30?s. We sometimes recorded temperature differentials between the inside of the greenhouse and the outside air of 60 degrees! We were able to ?harvest? heat from our greenhouse every day that it wasn?t actually snowing, as long as I kept snow from accumulating on the glazed portion of the roof. Using actual performance figures for the first year of our operation, we were eventually able to get the special rates we wanted from the gas company. A few years later, we discovered they were using OUR figures to encourage their customers to invest in ?alternative? energy strategies! And a few problems Post and beam construction is the oldest way of building houses, so you?d think building inspectors would be familiar with it. Ours weren?t, and we had to show them all our design figures to prove the roof wasn?t going to collapse. It took us a while to prove it to them. Non-standard designs tend to upset building inspectors, so be sure you can back up your drawings with figures, if there?s anything ?different? about your design. A worse problem was the ?rain forest? atmosphere in the greenhouse all winter long, when we had to keep the vent windows closed. Eventually, we covered the glazed part of the ceiling and the south windows with clear plastic, on the inside, so we could channel the run-off into the growing containers. The plastic did absorb some of the light, but it didn?t affect the temperature much, and it sure helped control the moisture. You may have noticed that this whole article is written in the past tense. To my mind, the biggest problem we had with our solar greenhouse occurred when we moved to our homestead in the backwoods. We were unable to take it with us! For more information I most highly recommend The Solar Greenhouse Book; edited by James C. McCullagh. It?s the definitive work on solar greenhouses, containing hundreds of photos, drawings, charts, graphs, and tables. Easy to read. Rodale Press. The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse Design, Construction, Operation, by Rick Fisher and Bill Yanda. It?s not as complete, not as well-illustrated, or as well-documented as the Solar Greenhouse Book, but it covers some aspects better, and is devoted only to greenhouses that produce both food and heat. John Muir Publication. ============== Join the alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:33:54 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:33:54 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: DIY for everything: online low-tech resources Message-ID: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Oct 20 13:38:18 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (RICHARD MENEC) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:38:18 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Fwd: DIY for everything: online low-tech resources In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Sorry about that: [in particular, check out the list of 900 documents, at: http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/cd3wd/index.htm ] Low-tech Magazine October 18, 2009 How to make everything yourself - online low-tech resources http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/how-to-make-everything-yourself-online-lowtech-resources.html ----- Original Message ----- From: RICHARD MENEC Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 2:34 pm Subject: [R-G] Fwd: DIY for everything: online low-tech resources To: Richard Menec > > > > From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 20 21:46:26 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:46:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Astroturfing Climate Change, New Bankruptcy and You Message-ID: <216595.53682.qm@web43508.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Medical Bankruptcy, Climate Change And PR Today a poll was released saying that 57% of Americans are in favor of the public option, up from 52% a month ago. It looks like the AstroTurf effect from the summer is wearing off. The Yes Men did it again pulling off a Press Conference where they claimed that the Chamber of Commerce had a change of heart and decided that there is no such thing as clean coal. Too bad it isn?t true. Recently the President of Maldives held a cabinet meeting under water to raise the alarm that small island nations and low lying nations like Bangladesh are threatened with inundation from rising sea levels due to global warming. The Chickens and Pigeons are really coming home to roost. Remember the Bankruptcy Law reform under Bush, that mean spirited legislation that was supported by then Senator Biden? Remember how it made it harder for people to declare bankruptcy? Remember how all that easy credit was available under the Bush administration and the credit card companies insisted upon this tougher bankruptcy legislation? Do you get the picture? Lure the suckers in and then take them for all they are worth. It is an old circus side show trick. Hookers working with thieves do it all the time. Lure a happily intoxicated gentleman up to a seedy hotel room and then rob him blind while he is in the act. What is he going to do call the cops? Sure. There is something methodical and cruel about this and today when there were Congressional hearings about the effect of the Bankruptcy laws on people undergoing hard times and medical emergencies, we see the Republicans saying, make them pay at least according to MSNBC today. This is from CSPAN ?Sen. Feingold: Medical Debt Behind 60% of Bankruptcies Today 10/20/09 The Senate Judiciary Cmte. held a hearing looking at the relationship of medical debt to personal bankruptcy. The Small Business Cmte. is looking at ways to minimize the impact of health reform on small businesses. And, closed door meetings continue in the Senate on health legislation.? This is an excerpt from a very long and hard to understand Wikipedia article on the law. Essentially consumers are screwed by this bill and now we are seeing the results. ?Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act From Wikipedia The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) (Pub.L. 109-8, 119 Stat. 23, enacted April 20, 2005), was a law enacting several significant changes to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. It was passed by the 109th United States Congress on April 14, 2005 and signed into law by President George W. Bush on April 20, 2005. Most provisions of the act apply to cases filed on or after October 17, 2005. Referred to colloquially as the ?New Bankruptcy Law?, the Act of Congress attempts to, among other things, make it more difficult for some consumers to file bankruptcy under Chapter 7; some of these consumers may instead utilize Chapter 13. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) made sweeping changes to American bankruptcy laws, affecting both consumer and business bankruptcies. Many of the bill?s provisions were explicitly designed by the bill?s Congressional sponsors to make it ?more difficult for people to file for bankruptcy?.[1] Although the BAPCPA was intended to make it more difficult for debtors to file a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy?under which most debts are forgiven (or discharged)?and instead force debtors to file a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy?under which debts are discharged only after the debtor has repaid some portion of these debts. Approximately 85% of debtors are not subject to its ?means test? and a large percentage of the rest are able to ?pass? the means test. Some of the bill?s more significant provisions include the following: Presumption of abuse Prior to the BAPCPA Amendments, debtors of all incomes could file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7. BAPCPA restricted the number of debtors that could declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The act sets out a method to calculate a debtor?s income, and compares this amount to the median income of the debtor?s state. If the debtor?s income is above the median income amount of the debtor?s state, the debtor is subject to a ?means test.? Post-BAPCPA, ? 707(b) provides two definitions of ?abuse.? ?Abuse? may be found when there is an unrebutted ?presumption of abuse? arising under a BAPCPA-created ?means test,? [see 11 U.S.C. ? 707(b)(2)], or through a finding of bad faith, determined by a totality of the circumstances [see 11 U.S.C. ? 707(b)(3)]. Means test Only debtors whose monthly income is higher than the median income of their state, as calculated by the Code, are subject to being found abusive under ? 707(b)(2). Debtors whose income falls below the median income figure may be in violation of the means test, however no party is permitted to file a motion in order to find abuse under ? 707(b)(2), [see 11 U.S.C. ? 707(b)(7)]. This creates a means test ?safe harbor? for debtors below the state?s median income figure. A ?presumption of abuse? will arise if: (1) the debtor has at least $166.67 in current monthly income available after the allowed deductions (this equals $10,000 over five years) regardless of the amount of debt, or (2) the debtor has at least $100 of such income ($6,000 over five years) and this sum would be enough to pay general unsecured creditors more than 25% over five years. For example, if a debtor had exactly $100 of ?current monthly income? left after deductions and owed less than $24,000 in general unsecured debt, then the presumption of abuse would arise, [see 11 U.S.C. ? 707(b)(2)(A)(i)]. Additional filing requirements and fees. The new law increases the amount of paperwork involved in filing and raises the filing fees. Criticisms The 2005 bankruptcy bill was opposed by a wide variety of groups, including consumer advocates, legal scholars, retired bankruptcy judges, and the editorial pages of many national and regional newspapers. While criticisms of the bill were wide ranging, the central objections of its opponents focused on the bill?s sponsors? contention that bankruptcy fraud was widespread, the strict means test that would force more debtors to file under Chapter 13 (under which a percentage of debts must be paid over a period of 3?5 years) as opposed to Chapter 7 (under which debts are paid only out of existing assets), the additional penalties and responsibilities the bill placed on debtors, and the bill?s many provisions favorable to credit card companies. Opponents of the bill regularly pointed out that the credit card industry spent more than $100 million lobbying for the bill over the course of eight years. One of the primary stated purposes of the bankruptcy bill was to cut down on abusive or fraudulent uses of the bankruptcy system. As Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis), one of the bill?s key supporters in the House, argued, ?This bill will help restore responsibility and integrity to the bankruptcy system by cracking down on fraudulent, abusive, and opportunistic bankruptcy claims.? Opponents of the bill argued that claims of bankruptcy abuse and fraud were wildly overblown, and that the vast majority of bankruptcies were related to medical expenses and job losses. Their arguments were bolstered by an in-depth study by Harvard University medical and legal scholars, which found that more than half of bankruptcies cited medical issues as a contributor to bankruptcy. Global Financial Crisis of 2008 As the Financial Times noted during the fall of 2008, ?the 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company?s assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors.? This radically altered the historic process of paying off creditors and did so just a few years prior to trillions of dollars in assets going into liquidation as a consequence of bankruptcies following from the global financial crisis of 2008. Some observers have argued that this contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 by removing the incentive that creditors would normally have to keep a borrower out of bankruptcy. Institutions who provided short-term funding to financial firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman through repo lending could abruptly withdraw that funding even if it risked pushing the firms into bankruptcy, because they didn?t have to worry about tying up their claims in bankruptcy court, due to the new safe harbor provisions of BAPCPA.? This from Democracy Now today. ?PR Executive James Hoggan on ?Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming? The Yes Men aren?t the only group accused of pulling off a hoax in the debate over climate change legislation. In August, the American Petroleum Institute?the oil industry?s top lobbying group?was found to have asked member oil companies to help recruit employees, retirees and contractors for anti-climate bill rallies around the country. Critics said the API was trying to fake a grassroots movement to give a false impression of widespread public opposition to tackling global warming. James Hoggan, has just published a new book on corporate efforts to mislead the public on human-driven climate change. It?s called Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.? This whole thing of corporations astroturfing the political debate as we have seen most graphically last August when astroturf groups bused in fake activists to protest Health Care reform has become endemic in American culture. It is only recently that the media especially MSNBC and Democracy Now have begun to expose these tactics. The right wingers were able to railroad through the defunding of ACORN, a group that helps poor people register to vote and fight for housing rights. There is a massive campaign of creating fake protests against climate change legislation by the Oil industry and the Chamber of Commerce today reported that they spent over $35 million dollars fighting climate change legislation just in the last three months. Progressive companies like Apple have quit the Chamber of Commerce because of its retrograde positions on this issue. Vote with your wallets people support companies that are support climate change legislation and health care reform. Stop spending your money on companies that oppose the interests of average people. Companies like Whole Foods whose founder is opposed to health care reform and oil companies like Exxon who oppose global warming control legislation. This is a pretty decent tale of the scientific facts about global warming. ?Who?s Lying? A Simple Tale Of Unbiased Global Warming Facts Goldilocks Meets Lost In Space - ?The Three Mysterious CO2 Planets? By Ed Ward, MD 2-24-7 The climate involves many facets of complex science and those wishing to mislead for blood moneys are more than happy to make it even more technical if it supports their uncaring, greedy and biased objectives. The objective of this article is to find the unbiased truth in a format that most can understand. No one knows every minuscule aspect of what produces our climate, but the major reactants are known. Almost all of the references are from studies that are unrelated to Earth?s industrial global warming and are almost universally accepted. While researching our solar systems three CO2 planets? atmospheres and temperatures, Johnson?s ?Goldilocks and the Three Planets? popped up. This short, entertaining, and informative article is highly recommended for a brief overall view of the climates of Venus, Earth, and Mars, the Greenhouse effect, and the CO2 cycle (including volcanic action for the ?no SUVs? history majors). It?s amusing title seemed unique until it was Googled and 73 other references popped up. One of which was an informative 10 minute video with a slightly different perspective. It is extremely important to note that the Greenhouse Effect of CO2 on Venus and Mars are virtually undisputed. The CO2 molecule is a greenhouse gas because of its dipolar characteristics which absorb and radiate the infrared energy (1/3 the wavelength of a microwave). The effects of infrared energy on dipolar molecules are also virtually undisputed. Apparently, no ?scientist? was able to gain personal blood or grant money for disputing these facts. The current atmosphere of Venus is about 96% CO2 at 90 times the density of Earth?s (93 million miles from the sun) atmosphere which is about 100 times the density of Mars? atmosphere. Venus (67 million miles from the sun) has an average temperature of 855 F, while Mercury?s (36 million miles from the sun with virtually no atmosphere) temperature ranges from -300 F to 870 F. Venus is hotter than Mercury in spite of being almost twice the distance from the sun which should make Venus (if it had no atmosphere) about 200 F cooler than Mercury. The current thin atmosphere of Mars (142 million miles from the sun) contains 95% CO2 with less than 1% of the atmospheric pressure of Earth. The temperature range is from a high of 98 F to a low of -190 F. This sparse compaction of the greenhouse gas CO2 by Mars? weak gravitational force is only enough to raise the surface temperature by 9 F. ?The Discovery of the Greenhouse Effect? (1820) on Earth (93 million miles from the sun) is also virtually undisputed. Without the greenhouse effect of the gases of our current atmosphere, Earth would be a very inhospitable planet and about 90 F cooler (also a good article for basic climate information). CO2 is a proven planet warmer. CO2 has increased from less than .03% (280 ppm) to .04% (390 ppm) in the last two decades without any signs of decreasing. Earth is rapidly approaching the CO2 effects of Mars which is responsible for at least 9 F without the effects of other greenhouse gases - water vapor, methane, N2O, various hydrocarbons - all of which add their warming effects. Once, like Venus, these compounds reach a concentration where more heat is retained than removed, as is the current situation, a runaway greenhouse effect is started. There is one proven way this effect has stopped of its own accord - the melting of all of the ice on the planet. Will it be enough to prevent the formation of another Venus? The facts say that Earth will start finding out by the year 2040. While it is believed that Venus and Earth started as very similar planets, Venus suffered a ?runaway? greenhouse effect. This event occurred sometime between four billion years ago when the sun was 30 to 40% cooler (this process continues daily at an imperceptible level - to such a small degree that it might take a century to notice a measurable change in the massive amounts of energy released) and now. The slightly smaller gravitational force and closer proximity to the sun explains why Venus would runaway prior to Earth. An average surface temperature of 80 F is believed to be the temperature range at which the runaway effect would start on Earth. The basic properties of the gaseous components of the atmosphere are fairly standard science and are further illustrated by the current temperatures/climates/atmospheres of Venus and Mars. The blanket analogy for greenhouse effect is an excellent one. If one compares the amounts/density of greenhouse gases to the thread count of a blanket/sheet, the effects are very similar and more easily understood. Mars? blanket has a thread count of one with minimal greenhouse effect, while the Venus? blanket has a thread count 9,ooo and retains 99.9% of the heat that reaches its surface. Currently, Earth is in between those two climates. One day, hopefully millions of years from now as the sun continues its normal star progression, Earth will become Venus long before the sun reaches a red giant phase. However, basic chemistry and physics clearly show that mankind?s actions may drastically shorten the length of time for that to happen. In the billions of years it took for life to develop on Earth, complete/incomplete meltdowns of Earth?s ice sheets has happened several times, without a runaway greenhouse occurring. So far, the article has only dealt with the ?positive feedback? loops of global warming. There are many ?negative feedback? loops that exist in nature to cool the earth, but history has shown that the negative feedback loops will not be significant enough to stop the complete meltdown of all natural ice sheets on Earth under the circumstances that existed in the past or in the present. Second verse, same as the first? but a little different. So far the article has not included is the destruction of rain forests by the shifting of weather patterns, the acidity of the oceans decreasing the removal of CO2 in our normal carbon cycle, and the 900 billion tons of CO2 (90 times the amount of yearly CO2 production - as well as tons of methane) awaiting dispersal from it?s resting place in the ice that is melting. There is nothing we can do to control the solar cycle (although there is ample evidence our government is trying with chemtrails), animal production of methane, and the physics of water vapor. But, there are existing easy methods of dealing with CO2 production and more difficult methods for dealing with methane production from refuse. Complete melting of all natural ice on the planet will result in 200 to 300 feet of sea level rise based on previous occurrences. When this happens (some have evidence of its occurrence prior to 2040 and being beyond the point of no return - the most accurate assessment of our current situation, although it is slightly optimistic in this reporter?s opinion), there will certainly be some ?negative feedback? loops placed on global warming. The surface area of more reflective water will be dramatically increased - although this will be counteracted by the loss of more reflective ice sheets. Millions of coastal area inhabitants will be displaced or killed like the residents of New Orleans that were murdered by covering up the rising sea levels of global warming. Fertile farmlands will be drastically reduced by rising tides. Starvation will assure that there are far fewer sapiens to worry about or to pollute the environment. Salt water will contaminate many of our water sources that are not already drained, polluted by radiation or toxic chemicals (the reason ?the shrub? bought Paraguay - third largest aquifer and possibly the only large clean water source left - one can live without oil or gold, but you cannot live without water - How much will it be worth?) . We will not have to drive nearly as far to get to the beach. Hydro power sources will be much more available and there will be far fewer people requiring energy by the time they can be built. There is no doubt that some on the global warming issue have finances influencing their actions. There is no doubt that most (all this reporter has seen) of the global warming ?debunkers? have financial reasons for their actions. However, there is a vast difference between supporting science facts for the continuance of all of mankind, and ignoring/hiding/distraction of science facts for the destruction of mankind for the sake of blood money. Just as there is a vast difference between creating a study to evaluate the facts and come to a conclusion (IPCC - click play - 2,500 expert reviewers, 800 authors, 450 lead authors, 130 nations), creating a conclusion for the cherry picking of any evidence to support that conclusion (ExxonMobil), or deliberately censoring all information in scientific articles contrary to massive profits (the shrub). Anyone in the past that has denied greenhouse effects, or the fact this planet is warming - the solar cycle still accounts for about the temperature rise since 1900, it fails to explain a rise of 0.4 C since 1980 (It?s the heat being retained that is causing the temperature rise), or has taken money to prove a conclusion with some facts rather than taking all the facts to form a conclusion, should at the very least be read with skepticism of their motives. The Kyoto pact - A Slight Division of NWO Agendas for Cash and Power. While ?the shrub? denies and classifies (at least until very recently denying, but probably still classifying the real facts) global warming for expansion of corporate and personal greed in his NWO agenda of the ineffectual buying and selling of pollution credits. The UN uses global warming for its NWO agenda of ?savior? for gaining control of countries with its trivial reductions of CO2 decades from now. Both of these scenarios promote the continuance of the problem rather than a complete shift from the problem - an oil driven economy with corporate and government control. Current hydrocarbon conversion to electricity wastes between 30 and 60% of the potential energy with the majority wasting as much as the process converts. Transfer of electricity over a great distance further degrades the conversion effectiveness. Even without further development of alternate energy sources there are currently more than adequate ways to completely change our delivery of needed energy without ?living in a cave? as the debunkers like promote. These current technologies are not cost effective because this government has supported the creation of massive profit corporations, instead of supplementing self sustaining individual energy creation and usage and alternate existing transportation. Personnel solar, wind and water energy converters and vehicles get no subsidies, credits, or adoption by this government. Instead, the government prefers to subsidize the corporations and let alternate energy die on the vine. Tesla Motors already has an impressive electric performance roadster with plans to produce a vehicle more along the lines of a transportation car. GM and Toyota had electric cars and NiMh- Lithium batteries that were allowed to die on the vine. If any of these already existing technologies had been given a chance to compete with the destructive forms of hydrocarbon energy usage by subsidy, incentives, or taxing, they would have the volumes of production required to lower the manufacturing costs to where they would be directly competitive with our existing vehicles - similar to the reduced costs of computers and calculators. The technologies are already here. They just need to be granted the opportunity to compete instead of insuring the current corporation-government symbiosis - all without losing any of our energy requirements. Billions of dollars have been spent on nuclear reactors which currently already have millions of tons of radioactive waste contaminating water, air and earth without any way of getting rid of them. Our current cancer rate may be as high as 10 times the pre-1950 rates. Billions of dollars have been spent on harvesting a hot fusion reaction - because it?s a way to get funding for nuclear weapons? advancements without the pesky truth. Virtually nothing has been spent on zero point energy, Aquygen, or cold fusion, except to denounce it by this government, despite continued advancements and partial technology working models.? Tags: Medical Bankruptcy, New Bankruptcy, PR and Astroturfing Climate Change From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Oct 21 01:31:24 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:31:24 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Problem of Usury Message-ID: <20091021163124.52aac8c7.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Martin Hattersley nationaleconomy.net (undated) A plea came to me over the Internet a while back from a PhD student in Switzerland, who needed help in preparing his thesis, by providing a translation from the Latin of a commentary by one Father Concina of an encyclical of Pope Benedict XIV on the subject of Usury entitled "Vix Pervenit". Having had an education in Latin and Greek, degrees and diplomas in Economics, Law and Theology, as well as a lifetime interest in monetary subjects, I felt called to offer my services, and in the light of today's economic difficulties have found the experience, still far from complete, difficult but extremely rewarding. Usury, as defined by Benedict and Aquinas and many other ancient writers, is not just the charging of excessive interest on a loan. It is the gaining of any reward at all for a loan of money (or other item that is not to be returned in its original form), other than return of an article of amount and value equal to the original advance. This definition is supported by Scripture (for loans within the Jewish community, though not to Gentiles: Deuteronomy 24.19,20) as well as Aristotle, but it was challenged by Calvin. Calvin and his followers maintained that there was no difference between asking payment for a rented house, for instance, and renting the money needed to buy the house, so long as the interest charge was not excessive - a view that is the accepted basis for banking and capitalism in the Western world today. So what is wrong with Calvin's approach? Three things at least - and there are more: First: Charging interest on money lent is asking for reward without risk, so doubling the burden on the borrower. The farmer operating on borrowed money, for instance, is still expected to pay interest on his loan even if his crops fail or the market collapses. Countries saddled with National Debts (including Canada, but especially Third World countries) have to tax their citizens heavily, and beyond the amount of any international aid they receive, to pay interest on debts currently beyond their means to repay, causing starvation and distress as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank insist on their pounds of flesh. Secondly: Making profits using bank-created money, for example by buying on margin on the stock market, does nothing to make the world richer in terms of real wealth. Money, contrasted with productive assets, is of itself sterile, but can be highly profitable to the speculators who expect the taxpayer to provide a bail out for them when the bubble bursts. Thirdly: Usury is a way by which both banker and borrower can rob the public. A loan of new bank credit, say for buying a house or an industrial project, dilutes the value of the monetary unit, making the value of everyone else's dollar that much the less. So we have a persistent erosion of the value of our money, so much so that the school principal who was "passing rich with forty pounds a year" two hundred and fifty years ago would need a salary of a thousand times as much to maintain that standard of living today. Bankers and borrowers print (and charge for) the tickets. We, the public, are expected to put on the show. Then, as we pay the bankers back and the credit is cancelled, we find we don't any longer have the money available to buy products that are waiting for our dollars, and the economy goes into a slump. Muslims still respect this prohibition on the charging of interest. Financing one's house through a Muslim bank involves the bank using depositors' funds to buy the house for the occupant, who pays rent, and contracts to pay additional monthly payments to build up a savings account by which the house will be paid for and transferred at the agreed price after a period of years. The risk of changes in house value is then borne by the lender, who is in the position of a landlord, and the borrower in financial difficulty has built up a cushion of savings that make it possible to renegotiate payments should he be temporarily unable to meet his obligations. The bank itself has physical assets that it owns, rather than paper promises to pay, to back up its balance sheet. So Muslim banks have been remarkably free from the monetary crisis that has struck the "Christian" world so severely. In this connection, Pope Benedict XVI's recent encyclical "Caritas in Veritate", along with pleas from our own Anglican Bishops, especially in England, calling for morality and compassion in the economic sphere, need to be listened to. Salvation is not just a personal matter - it operates at the level of the community as well. We Christians have something to learn - or re-learn - when it comes to looking at the way we do business. http://www.nationaleconomy.net/blog/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at gmail.com Wed Oct 21 12:09:08 2009 From: shniad at gmail.com (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:09:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] "The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats" - MRZine In-Reply-To: <36CEB595FECB054CB55D7C9A8A6D1482AC5C1C4566@KITE.wharton.upenn.edu> References: <1085461355.5733381256070436496.JavaMail.root@sz0047a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net> <36CEB595FECB054CB55D7C9A8A6D1482AC5C1C4566@KITE.wharton.upenn.edu> Message-ID: <83904d240910211109k62a49727kb336a2a673609305@mail.gmail.com> Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats," MRZine, October 20, 2009 From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Wed Oct 21 14:46:36 2009 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:46:36 -0400 Subject: [R-G] Working class frustration Message-ID: <164236a30910211346t1dc06745x15413e3c488102b@mail.gmail.com> The middle class. What exactly does that mean?? To generalize, the middle class encompasses the class that is between the working class and the ruling class. It is a class that controls it's own means of production or at least that would be a Marxist definition. Can we define the middle class in such a narrow way based on their economic status and their ability to own their own means of production? If it was easy as that, then how come Taxi drivers often make