Learning what food looks like before it goes into the package
Hannah Wallace New York Times USA February 5, 2010


Students from Automotive High School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, visiting the Meat Hook shop, where the meat is fresh and local and every bit of it is used. Photo: Joshua Bright/The New York Times

About 20 high school students stood behind the butcher counter, staring at a 160-pound piece of meat from a recently slaughtered cow. “All of our meat comes from local farms, and we get it all whole,” said Tom Mylan, 33, one of three butchers at the Meat Hook, a new butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that buys its meat locally and prizes nose-to-tail eating. “We don’t just buy steaks or pork chops or whatever.” “How much does the whole cow cost?” one boy in a white hoodie had asked moments before. Answer: about $3.25 a pound. “Do you slaughter here?” asked another. Short answer: no—most slaughterhouses are upstate. “What is chorizo?” asked a girl. Answer: a spicy Spanish sausage. These curious students, all juniors and seniors at Automotive High School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are taking a class called “Food, Land, and You.” Introduced by Jenny Kessler, a teacher at the school, three years ago, this elective English course is a primer about food broadly defined — its social, political and economic aspects. While dozens of New York City public schools have edible gardens, or offer student-grown food on the cafeteria menu, Ms. Kessler’s class is unusual in the wider perspective it takes. “Food justice is a huge issue,” Ms. Kessler, 31, said. “But we study and talk blatantly about it — who has access to this food and why.” ...

In the fall, for example, Ms. Kessler took her charges to the Queens County Farm Museum, where they collected eggs, worked with compost and helped clear garden beds. She also secured a stand for her students at the Union Square Greenmarket, where they ran cooking demonstrations, and she organized a volunteer stint for them at the Bowery Mission, where they made lunch for the homeless. Twice a year, Ms. Kessler also takes her students to Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, N.Y., where they make apple cider and apple pies from scratch, feed the pigs and sweep up cow manure. For many of these students, who hail from gritty neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York, that excursion marks their first visit to a farm. Back at the Meat Hook, another butcher, Brent Young, 27, was displaying the tools of his trade. “Ninety percent of our work is done with our knives, most importantly this five-inch European-style breaking knife,” Mr. Young said, pulling the tool out of his scabbard for all to see. ... Most of Ms. Kessler’s students live in “food deserts”—neighborhoods with lots of fast food but little fresh produce or other healthy fare. Automotive High School’s students are predominantly low income, too, with 75 percent of them qualifying for a free lunch, according to Ms. Brouder. Though the students may not return to the Meat Hook to buy the homemade sausages ($10.99 a pound), or even the grass-fed beef ($6 a pound), that’s not really the point. “The purpose of going there is just for them to know it’s out there,” Ms. Kessler said. “It’s really hard to cement in their heads that there are other options to industrial food.”

On National Meat Week, chewing over some meaty issues
Katherine Gustafson Sustainable Food USA February 2, 2010

There are a lot of diverse opinions about meat, ranging from it being the best thing ever to it being the devil's spawn. Since it's National Meat Week, let's talk more about this issue and discuss some tips about how to enjoy meat responsibly. Let's start there: Is it possible enjoy meat responsibly? Some hold fast to the opinion that sustainable meat production is impossible since farm animals, especially cattle, emit high amounts of methane and take vastly more resources to raise and turn into food than do plants. Others, however, are of the mind that livestock can be an essential part of sustainable agriculture, since the fertilization they provide is key to a diverse, organic polyculture farm environment. On the one hand, some see killing animals for meat as torturous and barbaric. On the other, some argue that there are methods of slaughter that are relatively humane and that if we refused to raise domesticated animals for food those species would disappear from the Earth altogether, which one could argue is crueler than the alternative.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum of opinion, as a reader of this site, you likely agree that humungous monocultures dedicated to livestock production — otherwise known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs — are, in fact, the devil's spawn. These operations are notorious for maltreatment of animals, over-use of chemicals and antibiotics, unclean conditions, use of corn-based diets and contamination of meat. ...


Test tube meat closer than you'd think? The good folks at The Bovine have collected a number of items about test-tube meat. Well worth a visit. Follow the embedded links to each full report. The LA Times story is the first of four examinations of the subject.

Vat-grown meat getting closer to reality as PETA offers million-dollar prize for “commercially-viable” test tube meat
The Bovine Canada February 8, 2010

Here are some excerpts from an LA Times story by Jason Gelt titled “In vitro meat’s evolution”‘

“In 1932, Winston Churchill, appalled by the leftover bones and gristle crowding his dinner plate, predicted that in 50 years “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” It’s taken longer than that, but at the dawn of the 21st century we’re finally closing in on tasty and eerily healthy meat grown by scientists instead of Old MacDonald.

“It’s been a thought problem for scientists for decades,” says Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization devoted to global efforts to produce cultured meat. With meat consumption in heavily populated countries like China and India multiplying every decade, the environmental complications resulting from industrial meat production have reached critical mass….”

“….Still, the road to cultured chicken nuggets faces obstacles. “There are lots of technical challenges,” Matheny says. “But those all appear to be solvable. The biggest challenge is one of marketing. There’s a yuck factor with the idea of producing cultured meat in a metal tank.” Many foods we take for granted are bioprocessed, including yogurt, cheese and fermented drinks. With the health of the world at stake, coming to terms with cultured meats is the logical next step, Matheny says. “If we shifted to cultured meat,” says Matheny, “it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than everybody trading in their cars and trucks for bicycles.”

With the efforts of organizations such as New Harvest, the term “mystery meat” may soon shift from a negative to a positive connotation. Squalid industrial animal farms would become relics of the past, and land, water and grain could be put to other uses. Says Matheny: “In principle, one could produce the entire meat supply from a few cells harvested from animals that don’t even need to be killed.”" ...

Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term “the narcissism of minor difference,” the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than expose truth. ... Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble something about telling the truth and serving the public. They prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. ... The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. - Chris Hedges

The creed of objectivity killed the news
Chris Hedges Truthdig USA February 1, 2010

Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press. And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits. This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices. They function as “professionals” and see themselves as dispassionate and disinterested social scientists. This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism.

“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. “There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes.” Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission—the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’ ” This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also, with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism, distrust and lack of credibility of the press—and here I speak of the dwindling institutions that attempt to report news—come directly from this steady and willful disintegration of the media’s moral core. ...

The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?
Alan Rusbridger Guardian UK January 25, 2010

This link is the full text of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's Hugh Cudlipp lecture.

Thank you for inviting me to give this lecture in honour of the memory of Hugh Cudlipp. Ask any British journalist who were their editor-heroes over the last 30 or 40 years and two names keep recurring. One is Harry Evans. The other is Hugh Cudlipp. Why were they so admired? Because they seemed to represent the best of journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers. ...

There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK. It's not a "digital trend" – that's just shorthand. It's a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech. As Scott said 90 years ago: "What a chance for the newspaper!" If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it because what 'they' do is different – 'we are journalists, they aren't: we do journalism; they don't' – then, never mind business models, we will be sleep walking into oblivion.

Related: Norman Farrell presents a conundrum that British Columbians face: "Why is the Campbell Government moving so certainly against the public interest and why has the media abdicated their role of objective truth telling?"

Once, there were giants
Norman Farrell Northern Insights Vancouver Canada February 5, 2010

I have written here repeatedly about British Columbia’s mistaken policy of promoting private production of electricity. BC Hydro is forced to sign long purchase agreements at rates substantially above the likely wholesale values and well above the cost of generating new electricity. Advance contracts at premium prices eliminate the main business risks facing producers and guaranteed streams of public money provide collateral for borrowing, even for producers with minimal invested equity. Liberals want profits to be privatized while costs and business risks are socialized. Since this benefits the rather few individuals gifted with risk free investments, we must examine possible motives for the policy. Here, the advantages are clear for the sellers but incomprehensible for the public. Without considering corruption, it is difficult to conceive of the Campbell Government’s motivation. If encouragement of private enterprise is the main purpose, BC Hydro would not be involved as intermediary. Private utilities could produce and sell electricity in the domestic or export markets at their own risk. That is market driven capitalism allegedly favored by BC Liberals. If alternative power technology initiatives are successful, inexpensive clean power will be available readily. Electricity prices will drop. Nuclear is one possible technology, geo-thermal and high-efficiency solar are others. We can embrace those capabilities or not but their availability will affect export pricing of electricity because Americans are diligently embracing alternate energy.

All schemes for private power in this province are shrouded in secrecy. What is known though is that many companies involved are populated by people with close ties to the Liberal Party. Contracts are not available for public review although it is clear that the commitments total over $30 billion. The quickly sourced report of the government’s Green Energy Task Force is secret and they solicited public submissions to be received through email accounts outside the public system so that records could be undisclosed. The Task Force is beyond scrutiny. This scandalous situation developed and continues, partly because the NDP opposition is poorly engaged as they wait for Premier Campbell's final self-destruction. Liberal backbenchers are toothless lambs, following their wounded leader without question. A compliant media. loyal to doctrinaire ownership, offers mindless support to the current administration. I will review one regularly egregious example of media ineffectiveness. It involves representatives from the three major news organization of BC: Global TV News, Canwest Newspapers and Corus Radio. I realize this is a long article but it is fairly transcribed and is reflective of the tortured logic employed by these media members. ...

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles. - Simone Weil. She also wrote: "A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."

How secret becomes special
Stan Goff CounterPunch USA February 1, 2010

The Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, pronounced jay-sock by members of the US armed forces, carries with it a mystique. The press, JSOC's promoters and its critics, as well as the entertainment media, have all contributed to its mystique; and that mystique is promoted my the military because it functions as a kind of deterrent.

One of the advantages of offical secrecy is its contribution to this mystique - writ large for secretive units, but this mystique-maintenance is also useful throughout the military. Hollywood, pulp fiction, television drama, infotainment "news," and military-veteran boosterism all contribute to the vast ignorance of military matters, by overdramatizing military life and military operations, and by idealizing it. Film and popular literature are packed with protagonists whose past or present CV includes membership in some elite and highly secret combat unit, where individuals are seven-language linguists, flawless marksmen with every firearm ever manufactured, field surgeons, helicopter pilots, chess masters, and gymnasts. The arms race among entertainment moguls to one-up each other's fantasies has only accelerated this stupidity; and the thirst among (primarily male) consumers for this drivel has corresponding and escalating ratio of profit to humbug. Hannah Arendt once noted:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Obviously, I insert this quote with the subject of evil in mind, and in the context of a discussion of this mystique-laden military institution, JSOC. Because that is what they actually do, evil, and not some salvific secret missions that keep us unkowingly safe abed at night. Moreover, they are not the idealized archetypes, but simply a bunch of men who are conjoined primarily by their overarching commitment to US nationalism, their belief that ends justify means, and their personal pursuit of probative masculinity. Few are multi-lingual, most are only marginally in better physical condition than the average civilian gym rat, many are stupid - moreso than you want to know - and all are committed, when under orders, to bully and kill helpless people. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. They are far more banal than anyone would like to believe; and the culture is closer than anything else to a boys locker room. ...

Related: The expanding US war in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill The Nation USA February 4, 2010

Three US special forces soldiers were killed in northwest Pakistan this week, confirming that the US military is more deeply engaged on the ground in Pakistan than previously acknowledged by the White House and Pentagon (see "The Secret US War in Pakistan," November 23, 2009). The soldiers died Wednesday in Lower Dir when their convoy was hit by a car bomber in what appeared to be a targeted strike against the Americans. According to CENTCOM, the US soldiers were in the country on a mission to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force run by Pakistan's Interior Ministry that patrols the country's volatile border with Afghanistan. A Pakistani journalist who witnessed the attack said that some of the US soldiers were dressed in civilian clothes and had been identified by their Pakistani handlers as journalists. The New York Times estimates that there are sixty to a hundred such US special forces "trainers" in Pakistan. Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command said there are about 200 US military personnel in Pakistan.

While the deaths of the soldiers has sparked impassioned discussion in Pakistan about the extent of the US military presence, the Pentagon has emphasized that the US soldiers were in Pakistan on a training mission at the invitation of the Pakistani government, saying they were not engaged in direct combat. But the geography of Wednesday's attack--in the northwest of the country in an area where the US has no on-the-ground aid presence and where Pakistani forces have struggled against the Taliban and other insurgents--reveals just how close to the epicenter of the action in Pakistan the US military is. According to CENTCOM, the soldiers were not members of Delta Force or the Green Berets, instead classifying them as "civil affairs" trainers. Officially, CENTCOM describes this mission as part of an expanding "partnership with the Pakistani military and Frontier Corps," providing "increased US military assistance for helicopters to provide air mobility, night vision equipment, and training and equipment--specifically for Pakistani Special Operations Forces and their Frontier Corps to make them a more effective counter-insurgency force."

In military parlance, these above-board US "training" forces operating under an unclassified mandate are "white" forces, while operatives working for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) would be classified as working on "black" operations, sometimes referred to as Special Mission Units. Since 2006, JSOC teams have operated in Pakistan in pursuit of "high-value" targets. "What we're seeing is the expansion of 'white' Special Operations Forces into Pakistan," says a former member of CENTCOM and US Special Forces with extensive experience in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. "As Vietnam, Somalia and the Balkans taught us, that is almost always a precursor to expanded military operations." ... Since President Obama's inauguration, the administration has downplayed the role of US military forces in Pakistan. In July, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said bluntly, "People think that the US has troops in Pakistan, well, we don't." On Wednesday, after the US soldiers' deaths, his tune changed dramatically: "There's nothing secret about their presence," he said. One thing is certain: as the situation in Pakistan becomes more volatile and the US military presence in the country expands, it will become increasingly difficult for the Obama administration to downplay or deny the reality that a US war in Pakistan is already underway.

Grave concerns over presence of Blackwater in Pakistan
Asif Haroon Raja Asian Tribune Sweden February 7, 2010

... Gordon Duff, a senior editor of Veterans Today has disclosed that the CIA has outsourced its most secret projects to Blackwater, a mercenary group with worst reputation of any firm the US has ever done business with. It plans and executes terrorist acts against civilian targets, military installations, intelligence agencies and resorts to target killings. It maintains contacts with terrorist leaders and organizes revolutionary groups. Disregarding US laws, CIA has expanded the role of private contractors including Blackwater like raids, operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia and now in Yemen. This was disclosed by four former US military and intelligence officers to ABL News.

There is mounting evidence that Pentagon and CIA are engaged in a war against Pakistan population involving death squads, disappearances and torture. These infamous practices were employed in Vietnam and El Salvador. One of the chief executives of Blackwater Robert Richer was head of CIA’s Near East and South Asia from 1999 to 2004 and ran clandestine operations throughout Middle East and South Asia. Gen Petraeus in August 2009 announced plans to launch an intelligence training centre in coordination with others to train military officers, covert agents and analysts who agree to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to a decade. In the same month, it was announced that Pentagon was reassigning its 3rd Special Forces Group presently deployed in Africa and Caribbean to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The CIA also uses credentialed journalists to engage in counter-intelligence. Individuals working as subcontractors to CIA have links to Blackwater CIA-approved operations in targeted countries of the region. Blackwater comes in the guise of contractors, investors, business partners and economic advisers. ...

The intended expanded US Embassy in Islamabad will be the largest in the world. $115 million have been earmarked for it and made part of Kerry-Lugar Bill (KLB) package for Pakistan. It includes $5 million for Marines quarters, $53.5 million for housing infrastructure; $18 million for general services and office area; $36 million for temporary duty quarters and community staff facilities. All told $4 billion will be required for the ambitious project. $800 million had been allocated for the protection of enlarged and fortified Embassy through private security contractor DynCorp. Some say it is being made into a military base while others say a cantonment is being built. Expansion of US Embassy in Islamabad is being justified under the plea that greater number of officials would be required to disburse promised $1.5 billion aid per annum from USA and Friends of Pakistan. If this is the criteria, India with which USA has strategic cooperation in defence and economic fields which is twenty times more in volume, USA should need half of New Delhi to accommodate coordinating and disbursement staff. ...


Karachi mourners bleed again, by Faraz Khan, February 6, 2010.

KARACHI: At least 27 people were killed and over 100 others – including women and children – wounded in twin blasts that ripped through the provincial capital as the city marked Hazrat Imam Hussain’s (RA) chehlum on Friday. According to sources, the death toll is expected to rise, as some of those injured are in critical condition. ... Doctor Seemi Jamali, head of Jinnah Hospital, urged the government to provide security assistance and training for a “war-like situation”. The attacks were carried out within two hours of each other despite tight security in the city. Witnesses said the Rangers and police stationed at the hospital were “nowhere to be seen” at the time of the blast. ... Shia strike: According to a private TV channel, the Jaafria Alliance would go on complete strike in Karachi today (Saturday) to protest against the blasts. The alliance has also given the government a 48-hour deadline to take action against those responsible. In addition, the media reported that transporters and businessmen in Karachi would suspend their activities today in protest at the attacks. The US embassy in Islamabad also condemned the terrorist attacks.

Kelseyville family mourns son killed in roadside bombing in Pakistan
Elizabeth Larson Lake Country News USA February 6, 2010


Sgt. 1st Class David J. Hartman, 27, and two fellow soldiers died on Wednesday, February 5, 2010, in Timagura, Pakistan after their unit was hit by an improvised explosive device planted by insurgents. Photo courtesy of the US Army Special Operations Command.

A Kelseyville family is mourning the loss of a son, killed this week in Pakistan. Sgt. 1st Class David J. Hartman, 27, was killed on Wednesday by a terrorist bomb while in Pakistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Department of Defense reported Friday. Hartman's father, Greg Hartman, and stepmother, Kate, live in the Clear Lake Riviera, while his mother, Mikail Bacon, lives in Pardeeville, Wisc. The family couldn't be reached for comment on Friday. However, late Friday their pastor, Victor Rogers, who leads the North Shore Christian Fellowship in Upper Lake, said he just returned from picking the Hartmans up from the Sacramento airport. He said they had just returned from Delaware, where David Hartman's body had arrived from Pakistan. ...


Sgt. 1st Class Matthew S. Sluss-Tiller, 35, of Callettsburg, Ky. (right) and Staff Sgt. Mark A. Stets, 39, of El Cajon, Calif., also were killed in Timagura, Pakistan on Wednesday, February 5, 2010, as the result of a roadside bomb. Photos courtesy of the US Army Special Operations Command.

The US Embassy in Islamabad reported that in addition to the deaths of Hartman, Sluss-Tiller and Stets, two other soldiers were injured in the bomb blast, which occurred at around 11:20 a.m. Wednesday. Rear Adm. Hal Pittman, director of Communication at U.S. Central Command, said the three men and their fellow members of the military were in Pakistan at the request of that country's government. The US military had been invited by the Pakistan Frontier Corps to conduct training in Lower Dir, according to the US Embassy. They were attending the opening of a new girls' school that had been renovated through US humanitarian assistance when the bomb went off. Such schools have become a particular target for insurgents, according to recent press reports. Pittman said the attack demonstrated “the terrorists' lack of respect for life and their willingness to use violence against women and children for advancing their malign vision.” Along with the military casualties, the US Embassy reported that several Pakistani citizens – among them children – were killed and injured in the blast. The US Embassy condemned the bombing. “The carnage at the school in Lower Dir clearly shows the terrorists' vision. The United States and Pakistan are partners in fighting terrorism – and our people are working together to build schools,” according to an agency statement. ...

Missteps on Afghanistan
William R. Polk History News Network USA February 1, 2010

... Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas. Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.

Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.” This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them. ...

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.... U.S. Constitution - Article 1 Section 10

The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.- Lewis Lapham, journalist


Cartoon from "Ready for the Bust in the Economy" by Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning, February 5, 2010

Dollar value sent to the corn fields
Bill Bonner The Daily Reckoning USA January 25, 2010

Paris, France – Maybe this is the next leg down. Maybe it isn’t. In either case, we don’t want to be holding a lot of stocks and real estate when we find out. If we’re right about the depression/deleveraging… And if we’re right about the bear market… You’re probably going to see stocks lose another half of their value. Remember, a correction is equal and opposite to the deception that preceded it. That deception is almost a hundred years old…and has added trillions of (largely fictitious) dollars to the nation’s wealth. An Everest of mistakes has been made. Can all this deception be corrected in 2 years…with the feds fighting every inch of the way? Can problems caused by too much credit be cured by more credit? Can a generation’s worth of mistakes be hidden under the carpet of bailouts? Can the boondoggles be washed away by more boondoggles? “They do one dumb thing,” said our gardener, speaking of the feds. “Then they do two dumb things so they don’t have to admit they did something dumb in the first place.” “The whole idea that you can cure financial problems by offering people money that doesn’t exist is preposterous,” adds colleague Simone Wapler. Governments have been up to this trick for a long time – but especially since the world went on the paper money standard in 1971. Where Americans had a dollar worth a dollar in 1913, today they have a dollar worth 3 cents. What happened to the other 97 cents? Where did it go? We don’t know. But we’ll take a guess – it went to the place where the feds keep all that money they don’t have.

20 reasons global debt time bomb explodes soon
Paul B. Farrell MarketWatch USA February 2, 2010

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms. Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts.

Wow, what an epic Hollywood blockbuster this will make: You know the drama, can't miss the warnings. The financial press is flooding us with plot lines ... a Forbes cover story focuses on a "Global Debt Bomb: How It Could Wreck Your Life" ... Leaders at the World Economic Forum on Swiss Mt. Davos fear another global meltdown will trigger mass rebellions ... The Economist calls the plot a "Global Asset Bubble," with cheap money fast driving up asset prices. Plus, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is adding jet fuel to the ticking time-bomb in: "After the Stimulus Binge, a Debt Hangover: Trillions of dollars have been spent keeping the global economy afloat. But now fears about the Great Recession are giving way to worries about something else: The Great Reckoning" when massive debts come due. Then the debt bomb explodes "and the results won't be pretty for investors or elected officials." Forbes discovered the trigger mechanism in "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff: The "90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth." For 800 years "you increase it over and beyond a high threshold, and boom!" Well guess what? "The U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio is 84%." Soon, Ka-Booom! Depression. Kiss your retirement goodbye.

Who knows? Forbes? Bloomberg BusinessWeek? The Economist? Davos-World Economic Forum? True, they're all looking at the same plot line for a Hollywood blockbuster about the "Global Debt Time Bomb." But the financial press navigates in a fog. There's not just one, but many triggers, all linked in a lethal network. We've reported on it for years. Now you tell us: What triggers this firestorm? ...

When you come to a fork in the road take it
Bob Moriarty 321gold.com USA January 26, 2010

I'd love to say I made that up but I didn't. Yogi Berra came up with it. I've read financial analysis from others for years. One technique that is pretty common and I resent a lot is the writer's tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth. A report will say that something will go up unless it goes down. That's simply brilliant but there really is no other alternative. Everything goes up, stays the same or goes down. Most of the time it's pretty useless to say it's going up unless it goes down. So I'll say it. We are at a fork in the road. My call for a top in gold and a bottom in the dollar back in November was pretty close. I missed the top in gold by three days but hit the bottom in the dollar. My gut feeling is that the gold decline is pretty much over and it may be safe to go back in the water. ... But the dollar is going to continue to go up. Unless of course it goes down. 78.50 on the dollar index is the fork in the road. Readers of 321gold are quite familiar with the anti-dollar logic. It's all valid and it's all true. But as bad as the future of the dollar is, the future of the Euro may be much shorter. So the dollar is going into the toilet but the Euro and the Yen may arrive first.

I think we are about to see a decoupling between the dollar and gold. I suspect we could see both gold and the dollar going up as sovereign nations start a wave of defaults on their debt. The stock market has begun its collapse. I think this year is going to be called the year of The Default. Greece is on the verge of collapse financially; possibly taking the Euro down with them. The good people of Iceland are about to vote on a referendum in February or March on whether or not they should tell the IMF to take their $5 billion in loans and shove them. Japan is in deep trouble and Britain is on the ropes. The readers of 321gold have long since been aware of the $120 trillion plus in debt of the United States that can never be repaid. I suspect the chickens have come home to roost and the horizon a year out is going to look a whole lot different than it does today. ...

Regular readers of 321gold know that I speak my mind and it really doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with me, you leave here understanding how I feel about an issue. All wealth comes from one of three sources. You can grow it. If you shove a single kernel of corn into the ground at the right time and under the right conditions, you can come back 110 days later and find a corn plant containing hundreds of kernels of corn. You have created wealth. Likewise, you can take $10 worth of some plastic and copper and quartz, squeeze them together in exactly the right way and call it an iPhone worth $200. You have created wealth. And you can dig a hole in the ground, bring up some minerals from the right formation, heat them and make silver bars or copper cathodes. You have created wealth. Everything else, including the actions of lawyers and politicians, is wealth distribution. You cannot have lawyers or politicians or tree huggers unless and until someone has created enough wealth to support the bloodsuckers. The United States is bankrupt. We have $120 trillion dollars of debt obligations and only $53 trillion dollars of wealth. The government could tax us for every cent we have twice over and we still can't pay our debts. We are going to default. I know it, you know it and worst of all, the Chinese know it. We can forget making it through, it ain't gonna happen. We are going to go into hyperinflation or a simple default and in either case; we are going to have a lot less government on the other side. We simply cannot afford the level of government we have. To survive, not to thrive, but just basic survival, the US is going to have to produce something. We can't grow more; we are now a net importer of food. We have exported our manufacturing industry in exchange for the production of hamburgers now called manufacturing. But we can mine mineral deposits we know exist....

Noted: 2009 - 2010 Silver and gold coins - South Carolina Legislature Online
This web page was last updated on February 5, 2010

A BILL

TO AMEND THE CODE OF LAWS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 1976, BY ADDING ARTICLE 18 TO CHAPTER 1, TITLE 1 SO AS TO PROVIDE THAT SILVER AND GOLD COIN SHALL BE LEGAL TENDER IN PAYMENT OF CERTAIN DEBTS.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina:

SECTION 1. Chapter 1, Title 1 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:

"Article 18

Gold and Silver Coin as Legal Tender

Section 1-1-1110. The South Carolina General Assembly finds and declares that the State is experiencing an economic crisis of severe magnitude caused in large part by the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin as legal tender in this State. The General Assembly also finds and declares that immediate exercise of the power of the State of South Carolina reserved under Article I, Section 10, Paragraph 1 of the United States Constitution and by the Tenth Amendment, is necessary to protect the safety, health and welfare of the people of this State, by guaranteeing to them a constitutional and economically sound monetary system. ...

MONEY LAW The Coinage Act of April 2, 1792

Related: Shares tumble and pound plummets as crisis looms for the Eurozone
Lucy Farndon Daily Mail UK February 6, 2010

Stock markets tumbled worldwide yesterday amid fears that crippling debt levels in southern Europe could destabilise the euro and derail economic recovery. Portugal and Spain became the latest Eurozone countries to cause a panic among investors, as economists cast doubt on their ability to control their national debt. With Greece already expected to need a bail-out of up to £16billion from the European Central Bank, there are real concerns that the Eurozone may become unviable in its present form. ... Earlier in the day, Asian stock markets also fell, with Japan's Nikkei index down by three per cent. In New York, Wall Street dropped by more than 100 points. Some economists say the turbulence in Europe could be enough to tilt the UK back into recession. ... Jim Reid, a strategist at Deutsche Bank in London, warned: 'These problems could be a dress rehearsal for what the U.S. and UK may face further down the road.'...

Obama's muddled solutions
Joseph Stiglitz Guardian UK February 6, 2010

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... The US economy is in a mess, even if growth has resumed, and bankers are once again receiving huge bonuses. More than one out of six Americans who would like a full-time job cannot get one; and 40% of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than six months. As Europe learned long ago, hardship increases with the length of unemployment, as job skills and prospects deteriorate and savings gets wiped out. The 2.5-3.5m foreclosures expected this year will exceed those of 2009, and the year began with what is expected to be the first of many large commercial real-estate bankruptcies. Even the Congressional budget office is predicting that it will be the middle of the decade before unemployment returns to more normal levels, as America experiences its own version of "Japanese malaise". As I wrote in my new book Freefall, Barack Obama took a big gamble at the start of his administration. Instead of the marked change that his campaign had promised, he kept many of the same officials and maintained the same "trickle down" strategy to confront the financial crisis. Providing enough money to the banks was, his team seemed to say, the best way to help ordinary homeowners and workers. ...

There was a moment a year ago when Obama, with his enormous political capital, might have been able to achieve this ambitious agenda, and, building on these successes, go on to deal with America's other problems. But anger about the bailout, confusion between the bailout (which didn't restart lending, as it was supposed to do) and the stimulus (which did what it was supposed to do, but was too small), and disappointment about mounting job losses, has vastly circumscribed his room for manoeuvre. Indeed, there is even skepticism about whether Obama will be able to push through his welcome and long overdue efforts to curtail the too-big-to-fail banks and their reckless risk-taking. And, without that, more likely than not, the economy will face another crisis in the not-too-distant future. Most Americans, however, are focused on today's downturn, not tomorrow's. Growth over the next two years is expected to be so anaemic that it will barely be able to create enough jobs for new entrants to the labour force, let alone to return unemployment to an acceptable level. ...

The defense industry is pleased with Obama
Laura Flanders The Nation blogs USA February 3, 2010

Who says the president is failing to show leadership? In one area at least, there's no sign of flag or falter. If anything, the administration's only becoming more forthright. Sad to say, that area is military build-up. ... The quote of the day comes from the CEO of a military contractor-funded policy group called the Lexington Institute. Loren Thompson tells Tuesday's New York Times, "The defense industry is pleased but bemused... It's been telling itself for years that when the Democrats got control it would be bad news for weapons programs. But the spending keeps going on." Take that you Nobel committee! And to think some whiners complain about Democrats suffering from a lack of direction.

Engraving depicting Sherman's march to the sea. Library of Congress: Ritchie, Alexander Hay, 1822-1895, engraver. Date: c. 1868

Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you... Leviticus 25:10 (NIV)

I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl! - General William Tecumseh Sherman, telegram to General U.S. Grant, October 9, 1864

Bring the good old bugle, boys, we'll sing another song;
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it as we used to sing it, fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia.

"Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee!
"Hurrah! Hurrah! The Flag that makes you free!"
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound!
...

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!"
So the saucy Rebels said, and 'twas a handsome boast;
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the host,
While we were marching through Georgia.
...

So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train,
Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain,
While we were marching through Georgia.

...

Items: My hopes for Iran in the decade ahead
Saeed Kamali Dehghan Guardian UK January 5, 2010

... I hope, too, that discrimination against Iranians all over the world will be stopped in the coming decade. Iranians cannot travel easily because of western sanctions against Iran which have mostly crippled ordinary Iranians rather than Iranian officials. The Iranian passport has been ranked among the world's 10 worst passports to carry. Iranians are not treated well at western airports, including by UK Border Agency at Heathrow airport. They are often considered as potential suspects and are treated poorly. As an Iranian citizen, I hope that the stupid sanctions imposed on Iran by western governments will be stopped and effective ways can be found to confront the Iranian government. Recently I found that it was impossible for an Iranian visitor to open a bank account in London. Whenever I visited banks in London, including HSBC and Barclays, I was told that Iranians could not open bank accounts. Well, I'm not the Iranian government, I'm an ordinary Iranian and the sanctions are just crippling me, not my government.

The Iran sanctions dilemma
James Denselow Guardian UK February 1, 2010

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The stakes were dramatically raised in the Middle East at the weekend by news that the US is deploying defensive missile systems throughout the Gulf. Writing in the Guardian, Robert Tait warned that the deployment "may strengthen radical elements in the revolutionary guards". ...

Last month more than 40 passengers were injured when an Iranian Tupolev 154 crash-landed at Mashhad. Another Russian-built Tupolev crashed last year en route to Armenia, killing all 168 on board. Iran has a poor aviation safety record, with numerous crashes since US aviation sanctions prevented it from buying more reliable western planes in 1995. The question that arises from these incidents is whether banning civilian airline parts represents "smart" sanctions that are intended to maximise the pressure on the ruling regime while limiting their unintended side effects, or whether it puts the lives of innocent travellers of all nationalities at risk. At the end of 2009 the head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organisation, Reza Nakhjavani, criticised the American ban as inhumane and tantamount to denying the country medical supplies. Yet according to the Carnegie Institute the initial logic of the Iran Sanctions Act was to "curb the strategic threat of Iran" with particular focus on the developing energy sector. Although development of the energy sector has been somewhat stunted, Iran's reliance on Russia and China to fill in for the US has the unintended consequence of making it a lot harder to find security council consensus on dealing with the country. ... A report prepared for the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in 2005 warned that American sanctions against Iran were placing civilian lives in danger by denying Iranian aviation necessary spare parts. The report said the US government and major US companies were ignoring international treaties and taking actions that put passengers on Iranian commercial airlines at risk, including thousands of people from other countries travelling to and from Iran. ...

Iran may be near uranium deal
Nicholas Kulish New York Times USA February 5, 2010

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MUNICH — Iran might be close to a deal to have uranium enriched abroad, the country’s foreign minister said Friday. But he proposed a condition that might not be acceptable to the United States and other governments that have been trying to negotiate a compromise over Iran’s nuclear program. Under such an agreement, Iran would send low-enriched uranium to the West and receive higher-grade uranium in return for use in a reactor that would produce isotopes for medical use. “We are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties,” said the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, who spoke before European leaders here at the annual Munich Security Conference. “I personally believe we have created conducive ground for such an exchange in the not very distant future,” Mr. Mottaki said. The foreign minister’s comments came after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Iran was prepared to comply with a United Nations request to send its uranium abroad for further enrichment.

Such a deal would indicate a compromise in the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran says the program is for peaceful civilian purposes only, but the West charges that it is a cover for developing weapons. Mr. Mottaki said that a key condition for an agreement would be allowing Iran to decide how much uranium would be enriched. “Our request is the quantity should be announced by the party who is going to use this enriched uranium, and the quantity will be announced based on our need,” he added. The United States has pressed for tighter sanctions against Iran, something China has resisted. Earlier, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said at the conference that Iran “had the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy.” And Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, who joined Mr. Mottaki onstage, said, “The clock is ticking.”

Iran nuclear issue the 'top global security threat'
Agence France-Presse/Yahoo! News France/USA February 6, 2010

MUNICH, Germany (AFP) – Iran's defiance over its nuclear programme poses the greatest threat to international security, US National Security Advisor James Jones warned on Saturday. "Hanging in the balance is a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and greater proliferation world wide. I can think of no greater concern at the moment to our collective security," he said. ... Jones said that the door for diplomacy with Iran remains open, but he underlined that "Tehran's puzzling defiance... now compels all of us to work together as allies and partners on a second track of increased pressure."

Gates plays down chances of atomic deal with Iran
Adam Entous Reuters/Yahoo! News UK/USA February 6, 2010

ANKARA (Reuters) – Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Saturday he saw no sign a deal was close between Iran and Western powers on exchanging some of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) for higher-grade fuel, suggesting it was time to move forward with sanctions. "I don't have the sense that we're close to an agreement," Gates told reporters in Ankara where he met Turkish leaders.

His comments stood in contrast to those by Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, who said on Friday he saw good prospects for clinching a deal with world powers on exchanging LEU for higher-grade fuel it can use in a reactor producing medical isotopes. "If they are prepared to take up the original proposal of the P-5 plus one of delivering 1,200 kilograms of their low enriched uranium, all at once to an agreed party, I think there would be a response to that," he added, referring to the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany. Gates said President Obama had taken unprecedented steps to engage with Iran, describing the response so far as "disappointing." ...

U.S. Senator Lieberman: Impose sanctions on Iran or attack it
Ha'retz Israel February 6, 2010

The world faces a stark choice between imposing tough sanctions on Iran to stop its nuclear program, or attacking it, United States Senator Joe Lieberman said Saturday. Lieberman is the influential chairman of the Senate committee on homeland security. He was speaking a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that his country was ready to accept an international swap of uranium, but only under certain conditions. "We have a choice here: to go to tough economic sanctions to make diplomacy work or we will face the prospect of military action against Iran," Lieberman told the annual Munich Security Conference. Top U.S. commanders are already working out how such a strike should be conducted, and although "no-one wants this to happen ... unless we together act strongly and do more than talk that is exactly what will happen," Lieberman said. ...

Tories would back war with Iran
Sean Rayment Daily Telegraph UK February 6, 2010

Liam Fox described the threat posed by Iran as the "single most important issue facing the West" and added that 2010 was the year in which the Islamic state had to be confronted. Mr Fox said that while military action would be in "no one's interest", he maintained that the use of force was an option which "must remain on the table".... The Tory policy on Iran differs from the Government's stated position that military action was "inconceivable". Defence sources said an attack on Iran would be likely to consist of a missile attack rather than an Iraq-style invasion, with nuclear and uranium enrichment sites being targeted by cruise missiles launched from submarines and aeroplanes. Britain could play a direct role - the Royal Navy has ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles and could provide early warning aircraft and tankers for in-flight refuelling for other aircraft taking part in an operation. ...

China counsels not so fast, boys and girls!

U.S. doesn't foresee nuclear deal with Iran in near future
Ha'aretz Israel February 6, 2010

... China's foreign minister on Friday urged the world to be patient and keep up diplomatic efforts with Iran to try and find a solution to Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told a gathering of the world's top defense officials that negotiations with Iran's government have entered a crucial stage. "The parties concerned should, with the overall and long-term interests in mind, step up diplomatic efforts, stay patient and adopt a more flexible, pragmatic and proactive policy," he said. "The purpose is to seek a comprehensive, long-term and proper solution through dialogue and negotiations." China's insistence on diplomacy comes just after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier Friday that UN Security Council members may have to discuss Iran if the Islamic Republic fails to behave constructively in a dispute over its nuclear work. A permanent member of the UN Security Council, China is a major player in the dispute with Iran over its nuclear activities. ...

Related: Iran says Russia offers missile reassurance
Washington Post/Tehran Times USA/Iran February 6, 2010


Russia’s S-300 long-range air-defense missile

The Iranian ambassador in Moscow says Russia has assured Iran that it still intends to deliver long-range air-defense missiles. Russian news agencies cite Seyyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi as saying on Thursday “our Russian colleagues have assured us that they will meet their obligations.” Russia signed a 2007 contract to sell the S-300 missile complex, but so far has not delivered. Technical issues to blame for delay The ambassador said the delay in delivering S-300 air defense systems has been due to technical reasons. Several technical issues have occurred while implementing the contract, the diplomat said.

The latest version of the S-300 series is the S-300PMU2 Favorit, which has a range of up to 195 km and can intercept aircraft and ballistic missiles at altitudes from 10 meters to 27 km. It is considered one of the world's most effective all-altitude regional air defense systems, comparable in performance to the U.S. MIM-104 Patriot systems. According to a Jan. 28 report from the Russian news agency Interfax – translated by BBC Worldwide Monitoring – Russia’s state-owned arms trading company Rosoboronexport will continue selling weapons to Iran because there is no international prohibition against it. “There are no international sanctions against Iran,” Anatoliy Isaykin, the company’s director-general said. “Therefore there are formally no bans against supplying any kind of arms to Iran. Iran has remained our partner for a long period of time,” Isaykin said. “There has not been a single instance of the commitments outlined in (arms) contracts being breached (by Iran).”

Footnote:


General Sherman Memorial, Washington D.C.

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

Oh, did we mention the Obama administration's asking Congress to increase spending on new nuclear weapons by more than $7 billion dollars over the next five years -- despite that peace prize-winning pledge to cut the US arsenal and seek a nuclear weapons-free world?

• Click on a headline below to go to that news item

Friday, February 5,2010

National News
Eye on North American Union: A puzzle piece is placed; another has been discovered but not yet put in place

Thursday, February 4,2010

National News
As part of Stephen Harper's new 'grim consensus', Kadhr will not be repatriated

World News
Global military spending ‘recession-proof’: Money is tight everywhere, until its time to fund the military

Commentary
The lessons of Iraq have been ignored. The target is now Iran

Commentary
America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well

Wednesday, February 3,2010

New World Order
British Columbians waking up to the fact that the 2010 Winter Olympics are just another fascist fraud

Tuesday, February 2,2010

World News
Decades later, U.S. military pollution in Philippines linked to deaths

World News
Middle East notes: Israeli minister worries about all-out war; Jordan renders nearly 3,000 Palestinians stateless; in Yemen, the truth is a casualty of war

Commentary
Vignettes from the Afghan war: As US and allies seek face-saving way out, US Marines pray and fight, two Afghan soldiers choose flight

Monday, February 1,2010

National News
Here are the news: Old Crow writer Edith Josie dies

World News
Those American Southern Baptists caught with 33 Haitian children: Misguided samaritans or theocratic, proselytizing criminals?

Commentary
First Kosovo, then Iraq, now on to Iran: Tony Blair’s monstrous consistency

World News
Another Mossad assassination? Secret CIA-Mossad meeting, preparation for new war? & The question of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel)

Sunday, January 31,2010

Social Ideas
Community food enterprises: Providing economic stability and food security

National News
Canadian government and supermarket chains have helped stunt Canadian garlic farmers who have been wiped out commercially by imports from China

Science & Technology
The grand experiment: Eating food that is mutated by other non-food species

Deal easing Buy American policy comes at a price
Les Whittington Toronto Star Canada February 5, 2010

OTTAWA—The Conservative government today announced a tentative Canada-United States procurement deal intended to help Canadian companies get around the protectionist wall thrown up by recession-battered Americans. But in exchange, Canada is giving American firms access to billions of dollars in contracts by provincial governments and, in some cases, municipalities, federal government officials said. The long-sought compromise is an agreement in principle but Trade Minister Peter Van Loan said Ottawa fully expects the provinces to approve the deal and the U.S. government is committed to implementing its part of the agreement, which will not require approval from the U.S. Congress. The deal with President Barack Obama’s administration will weaken the Buy America provisions that have kept Canadian exporters from bidding on hundreds of millions of dollars in economic stimulus projects south of the border. ...

Under today’s agreement, states and local governments will no longer apply Buy America provisions to Canadian companies bidding on projects funded under the Recovery Act through several U.S. government departments, including energy, housing and the environmental protection agency. Canadian officials said this will provide significant new access for Canadian suppliers and manufacturers. But the price for Canada is high. As part of the deal, Canadian provinces will permanently give up their highly-valued right to use government procurement (with some exceptions) to spur local economic growth by favouring homegrown goods and suppliers. The deal is likely to spark angry complaints that the Harper government gave away too much to reach a compromise with Washington. In exchange for this concession, however, companies in Canada will have permanent access to procurement at the state level in the 37 U.S. states that are parties to the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on government procurement. Canadian officials said this will allow Canadian companies to bid on state government contracts in most of the economically important states south of the border. ... Another aspect of the deal is an agreement to continue bilateral negotiations on expanding reciprocal access to the U.S. and Canadian markets in future, sources said. ...

As U.S. eases protectionism, Canada moves a step closer to economic union
John Ibbitson Globe and Mail Canada February 5, 2010

Canadian firms will be able to bid on new U.S. contracts worth tens of billions of dollars after an announcement today that is expected to ease Buy American restrictions. It may also signal a step toward economic union within Canada. ...

Related: There is a price to pay for this union. It is your mortgage. And maybe—in the near future—your water.

CIBC fuels US covered bond hopes
Nicole Bullock in New York and David Oakley in London Financial Times UK January 27, 2010

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce sold $2bn of covered bonds on Wednesday in a deal that bankers hope will lay the groundwork for a US covered bond market. European bankers are monitoring the US for signs that covered bond issuance can take off after success in Europe with deals totalling $50bn so far this year, five times more than the same period last year. Covered bonds are debt issued mostly by banks and secured by a pool of loans. Unlike a traditional securitisation, the original lenders own the underlying loans, so the bonds are backed by both the loan pool and the issuing bank. Bankers have touted them as a way to boost mortgage lending and provide financing for banks. ... The three-year covered bonds, which are rated triple-A, were priced at 30 basis points over swaps. The high quality nature of the collateral pool, which is guaranteed by the state-owned Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp, enticed investors. Tim Skeet of Bank of American Merrill Lynch, which was lead arranger on the deal, said: “The profile of this borrower and structure of the deal is probably the optimal place to start when it comes to reintroducing US investors to covered bonds.” ...

Start of a trend by non-U.S. banks?
Spencer Punnett Covered Bond Investor™ USA January 27, 2010

... This issuance marks the first time in years that covered bonds have been issued in U.S. dollars from any source — foreign or domestic. "This is a welcome development," said Jerry Marlatt, Senior Of Counsel at Morrison & Foerster and a member of the Steering Committee of the U.S. Covered Bond Council. "Everything that helps open up the U.S. covered bond market is to be cheered, and issuance by non-U.S. banks may help move the proposed [federal] legislation [for U.S. issuers] along." "But it is a bit ironic to have foreign banks financing foreign mortgage loans in the U.S. private markets when U.S. banks are not able to finance U.S. mortgage loans in the market," Marlatt added. ... The cover pool for the CIBC's new issue will consist entirely of Canadian residential mortgage loans and eligible substitute assets, according to Moody's Investors Service. An attractive feature is that all mortgage loans in the cover pool are insured by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC), whose obligations are backed by the full faith and credit of the Canadian government. ...

For decades, political and business insiders, with Canadian and British Columbian governments, have known that the water resources in the American southwest and Mexico were dwindling in the face of an increasing population. A small group of political and business insiders saw the opportunity to earn massive profits for themselves from the export of Canada's fresh water and set about on a fraudulent and corrupt scheme to capture for themselves an illegal water export monopoly so they could line their pockets with revenues from the sale of Canadian public assests. The really big project for water from British Columbia is pictured to the left. It is known as the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) and it will deliver huge quantities of fresh water from Alaska and British Columbia to the American south west and northern Mexico. It will transform life in much of western North America, just like the great water project of the 1950's, the St. Lawrence Seaway, transformed the regions of eastern and central North America.

The politicians plan to steal Canada's water resource wealth
Water War Crimes Canada n.d.

... In the 19th century American writer Mark Twain observed of the American southwest “Where whiskey is for drinking over and water is for fighting over”. People fight over water in the American southwest and in northern Mexico. In the 1950's, retired Canadian General Andrew MacNaughten observed that eventually the Americans were going to need Canadian water and that Canadians should figure out how to sell it to them before they came and took it. In the 1970's the National Security Administration of the United States reported that the biggest long term threat to the United States economy was the lack of fresh water resources in the American southwest. Eventually, Canadian political and business insiders realized the enormous potential markets in the American southwest and northern Mexico that could be supplied with fresh water from Canada and a scheme was devised to make some money out of a worthless resource - Canada. ...

United States Senator John McCain is not a Canadian politician. He is a straight shooter. He comes from Arizona. He knows about water. He knows the magic water can do in the desert. He came to Ottawa on June 20, 2008, on US Senate business. He spoke to Canada's then Minister of Foreign Affairs David Emerson. Prime Minister Stephen Harper left town. At a news conference, after the meeting, a reporter asked Senator McCain about the issue of bulk water exports from Canada to the USA. He replied,

"Water exports will be the defining issue of the 21 st century but it must be done with the consent of the people".

These are strange words for a politician, in Canada, to say. He is talking about "the consent of the people". He is actually talking seriously about "water exports", something politicians in Canada do not talk about very often, if at all, although it is the most serious, long term economic item on the agenda between Canada and the USA. But, John McCain, is not a Canadian politician. He is not trying to figure out how he and his pals can swindle a bulk water export monopoly between Canada and the USA. ...

Harper to address B.C. legislature on eve of Games
Ian Bailey Globe and Mail Canada February 5, 2010

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will address the B.C. Legislature on the eve of the Olympics next Thursday, thanking the province for its efforts to prepare the Games. “The Prime Minister will salute Vancouver, Whistler and British Columbia for its magnificent work in organizing and hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games – ‘Canada’s Games,’” said a statement from Mr. Harper’s office. A prime ministerial speech to a provincial or territorial legislature is rare and last occurred in 1990, when Brian Mulroney discussed the Meech Lake accord with the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell noted Mr. Harper’s speech before B.C. members will be the first time a prime minister has so addressed the B.C. Legislature. ... Political scientist Norman Ruff of the University of Victoria said Mr. Harper’s appearance speaks to the state of harmonious relations between Ottawa and Victoria, and Mr. Campbell and Mr. Harper. ...

The B.C. legislature opens next Tuesday with a throne speech and will sit for two days before breaking for the Games. MLAs will return March 2, when Finance Minister Colin Hansen will deliver the budget.

Noted: Canada, U.S. cooperate on terror, Olympics
Alex Kingsbury US News and World Report USA February 5, 2010

Gary Doer is one of the newest ambassadors in town, having represented Canada for just over three months. The veteran politician spent a decade as a provincial premier, but the bare-knuckled atmosphere inside the beltway should be a breeze compared with one of his first jobs as a counselor at a youth detention facility. He spoke with U.S. News about U.S-Canadian relations and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Excerpts:

Which issues consume most of your time?

There's so much going on between our two countries that people just don't see. Obviously, trade is visible. The jobs that are created by trade are visible but often under­estimated in terms of their benefit. The work we're doing together in Afghanistan is visible and understood. I think that an area of cooperation that would surprise people, and that I've been very favorably impressed with, is intelligence. The U.S. has a lot of resources in intelligence, more than we do. But Canada has some windows on information that might be unique, and it gets shared in very useful ways. There's tremendous cooperation between your security people and our security people.

How do Canadians view the U.S. fight against terrorists?

We may have some connection to the attacks of 9/11, but we have less connection than Americans. Ever since the horrible attacks of 9/11, it has been important to convey to Canadians not just the threat but also the emotion of being a target that is felt by the United States
. It's important for us to have a consistent message. The comments our prime minister made last year, that an attack against the U.S. is an attack against Canada, is an important message to reiterate to Canadians over and over and over again.

...

The Vancouver Olympics are less than a month away. What's been the biggest challenge?

We have the joy of hosting and the challenge of security. Everybody is on their toes. Secure movement of people between the western U.S. and western Canada is a challenging problem. There's been a lot of prework going into those issues for months, if not years. When our ministers meet with the head of your Department of Homeland Security, there are a few friendly barbs about the competition, but mostly it's security, security, security.

Are there specific threats associated with the games?

If I listed them, they'd become a bigger threat, wouldn't they? We believe in the freedom of the press, but we don't want to lead with our chin.

Saying no to corporate meddling in our lives
Jerry West rabble.ca Canada February 3, 2010

... The idea that corporate groups have rights equal to those of real persons in a society is a threat to any form of democracy based on the equality of the individual, and is a step in social evolution backward towards the structures of the Middle Ages. Recognizing the rights of corporations as equal to those of actual persons increases the power of accumulated wealth to decide what the rules are that govern how we can live our lives. When corporations exercise their influence there is little doubt that when the question is between corporate interest and the well being of society, which way they will influence the decision. The power of corporations is a direct threat to personal freedom. The more this power increases the more people are made dependent upon them and the less ability people have to deviate from what the corporations want them to do. As corporate power grows corporations absorb more and more of our infrastructure, buying up businesses and property and taking over government services. The end result could be a return to a feudal system where most of the population are serfs in the service of one corporation or another. Unlike the older feudal structures, however, instead of the ruler being at the top of the pile, in today's developing feudal society the corporations own the rulers who are being reduced to corporate functionaries. The real power lies in the board rooms.

The recent [United States] Supreme Court ruling is a step in the direction of greater corporate influence in our lives, and not just American lives since the United States has such a great impact on world society, whatever happens there sends ripples throughout the rest of the world, particularly in Canada which is so closely bound to it. The future will depend on whether the trend of increasing corporate wealth and power is allowed to continue. If it does, the ideals of freedom and democracy will be replaced with ones emphasizing compliance and loyalty to corporate will. Reversing the trend will require public pressure, a lot of it, to reduce corporate power and increase the power of the individual.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator, lawyer, politician and philosopher



Intro: Democracy in trouble: Time to wake up
Ralph Surette rabble.ca Canada February 1, 2010

I hate to be grim, but there's this gnawing question in the air: Is democracy in trouble? If so, what does it mean? In both Canada and the U.S., what's transpiring is astonishing. ... As in Canada, where the Conservative party is no longer the Conservative party but the barely disguised derivative of a right-wing fundamentalism, so the U.S. Republicans are light years away from the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower ("I despise those who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the centre"). ...

Back in Canada, here's another unnerving thought. It's not just because of Stephen Harper. Anti-democratic concentration of power in the prime minister's office has been increasing since Pierre Trudeau. We are now, apparently, the most undemocratic of the British-derived parliamentary systems. Is there a deeper "structural" dynamic of democratic disintegration at work beyond Harper's machinations? And is this greater disintegration in part because of our proximity to the U.S.? After all, the Harper government draws its inspiration, if you can call it that, from the Bush Republicans, having borrowed some of their electoral operatives and tactics, and still cultivates those contacts. Are we down to desperate measures in our democratic life? ...

Harper's new, grim consensus
Thomas Walkom Toronto Star Canada February 3, 2010

Key changes often happen at the margins, quietly and away from public scrutiny. Prime Minister Stephen Harper understands this. That is why he focuses less on grand schemes such as rolling back abortion rights or slashing social spending, and more on making subtle changes to how government works. His key tools are enforcement and appointment. Parliament can pass laws. But, as Harper proved by flouting the gun registry act, it can't make the government enforce them. Appointments are trickier. In the U.S., an incoming president gets to immediately replace hundreds of federal officials with his own partisans. In Canada (with a few obvious exceptions like the Senate) such blatant patronage is considered tasteless. Here, such things usually happen in dribs and drabs. This is the context in which the ongoing brouhaha over Rights and Democracy, a federally funded human rights agency, must be seen. The complicated details of what's been going on at the Montreal-based agency have been reported by my colleague Haroon Siddiqui. But the Harper government's essential aim has been simple – to make appointments to the agency's board that will shift its approach to Israel and the Palestinians. In a phrase used four years ago by Michael Van Pelt, one of Harper's new appointments to Rights and Democracy, the agency is part of the older "pan-Canadian consensus" that the present government wants to change. Writing in the magazine Policy Options, Van Pelt (who heads the evangelical Christian think-tank Cardus) and associate Ray Penning argued that this old, small-l liberal consensus – which both Liberals and Tories ascribed to for years and which emphasizes "an aggressive rights-based polity that identifies with tolerance" – is ending. Stephen Harper conservatism, they argue, is the cutting edge of a new Canadian consensus. ...

Nonetheless, the quiet refashioning of government continues apace: an appointment here, a directive there. In Canada's foreign service, for instance, the government has ruled that bureaucrats may no longer refer to "child soldiers." This phrase suggests that actions of insurgents under 16 (such as alleged Guantanamo Bay war criminal Omar Khadr) are excusable. In the new consensus, no one is excused. All – including the youngest children – are responsible for their own sins. No quarter is to be given.

Nothing in PM's way now ... and that's his problem
James Travers Toronto Star Canada February 4, 2010

Stephen Harper finally has everything he needs. Well, almost. With the Commons and Senate under control and the top court leaving the Prime Minister room to manoeuvre, Harper urgently requires a few fresh excuses. Without them, Conservatives will wonder what's holding back an agenda more or less on hold since they won power four years ago. Before painting the red chamber blue, Harper could, and did, blame Liberal senators for blocking bills closest to the hearts of those who fondly remember the good old days when Reform was the party's name. Just in case anyone missed the importance of the blame game, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson specifically justified packing the Senate with obedient loyalists by accusing unelected Liberals of obstructing Conservative law-and-order legislation. Not quite a lie, Nicholson's claim is a long-day's march from the truth. But aside from honesty, it hardly matters that Conservatives became their own speed bump, once slowing the government's crime-fighting momentum by breaking the Prime Minister's fixed-date election law and twice by suspending Parliament.

What really matters is what the party's base is willing to accept. So far it has been willing to believe that Liberals are the reason Canada is changing more incrementally than Conservatives dreamed after the 2006 election and now have new reasons to dream again. Meeting those expectations is the Prime Minister's current conundrum. If he hurries the agenda hard, the roughly 65 per cent of voters who still don't trust Conservatives will trust them even less. If not, the party will want to know why not. That question was easier to answer just months ago. Back then, the Official Opposition was threatening an election, more Liberals than Conservatives were belly-scratching in the Senate and the lower courts were telling the government to bring Omar Khadr home from Guantanamo Bay. Now, no party has enough to gain from yet another campaign, newly appointed winners of the great Canadian lottery are standing by to do the Prime Minister's Senate bidding and the Supreme Court left it to the government to make the wrong decision by not asking for Khadr's release. ...

Items: Do the right thing, Mr. Harper
David Berner The Berner Monologues British Columbia Canada January 30, 2010

Omar Khadr may or may not be a murder, a terrorist, and a sonofabitch who is mean to babies and dogs. But what is the point of fighting and winning wars and skirmishes in the name of fairy-tale notions like democracy and freedom and justice if we abandon all such in the execution of the battle? Now, the Supreme Court of Canada has clearly and cleanly thrown down the gauntlet to the Harper government, challenging Canada to bring Khadar back from the legal and moral black hole of Guantanamo Bay.

In a 9-0 ruling, the court effectively dared the Harper government to ignore its finding that Canada and the United States are violating Mr. Khadr's right to life, liberty and security under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A government is expected to take action when the court rules it has violated some one's rights. This is not a question of being kind to criminals. It's all about the principle, stupid.

Canada's silence on Khadr is a scary prospect for us
Bruce Holvick, Letter to the Editor Surrey NOW British Columbia Canada February 2, 2010

The Editor,

So, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are free to act, or not, according to their core values and sense of moral obligation. If they don't apply to the American government to repatriate Mr. Khadr immediately, then an underlying message would be clear. Yours (and my) personal rights and freedoms as per the Canadian Charter would apparently mean nothing to the current Harper administration. ... Apparently it is the standard operating procedure for Canadian officials - by silence and/or inaction - to support inappropriate, unethical, immoral or even illegal actions by any foreign government, including the United States of America. It is unfortunate for most of us, but it is a big plus for Mr. Harper's Conservative administration, that - because of Mr. Harper's recent personal decision - the Canadian Parliament is not actually sitting at the present time. ...

Government refuses to ask for Khadr's return to Canada
Janice Tibbetts Canwest News Service/Vancouver Sun Canada February 4, 2010

The Harper government says it will not seek Omar Khadr's repatriation from Guantanamo Bay, but that it is considering other undisclosed options to make up for violating his constitutional rights. ... The Toronto-born Khadr, now 23, was 15 years old when he was captured by American forces following a shootout with al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan in July 2002.

"Shootout"? It was a firefight between Afghanis and invading America forces, a firefight initiated by the invaders. Oh, well.

Mr. Harper continues to surprise
Norman Spector Globe and Mail blogs Canada February 4, 2010

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... Speaking of Afghanistan, yesterday Mr. Harper smoothly took the option of repatriating Omar Khadr off the table. Why is this important? Last week’s Supreme Court decision reversing decisions by two lower courts ordering his repatriation has been widely misinterpreted – if not deliberately distorted – by Mr. Khadr’s lawyers, sympathizers in the media and academe – and by the large number of Canadians who’d never, ever consider voting Conservative. And still is being, as you can see in the lead of a report in today’s Toronto Star: “Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be asking the United States to return Omar Khadr to Canada, despite a Supreme Court ruling that his rights were violated by Canadian officials.” Contrary to the Khadr lobby, repatriating Omar Khadr is not the only option for complying with the Court decision. In fact, the only option not open to the government is the option of doing nothing in light of the violation of his rights by Canadian officials in 2003-2004. How do we know this to be true? Forget about what you’ve been reading in the papers and seeing on television since the Court decision.

Consider instead the reaction of Bob Rae to yesterday’s announcement by Mr. Harper’s spokesperson that the government would not be asking for the repatriation of Mr. Khadr (as reported by CP): Liberal Foreign Affairs critic Bob Rae dismissed Soudas’ comments, saying the government needs to “get serious” about its response to the top court. “The Attorney General of Canada has to tell us how the government intends to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada,” Rae said. Or consider the later, and therefore more thoughtful reaction of NDP justice critic Joe Comartin, as reported by Canwest: the government could respond to the Supreme Court ruling by trying to seek assurances from the United States that the information it obtained in its interviews with Mr. Khadr – which were passed on to the Americans – will not be used at his military trial. “That’s a step that they could try to do,” said Mr. Comartin, who predicted that seeking concessions for Mr. Khadr in the United States “may well be enough to satisfy the Supreme Court.” If Opposition critics are willing to cut the Conservatives that much slack, you can be sure that Mr. Soudas saying that the government is still reviewing the court decision was all that needed to be said yesterday. And, unlike yesterday, when an announcement is eventually forthcoming, it will have already been known by the public that repatriating Mr. Khadr was not an option. ...

Supremes wrong
Shloime Perel, Letter to the Editor The Gazette Quebec Canada February 4, 2010

Re: "An unsatisfactory end to the Omar Khadr case" (Editorial, Jan. 30). The Supreme Court's ruling to overturn two lower federal court decisions ordering the Harper government to repatriate Canadian Omar Khadr amounts to a shameful abandonment of Khadr, despite its criticism of the feds acting as an accessory to Khadr's torture. The court did not have the courage to challenge both the Canadian and U.S. governments and copped out, saying it's not its role to challenge foreign policy. Yet in the recent case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the court did not challenge a lower court ruling ordering the government to repatriate him from the Sudan. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Khadr will now face a U.S. military tribunal in which military officers are the judge and jury and in which anything said under the duress of torture is permissible evidence.

Related: Pastor Martin Niemöller
Serendipity USA n.d.

There are several versions of the well-known statement attributed to the German anti-Nazi activist, Pastor Martin Niemöller (his family name can also be writted without the umlaut as "Niemoeller"). The following is said, by someone who heard him speak at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA, in 1959 (or 1960), to be what he actually said:

Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

What Martin Niemöller said appears in the Congressional Record, 14, October 1968, page 31636, as:

When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned.

But someone who worked in the House of Representatives for years says that "stuff is just put into it [the Congressional Record] by Members of Congress and is not checked for accuracy, or even truth."

On 2005-07-11 a reader sent this message:

Please allow me to say that the Niemöller quote you have is not correct. The Nazi party did not come for the Jews until last. Correctly the order is Communist, Socialist,Trade Unionist,then Jews, then Pastor Niemoller. Thank you

Only empathy can save us: Why Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization is this month's HuffPost Book Club pick
Arianna Huffington Huffington Post USA February 3, 2010



For this month's HuffPost Book Club, I have chosen a big book -- both figuratively and literally. Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization clocks in at close to 700 pages and sets out to present nothing less than -- as Rifkin puts it -- "a new rendering of human history and the meaning of human existence." This alternative history focuses not on the conflicts, antagonisms, and power struggles that have marked human progress, but on "the empathic evolution of the human race and the profound ways it has shaped our development and will likely decide our fate as a species." Empathy, Rifkin tells us -- and backs up with new scientific data -- is not a quaint behavior trotted out during intermittent visits to a food bank or during the Haiti telethon. Instead, it lies at the very core of human existence.

This is something I've long believed. Indeed, I dedicated a whole book to exploring what I called The Fourth Instinct -- that part of the human character that compels us to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring to include our communities and the world around us. And, in the 15 years since then -- and especially since the economic meltdown -- the role empathy plays in our lives has only grown more important. In fact, in this time of economic hardship, political instability, and rapid technological change, empathy is the one quality we most need if we're going to survive and flourish in the 21st century. It's important to keep in mind what empathy is -- and what it's not. It's different than sympathy, which is passive. "Empathy," explains Rifkin, "conjures up active engagement -- the willingness of an observer to become part of another's experience, to share the feeling of that experience."
But empathy is not just about feeling for another's suffering. As Rifkin points out: "One can also empathize with another's joy." Indeed, according to Rifkin, "empathic moments are the most intensely alive experiences we ever have. We empathize with each other's struggles against death and for life. One acknowledges the whiff of death in another's frailties and vulnerabilities. No one ever empathizes with a perfect being." ...

I chose The Empathic Civilization as this month's selection because, besides being a brilliant read and offering a vitally important perspective, it is the perfect companion piece to last month's selection, Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. While Shadow Elite lays out precisely who and what currently have a stranglehold on our political system, The Empathic Civilization shows us the way to decisively break that hold. Rifkin divides the book into three parts. The first takes a look at the new scientific discoveries that lead to the conclusion that rather than being naturally aggressive, acquisitive, and self-involved, humans are "a fundamentally empathic species" -- what Rifkin calls Homo empathicus. The second part charts the development of human empathy, "from the rise of the great theological civilizations to the ideological age that dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the psychological era that characterized much of the twentieth century," and the emerging trends of the 21st century. In the third part of the book, Rifkin focuses on the nascent Third Industrial Revolution and the rise of The Age of Empathy. According to Rifkin, the progress of civilization has been a constant struggle between empathy -- increased human connection -- and entropy, the deterioration of the health of the planet. It is, quite literally, a race against time. "We are on the cusp of an epic shift," he writes. "The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy." ...

America’s Army is no longer an intact force. First of all, the costs of putting "boots on the ground" are now astronomical, some half a million dollars per man. - Jon Basil Utley, "Sun Tzu and America’s Way of War"

Global military spending ‘recession-proof’
Jason Ditz Antiwar.com News USA February 3, 2010

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According to a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, one group has been completely unaffected by the global economic meltdown, the military. “The economic crisis hasn’t had a dramatic impact on defense spending in the past 18 months,” one of the IISS economists, Mark Stoker, noted. In fact worldwide the report showed that military spending actually grew markedly over the past few years, from $1.3 trillion worldwide in 2006, to $1.55 trillion in 2008.

The trend shows no sign of reversing, with the United States, responsible for nearly half of that spending by itself, looking at record war budgets moving forward according to the Obama Administration. The IISS report said only Russia was anticipating a reduction in spending among major nations. The economic downturn has left governments across the world looking at ways to curb spending, but so far few nations are looking at the military as a place to make cuts. As political unrest grows and more nations bring out austerity programs, it seems likely that military spending will come under renewed scrutiny.

How Bin Laden bankrupted America: The five ways
Jon Basil Utley Antiwar.com USA January 19, 2010

For a man who spent years living in caves, Osama bin Laden sure knows his Sun Tzu and the basics of jujitsu. Sun Tzu's famous dictum was "know yourself" and "know your enemy." Jujitsu is based upon using your enemy's strength against him, e.g., like Jack in "Jack and the Beanstalk," who used the giant's own size and anger to get him to crash from his own weight. Bin Laden understood that the way to beat America was to turn its power back upon itself. His early stated aim was to bankrupt America. He knew his own weaknesses, and he profoundly understood America's, how its pride and fears could trigger irrational, self-destructive reactions. The genius of bin Laden's pinprick attacks, costing a few hundred thousand dollars, has left America reeling with two unending multi-trillion-dollar wars it doesn't know how to get out of. He knew that his own strength was mainly in his appeal to the minds of men, particularly to the lost dignity of Muslims trampled under the heel of their own dictators, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and America's military. Getting rid of the "far" enemy was the way to take on the "near" ones.

Instigating America to destroy Iraq was a triumph of genius. He must have known about the neoconservative cabal in Washington that was itching to start wars and destroy Iraq. In bin Laden's wildest dreams he then imagined that he could get an enraged America to destroy his enemies while, at the same time, isolating itself from allies and becoming seriously weakened. His prime Arab enemy, secular nationalist socialism, was embodied by the Ba'athist rulers in Iraq. Once destroyed, Muslim resistance could be channeled to religious fundamentalism as the only remaining force honest and profound enough to challenge Arab dictators and American soldiers successfully. In that sense he was allied with Israel, again an intelligent strategy of harnessing his enemies' strength, which, for different reasons, feared Iraq as the most modern, secular nation among the Arabs far more than it feared Muslim fundamentalists. Indeed, in Palestine, Israel built up Islamist Hamas at first as a counterforce to the secular PLO. Successful terrorists come from the well educated, not from fundamentalist fanatics. Next was his hope that he might get America to destroy his Shi'ite enemy, Iran. He almost succeeded in this too. His prime aim, though, was to get America bogged down in endless, resource-sapping wars on the Asian landmass and disrupt oil flows that benefited his enemies. Bin Laden understood how America's religious fundamentalists, who had inordinate power in Washington, could be encouraged to sustain religious wars. He "knew" them precisely because he understood his own Muslim fundamentalists, as indeed also the Israeli ones. All could work together in his scheming mind to wreck the global economy, which so benefited American power. In 2002 at a party in my home, I said to Peru's brilliant economist Hernando de Soto that, of course, bin Laden's objective was to drive America out of the Middle East. He replied to me, "Not just that, out of the whole Third World!" The actual crash in America came about because of the wars, in several ways: ...

Related: Deepening debt crisis: The Bernanke reappointment: Be afraid, very afraid
Michael Hudson Global Research Canada February 2, 2010

If the economy deteriorates in the L-shaped “hockey-stick” rut that many economists forecast, what political price will President Obama and the Democrats pay for having returned the financial keys to the Bush Republican appointees who gave away the store in the first place? Reappointing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may end up injuring not only the economy but also the Democratic Party for years to come. Recognizing this, Republicans made populist points by opposing his reappointment during the Senate confirmation hearings last Thursday, January 27 – the day after Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address. The hearings focused on the Fed’s role as Wall Street’s major lobbyist and deregulator. Despite the fact that its Charter starts off by directing it to promote full employment and stabilize prices, the Fed is anti-labor in practice. Alan Greenspan famously bragged that what has caused quiescence among labor union members when it comes to striking for higher wages – or even for better working conditions – is the fear of being fired and being unable to meet their mortgage and credit card payments. “One paycheck away from homelessness,” or a downgraded credit rating leading to soaring interest charges, has become a formula for labor management. As for its designated task in promoting price stability, the Fed’s easy-credit bubble has made asset-price inflation the path to wealth, not tangible capital investment. This has brought joy to bank marketing departments as homeowners, consumers, corporate raiders, states and localities run further and further into debt in an attempt to improve their position by debt leveraging. But the economy has all but neglected its industrial base and the employment goes with manufacturing. The Fed’s motto from Bubblemeister Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke has been “Asset-price inflation, good; wage and commodity price inflation, bad.”

Here’s the problem with that policy. Rising prices for housing have increased the cost of living and doing business, widening the excess of market price over socially necessary costs. In times past the government would have collected the rising location rent created by increasing prosperity and public investment in transportation and other infrastructure making specific sites more valuable. But in recent years taxes have been rolled back. Land sites still cost as much as ever, because their price is set by the market. Land itself has no cost of production. Locational value is created by society, and should be the natural tax base because a land tax does not increase the price of real estate; it lowers it by leaving less “free” rent to be paid to the banks. The problem is that what the tax collector relinquishes is now available to be paid to banks as interest. And prospective buyers bid against each other until the winner is whoever is first to pay the land’s location rent to the banks as interest. This tax shift – to the benefit of the bankers, not homeowners – has made Mr. Obama’s hope of doubling U.S. exports during the next five years ring hollow. This is the upshot of “creating wealth” in the form of a debt-leveraged real estate and stock market bubble. Labor must pay more for debt-financed housing and education, not to mention payments to health insurance oligopoly and higher sales and income taxes shifted off the shoulders of financial and real estate. ...

Iraq war profiteer wants to move on to stealing Iran's resources. Photo: Jason DeCrow. Lest we forget, Blair lied in build-up to Iraq invasion, claims Clare Short, the former International Development Secretary in Blair's cabinet.

In case anyone missed the parallels, Tony Blair hammered them home at the Iraq inquiry last Friday. Far from showing remorse about the bloodshed he helped unleash on the Iraqi people, the former prime minister was allowed to turn what was supposed to be a grilling into a platform for war against Iran. - Seumas Milne

Foreign oil companies have been demanding that Iraq privatises its oil since the invasion. It is shocking news that rather than being held to account for his actions in Iraq, Tony Blair now appears to be profiting at the expense of the Iraqi people. - Ruth Tanner, the campaigns and policy director at War on Want, an anti-poverty charity based in London, cited by Jon Ungoed-Thomas

Most actual experts on developments in Iran believe that sanctions will most hurt the Iranian people and will actually discredit reformers, making the regime stronger and heightening the paranoia that might lead to demands for nuclear weapons for self-defense. - Philip Giraldi

The lessons of Iraq have been ignored. The target is now Iran
Seumas Milne Guardian UK February 3, 2010

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We were supposed to have learned the lessons of the Iraq war. That's what Britain's ­Chilcot inquiry is meant to be all about. But the signs from the Middle East are that it could be happening all over again. The US is ­escalating the military build-up in the Gulf, officials revealed this week, boosting its naval presence and supplying tens of billions of dollars' worth of new weapons systems to allied Arab states. The target is of course Iran. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain are all taking deliveries of Patriot missile batteries. In Saudi Arabia, Washington is sponsoring a 30,000-strong force to protect oil installations and ports. The UAE alone has bought 80 F16 fighters, and General Petraeus, the US commander, claims it could now "take out the entire Iranian airforce".

The US insists the growing militarisation is defensive, aimed at deterring Iran, calming Israel and reassuring its allies. But the shift of policy is clear enough. Last week Barack Obama warned that Iran would face "growing consequences" for failing to halt its nuclear programme, while linking it with North Korea – as George Bush did, in his "axis of evil" speech in 2002. When Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week renewed Iran's earlier agreement to ship most of its enriched uranium abroad to be reprocessed, the US was dismissive. Obama's "outstretched hand", always combined with the threat of sanctions or worse, appears to have been all but withdrawn. The US vice-president, Joe Biden, underlined that by insisting Iran's leaders were "sowing the seeds of their own destruction". And in Israel, which has vowed to take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, threats of war against its allies, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, are growing. "We must recruit the whole world to fight Ahmadinejad," Israeli president Shimon Peres declared on Tuesday. ...

Noted: Blair was accused of supporting the interests of the western oil companies with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but dismissed the allegations as a conspiracy theory.

Tony Blair’s £1m-a-year paymaster seeks giant Iraqi oil deal
Jon Ungoed-Thomas Sunday Times UK January 3, 2010

A Middle Eastern investment fund that pays Tony Blair about £1m a year as an international adviser is in talks to develop one of Iraq’s biggest oilfields. Mubadala, a United Arab Emirates investment firm, is in negotiations to join a consortium of western oil companies developing the Zubair oilfield in southern Iraq. More than £6 billion of investment is required for the project. Blair has always insisted that the Iraq conflict was never linked to the country’s vast oil reserves, but he was facing criticism this weekend over his role with Mubadala. The investment firm, which receives 80% of its revenues from oil and gas, intends to build the biggest oil company in the eastern hemisphere. ...

Related: The state of the empire: Not so good
Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com USA January 29, 2010

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Well, I see the President read and took to heart my suggestion, made Wednesday, that he minimize mentions of the two wars we are currently fighting: either that, or else we’re just on the same wave-length. There was very little foreign policy talk in this SOTU, and that was the usual disingenuous happy-talk. ... The very lack of attention paid to foreign policy in the president’s peroration, at a time when we’re fighting two wars (and threatening a third), was itself a significant comment on the state of the American hegemon. In the Imperial metropolis, they’re too consumed with their own internal problems to care much about the far frontiers of the empire. This turning inward presages a radical contraction, similar in scope and origins to the one currently squeezing the life out of the US economy. The American sphere of influence – the structure of which is comprised an "empire of bases," in Chalmers Johnson’s phrase – has reached the outer limits of its possible expansion. We now preside over a network of 737 known US bases that rings the globe, each a possible launching pad for the projection of American military power anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. The sustainability of this project, however, has always been challenged by anti-interventionists on the right as well as the left, and today we are seeing the direst of their predictions fulfilled on a daily basis. Economically ruinous, culturally poisonous, socially disruptive, and subversive of the Constitution, the very idea of imperialism is antithetical to our traditions and alien [.pdf] to the American character. That is why our more recent wars of conquest (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) have been so wrenching, domestically, and the cause of such bitter controversy: they required the sort of self-violation that is usually restricted to mental patients who maim themselves habitually. ... The state of the empire is bad, and getting worse. All around the world, the American position is simply untenable, and the economic basis of it all is eroding with such rapidity that the structure is bound to come crashing down in one fell swoop, rather than falling to the ground piecemeal, like Rome. Americans have good cause to be concerned, and even panicked, that when the hegemon goes down it’s going to take all of us with it.

Onward Christian Soldiers, again
Philip Giraldi Antiwar.com USA February 4, 2010

On Christmas Eve I reported about a group of “Christian leaders” who were calling on the US government to initiate harsh sanctions against Iran. Their lobbying contributed to an overwhelming House of Representatives vote (412-12) in support of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which seeks to cut off Tehran’s importation of refined petroleum products, amounting to 40% of its energy needs, and bring the country’s economy to its knees. The supporters of the House resolution believe that pressuring Iran in that fashion will somehow convince its government to alter its nuclear energy policy. Others argue, however, that the sanctions will not influence the Iranian government in the least and that the pain experienced as a result will fall most heavily on the Iranian people who will be unable to heat their homes and will likely lose their jobs as the economy contracts. As the sanctions would punish any country that does business with Iran, the risk of blowback on the American economy is chilling. Congressman Ron Paul observed, "Are we to conclude, with this in mind, that China or its major state-owned corporations will be forbidden by this legislation from doing business with the United States? What of our other trading partners who currently do business in Iran’s petroleum sector or insure those who do so? Has anyone seen an estimate of how this sanctions act will affect the US economy if it is actually enforced?" Nevertheless some in Washington apparently would like to think that the sanctions will somehow force the Iranian people to rise up against their rulers, leading to a bloodbath followed by some kind of regime change that would usher in an era of democracy and freedom.

Not content with their victory in the House of Representatives, the Christian leaders did it again, urging the Senate to follow the House’s lead. On January 26th, they sent a letter to the leaders of the Senate demanding passage of “tough sanctions on Iran to prevent that terrorist sponsoring regime from obtaining nuclear weapons.” The Senate obliged two days later, passing the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act overwhelmingly on a voice vote. The first signature on the Christian leaders’ letter was that of Pat Robertson, who recently stated that the Haitian people are being punished by God because they made a pact with the devil back in 1804. Other prominent signatories are Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and John Hagee of Christians United for Israel who once insisted "I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God" when hurricane Katrina hit. There are forty-two other signatories, mostly evangelical Christians with a sprinkling of Catholics, and also including some who have no apparent religious affiliation at all. The Christian leaders’ letter incorporates a number of half truths and untruths. This is how the letter summarizes the case against Iran: “…we must remember that Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, is funding Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, has sought to destabilize democratic and Western-leaning regimes throughout the Middle East, is currently arresting and detaining political opponents, actively persecutes its Christian citizens, has shot protestors in cold blood in the streets, and its president has denied the Holocaust and vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. We speak out today on behalf of millions of Christians who believe that the interests of peace and security would best be served by our elected representatives sending a powerful signal that this tyrannical Iranian regime shall never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.” The letter also states that “Iran will sell or give nuclear weapons to extremist groups.” In a separate Baptist press release by Richard Land he asserts that Iran has a “defiant insistence on building nuclear weapons” which he also describes as a “maniacal quest” and that it calls for the “violent expansion of radical Islam.” To ice the cake, he notes that Tehran has “facilitated the development of improvised explosive devices that have killed US troops.” ...

Three times in the last 60 years, U.S. forces have achieved an approximation of unambiguous victory—operational success translating more or less directly into political success. The first such episode, long since forgotten, occurred in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson intervened in the Dominican Republic. The second occurred in 1983, when American troops, making short work of a battalion of Cuban construction workers, liberated Granada. The third occurred in 1989 when G.I.’s stormed the former American protectorate of Panama, toppling the government of long-time CIA asset Manuel Noriega. Apart from those three marks in the win column, U.S. military performance has been at best mixed. The issue here is not one of sacrifice and valor—there’s been plenty of that—but of outcomes. - Andrew J. Bacevich. Bacevich graduated from West Point in 1969 and served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, serving in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971. Later he held posts in Germany, including the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the United States, and the Persian Gulf up to his retirement from the service with the rank of Colonel in the early 1990s. His son, First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich, 27, Third Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division, was killed in Iraq May 13, 2007.

America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well
Andrew J. Bacevich The American Conservative USA February 1, 2010

President Obama’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan earned him at most two muted cheers from Washington’s warrior-pundits. Sure, the president had acceded to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. Already in its ninth year, Operation Enduring Freedom was therefore guaranteed to endure for years to come. The Long War begun on George W. Bush’s watch with expectations of transforming the Greater Middle East gained a new lease on life, its purpose reduced to the generic one of “keeping America safe.” Yet the Long War’s most ardent supporters found fault with Obama’s words and demeanor. The president had failed to convey the requisite enthusiasm for sending young Americans to fight and die on the far side of the world while simultaneously increasing by several hundred billion dollars the debt imposed on future generations here at home. “Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?” asked a querulous Charles Krauthammer. Obama ought to have demonstrated some of the old “bring ’em on” spirit that served the previous administration so well. “We cannot prevail without a commander in chief committed to success,” wrote Krauthammer. ...

Oddly enough, the military leaders to whom Krauthammer, Boot, and Barnes all insist that Obama should defer also eschew the V-word. McChrystal and McChrystal’s boss, Gen. David Petraeus, have repeatedly said that military power alone won’t solve the problems facing a country such as Afghanistan. Indeed, the counterinsurgency doctrine that Petraeus revived and that McChrystal is keen to apply in Afghanistan in effect concedes that violence alone is incapable of producing decisive and politically useful outcomes. Expend as much ammunition as you want: what today’s military calls “kinetic” methods won’t get you where you want to go. Acknowledging that battle doesn’t work, counterinsurgency advocates call for winning (or bribing) hearts and minds instead. And they’ll happily settle for outcomes—take a look at Iraq, for example—that bear scant resemblance to victory as traditionally defined. That the post-Cold War United States military, reputedly the strongest and most capable armed force in modern history, has not only conceded its inability to achieve decision but has in effect abandoned victory as its raison d’être qualifies as a remarkable development. ...

The enduring relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr
BU Today USA January 31, 2008

Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of history and international relations, delivers the 2007 University Lecture, Illusions of Managing History: The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr. A self-professed “groupie” of mid-20th-century cultural critic and Protestant theologian Niebuhr, Bacevich addresses the parallels between Niebuhr’s criticisms of Cold War–era America and his own analysis of the war in Iraq, ultimately calling for a “Niebuhrian revival” in American foreign policy. Bacevich defines four of Niebuhr’s principal theories — the “persistent sin” of American exceptionalism, the ultimate indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple foreign policy solutions, and the need to appreciate the limits of American power — that he believes can explain contemporary problems in American foreign policy. Bacevich argues that today, as in Niebuhr’s time, American policy makers are so enamored of romanticized notions of democracy and America’s moral authority that they fail to see the flaws of supposed cure-all policies like the war on terrorism in Iraq. The result, he says, is a mismanaged and infeasible policy in the Middle East that has damaged America’s reputation and political stability there. Bacevich concludes by calling for a reassessment of American values and culture, for as Bacevich warns and as Niebuhr himself once wrote, “Should the United States perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster.” ...

“Sun Tzu and America’s Way of War” by Jon Utley just posted at antiwar.com
Press release Griffin Internet Syndicate/Earth Times USA February 4, 2010

WASHINGTON - (Business Wire) America’s strategy of war violates the dictums of the greatest strategic genius in history, according to a new 1600-word analysis just posted at antiwar.com. In “Sun Tzu and America's Way of War,” columnist Jon Basil Utley dissects ten maxims in classic book, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general and military analyst. Utley compares how the U.S. and the Taliban and al-Qaeda are conducting war with the classic dictums of Sun Tzu.

“Centuries ago, China’s Sun Tzu would have recognized some of our ways and errors,” Utley writes. “Indeed Sun Tzu would be rolling over in his grave at seeing how his famous dictums for successful wars are ignored and violated by America: a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, losing our allies, creating more and more fanatical enemies willing to do suicide missions against us, borrowing from foreigners to finance our wars.”

Utley, who is Associate Publisher of The American Conservative magazine, dissects U.S. policy according to ten of Sun Tzu’s major maxims including:

-- Sun Tzu: “The best victory is to win without actually fighting.” Utley argues that Washington “has little interest in winning without war.”

--“Know thyself and know thy enemy. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Americans “knew almost nothing and cared less about Muslim cultures, their religion, why they hated us, how to win them over,” Utley explains.

--“There is no instance of a country having benefited from a long war.” “The War Party needs and wants ‘long wars’ and permanent enemies. ‘Winning’ is not to its benefit,” Utley says.

--“Try to break up your enemy’s alliances.” “Instead, America succeeds in agitating and killing disparate Muslims so that they unite against us.” Utley writes.

--“The best thing is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.” “ Instead “we turned Iraq into a broken nation” with a dysfunctional government.

--“Empires are lost when inadequate men become leaders and wage war for base reasons or for no reason at all.”.

Utley compares the Taliban and al-Qaeda war conduct according to four of Sun Tzu’s maxims:

--“Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend; go swiftly to place where you are not expected.”

--“That general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”

--“If your opponent is of choleric temper seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.”

--“Fight not unless the position is critical. The good general is full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.”

Jon Utley, the Robert A. Taft Fellow for International and Constitutional Studies at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the author of the article, "How Bin Laden Bankrupted America."

See full text of "Sun Tzu and America's Way of War" at http://original.antiwar.com/utley/2010/02/03/sun-tzu/.

The 2010 Winter Olympic rings in Vancouver harbor. Photo: Andy Clark/Reuters

Intro:

It's understandable that local mainstream news media are slow in connecting the dots, especially CanWest which is now paid by the Olympics to boost the Games. They own The Vancouver Sun, Province, Courier and Global Television, and have much less incentive than most news companies to inform residents that many of the negative issues we see happening here lately are tied directly or impacted by the 2010 Olympics. - Vancouver sags under Olympic weight

Nine days before the games and with police officers on every corner, Vancouver is far from an Olympic wonderland. Jim comment: I tend to view the Games the same way I view the global oligarchy's wars. I have tremendous admiration for the athletes just as I do for the airmen, Marines, sailors and soldiers involved. But as for the structures created which showcase their heroics—be it the IOC or the related international über-community of global disaster capitalism—those structures are criminal enterprises founded on unconstrained moral failure.

"I'm not anti-sport. But I am against the idea that sporting events like this, which are really mega-industry events, are somehow separate from political events and they're not." - Alissa Westergard-Thorpe, 35, a key figure in the militant Olympic Resistance Network (an umbrella organization for groups like the Anti-Poverty Committee, StopWar.ca, the Work Less Party and the Native Youth Movement), cited by Doug Ward in Anti-Olympic protesters get their game on

The Olympic torch's shadowy past
Chris Bowlby BBC News UK April 5, 2008



The Olympic torch is being welcomed this weekend in the UK as a symbol of the sporting spirit, uniting people around the world in peaceful competition. But the idea of lighting the torch at the ancient Olympian site in Greece and then running it through different countries has much darker origins. It was invented in its modern form by the organisers of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. And it was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence.

The organiser of the 1936 Olympics, Carl Diem, wanted an event linking the modern Olympics to the ancient. The idea chimed perfectly with the Nazi belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich. And the event blended perfectly the perversion of history with publicity for contemporary German power. The first torch was lit in Greece with the help of mirrors made by the German company Zeiss. Steel-clad magnesium torches to carry the flame were specially produced by the Ruhr-based industrial giant Krupp. Media coverage was masterminded by Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, using the latest techniques and technology. Dramatic regular radio coverage of the torch's progress kept up the excitement, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it to create powerful images. The route the torch takes has always been a matter of careful political planning too. ...






In 1936 itself there was no doubt that the spectacle of his torch relay was judged a great international success. As a suitably Aryan-looking German athlete carried the torch into the stadium in Berlin the BBC radio commentator was deeply impressed: "He's a fair young man in white shorts, he's beautifully made, a very fine sight as an athlete." Another relay runner was Siegfried Eifrig, who had carried the torch as it arrived in the centre of Berlin. Flanked by huge swastika flags, he then lit a fire on an altar - typical of the pseudo-religious symbolism Nazism relished. Eifrig is still alive, aged 98, and still has his Krupp torch engraved with the route of the 1936 relay. But he told me this week that he was saddened by the controversy this year's relay has attracted, as it ought to be kept a "purely sporting" affair. And he is critical of the way the politicians always seek to exploit it, seeing the plan to take the torch across the summit of Mount Everest as a "pointless gesture" that makes a nonsense of the relay as an athletic challenge. Having survived the war as a soldier and then a British prisoner of war, he now sees the 1936 relay in a more sober light than when he was one of its stars. No matter how great the emphasis on the torch as a bright sporting symbol, he knows better than most that, amid the political wrangling and media hype, less welcome historical ghosts are running alongside.

'Saluting' Nazi filmmaker a no-win for VANOC
Joe O'Connor National Post Canada January 28, 2010

It has been raining on Cypress Mountain of late, causing some logistical headaches at the Olympic venue, but the latest dark cloud on the horizon appears on the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) website. "Lights Will Guide You Home" is a four-minute video celebrating the Olympic torch run. It also happens to include the work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose biggest fan was a madman named Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl was friends with the Nazi leader, and was a sometime propagandist for his National Socialist program. Her film Triumph of the Will‚ about the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934, helped put Hitler on the international map.

A few years later, Riefenstahl shot Olympia, a movie about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Hitler hoped to show the world his Aryan utopia. There is an ongoing debate about whether the film is a piece of propaganda or a non-partisan work of art. (Let's just assume it was a bit of both). One of Riefenstahl's most wondrous inventions in Olympia -- in addition to filming athletes in slow motion -- was the Olympic torch relay. She concocted the now well-worn ritual for her movie, and VANOC incorporated some of her scenes into its four-minute clip. Borrowing from a Nazi propagandist -- er, ah, cinematic genius -- is no crime. (Not crediting Riefenstahl's work, which would appear to be the case with VANOC, could be). But where VANOC may run afoul is in the editing applied to Olympia.

Items: News media, 2010 Olympics
Maurice Cardinal OlyBLOG.com Vancouver Canada October 2006

... The special challenge in Olympic regions is that most people have no idea that local mainstream news media generate obscene amounts of revenue from the Olympics, and more importantly, that some make more money if they primarily tell the Olympic side of the story. For some news media companies, profit is proportionately tied to "Olympic Spirit." The Vancouver Sun for example has already made a fortune off of 2010 by selling copious amounts of double-spread full color advertising to condo king Bob Rennie who capitalized on Olympic frenzy and pumped the well dry for all it was worth. People who foolishly bought in at artificially inflated prices would have been much better off investing in bonds, and then buying a home when the market takes a dive, which it started to already in Q3 2006. I'm sure lenders like RBC, also Olympic sponsors, are quietly rubbing their hands in glee knowing they have customers locked into bubble-bursting mortgages.

Communities now know more about what has transpired in past contemporary Olympic regions than any region has in the past. We in Vancouver/Whistler even now know more than we knew in Turin, and their Games happened less than a year ago. Our knowledge grows exponentially. Considering VANOC's resistance to offer clear fiduciary and planning transparency, and the incredible amount of revenue that media will generate, plus the volatile nature regarding almost everything connected to our 2010 Olympic Games; any media action that promotes false information regarding 2010 Olympics planning, operations and logistics, should constitute grounds for an inquiry -- just like they did in Sydney, Australia in the ramp up to their Olympic Games in 2000. Because of legal issues (I don't want to be sued), I'm not claiming a case of checkbook journalism, or even one of advertorial impropriety, however, you have to wonder how a news company that purports to be professional, can allow something like the following to happen. Read on and make up your own mind regarding what you think is transpiring here in our Vancouver/Whistler regions. ...

Strollers, Frisbees, umbrellas among items banned from Olympics
Larry Pynn Canwest News Service/National Post Canada February 2, 2010

VANCOUVER -- Everything from strollers to Frisbees, umbrellas, laser pointers and flags from non-participating countries are banned from Olympic venues, Vancouver 2010 officials announced this week. Officials told a Monday news conference that spectators should expect airport-style security, complete with x-ray machines and magnetometer screenings, when the Games begin on Feb. 12. Spectators should arrive two hours before city events, three hours before mountain events, and four hours before the open and closing ceremonies, Olympic officials said. RCMP Sgt. Mike Cote, a spokesman for the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, said security measures will escalate if there are threats made against the Games. ...

Let the Bailout Games begin
Bob Mackin 24 Hours Vancouver/TheTyee.ca British Columbia Canada January 11, 2010

NBC expects to take a bath and VANOC, rocked by recession, still has its hand out.

Once upon a time, when Vancouver 2010 was an itty-bitty bid, they were called the "Sea to Sky Games." Then the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gave its seal of approval in 2003, when President Jacques Rogge opened an envelope in Prague and read "Vonn-KOO-vah!" Hello, Canada's Games. The years turned to months and months turned to weeks. Now we count the days and hours until the wintry version of the Montreal Olympics. Welcome to the Bailout Games. Even with the intense participation of some of the world's biggest corporations, the 2010 Winter Olympics are being held together by government spending -- much of it never contemplated before the economic bubble burst weeks after the 2008 Beijing Games. ...

As Olympics near, people in Vancouver are dreading Games
Dave Zirin Sports Illustrated USA January 25, 2010

When I arrived in Vancouver, the first thing I noticed was the frowns. The International Olympic Committee has leased every sign and billboard in town to broadcast Olympic joy, but they can't purchase people's faces. It's clear that the 2010 Winter Games has made the mood in the bucolic coastal city decidedly overcast. Even the customs police officer checking my passport started grumbling about "$5,000 hockey tickets." Polls released on my first day in Vancouver back up this initial impression. Only 50 percent of residents in British Columbia think the Olympics will be positive and 69 percent said too much money is being spent on the Games. "The most striking thing in the poll is that as the Olympics get closer, British Columbians are less likely to see the Games as having a positive impact," said Hamish Marshall, research director for the pollster, Angus Reid. "Conventional wisdom was that as we got closer to the Olympics, people here would get more excited and more supportive." If the global recession hadn't smacked into the planning last year, with corporate sponsors fleeing for the hills, maybe the Vancouver Olympic Committee would be on more solid ground with residents. But public bailouts of Olympic projects have decisively altered the local mood.

I spoke to Charles, a bus driver, whose good cheer diminished when I asked him about the games. "I just can't believe I wanted this a year ago," he said. "I voted for it in the plebiscite. But now, yes. I'm disillusioned." This disillusion is developing as the financial burden of the Games becomes public. The original cost estimate was $660 million in public money. It's now at an admitted $6 billion and steadily climbing. An early economic impact statement was that the games could bring in $10 billion. Price Waterhouse Coopers just released their own study showing that the total economic impact will be more like $1 billion. In addition, the Olympic Village came in $100 million over budget and had to be bailed out by the city. Security was estimated at $175 million and the final cost will exceed $1 billion. These budget overruns are coinciding with drastic cuts to city services. On my first day in town, the cover of the local paper blared cheery news about the Games on the top flap, while a headline announcing the imminent layoff off 800 teachers was much further down the page. As a staunch Olympic supporter, a sports reporter from the Globe and Mail said to me, "The optics of cuts in city services alongside Olympic cost overruns are to put it mildly, not good." But these aren't just p.r. gaffs to Vancouver residents....

Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster
Douglas Haddow Guardian UK January 31, 2010

Douglas Haddow is a Vancouver-based freelance writer. Visit this page for its embedded links.

... Conservative estimates now speculate that the games will cost upwards of $6bn, with little chance of a return. This titanic act of fiscal malfeasance includes a security force that was originally budgeted at $175m, but has since inflated to $900m. With more than 15,000 members, it's the largest military presence seen in western Canada since the end of the second world war, an appropriate measure only if one imagines al-Qaida are set to descend from the slopes on C2-strapped snowboards. With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland. Whole sections of the city are off-limits, scores of roads have been shut down, small businesses have been told to close shop and citizens have been instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors to make way for the projected influx of 300,000 visitors. Vancouver's Olympic committee has also assumed the role of logo police. Librarians are being commanded to feed McDonald's to children while unauthorised brands have been banned from Olympic venues. Worse yet, they've begun to casually slip clips from Leni Riefenstahl films into their Coldplay-soundtracked promotional videos.

This manic mix of hype and gloom is a byproduct of the games' utter pointlessness. For those who have been planning their resistance since 2003, Vancouver is about to become the world's premier political stage. It will be the best chance yet for the Olympics to be derailed and exposed as what they are: a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. ...

Could Vancouver 2010 be the next 9/11?
Marc Stinebaugh Dprogram.net USA Last updated January 31, 2010

I now believe I have reasonable grounds to suspect there could be a “false flag” operation carried out somewhere in the Vancouver area during the Olympics in Canada. Yes, this is purely speculation, but I feel the mention of it is justified in the interest of our national security to keep an eye on potentially dangerous overlapping occurrences. The games will take place in Vancouver and Whistler from Feb. 12th until Feb. 28th. Below, I have compiled the following suspicious activity and coincidences by searching and analyzing the news from various media sources and by speaking with my own contacts. ...

There are scores of sites now popping up warning about this possible attack on the Olympics, and lots of people will soon be searching for more evidence that this could be a false-flag attack. A friend of mine in the Army at Ft. Bragg, NC said to me in recent months that he believes the US military is preparing for a false-flag attack. Now that was scary for me to hear, because he didn’t go into any more detail than that. Anything is possible, and these things are plausible. We don’t need to be afraid, we just need to get the word out, if we do, this may never happen. The reason it would happen is so it could be blamed on another entity, if they can’t do that anymore, they lose that method and have less power over us. Together by spreading the information about this, we can eliminate the threat of false flag terror take away that weapon from those who wish to exploit it and we can use this information as a weapon and turn it right back around on them.

I would rather nothing happen, but if it does, we’re going to be here ready to answer why we thought it would happen, and ready to turn this event back against them. So please, join in the search for more information, check out the companies involved, check out the people involved, check their connections, check out previous false flag attacks, learn how they work and find out if anything you see this time reminds you of a previous event. Together, we can save the world, one person at a time, wake up to the world around you, and wake up those around you. Thank you. If you have any further information you would like to contribute to the next update, feel free to contact the author using one of the methods provided at the beginning of the article. I am currently looking for information regarding the stock market, big business deals, and anything else that could be relevant. ...

Intro:

Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then

An aerial view of Naval Station Subic Bay (right) and Naval Air Station Cubi Point (left). U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay was a major ship-repair, supply, and rest and recreation facility of the United States Navy located in Zambales, Philippines. It was the largest U.S. Navy installation in the Pacific. Here is the link to the Wikipedia entry U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay


'Friends' in Olongapo, 1960s. A visit to Olongapo was special in many ways. To the sailors and Marines not stationed at Subic, it was a chance to get the hell off a ship, into some civies, and into the most exciting town in the Orient.

Subic Bay Naval Base revisited
Designed and managed by Sgt. Howard James Holub, USMC Retired CopyrightSubicBayPI, 1998 - 2009, All Rights Reserved

This web site covers the past and present history of the following.
SUBIC BAY Ship Repair Facility - CUBI POINT Naval Air Station - SUBIC BAY Naval Magazine
GRANDE ISLAND - OLONGAPO - SUBIC CITY - BARRIO BARETTO

Item: Decades later, U.S. military pollution in Philippines linked to deaths
Travis J. Tritten Stars and Stripes, Pacific edition USA February 2, 2010

CLARK AIR BASE, Philippines - The U. S. military is long gone from bases in the Philippines, but its legacy remains buried here. Toxic waste was spilled on the ground, pumped into waterways and buried in landfills for decades at two sprawling Cold War-era bases. Today, ice cream shops, Western-style horse ranches, hotels and public parks have sprung up on land once used by the Air Force and the Navy — a benign facade built on land the Philippine government said is still polluted with asbestos, heavy metals and fuel. Records of about 500 families who sought refuge on the deserted bases after a 1991 volcanic eruption indicate 76 people died and 68 others were sickened by pollutants on the bases. A study in 2000 for the Philippine Senate also linked the toxins to "unusually high occurrence of skin disease, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, cancers, heart ailments and leukemia."

The 1991 base closing agreement gave the Philippines billions of dollars in military infrastructure and real estate at the bases and in return cleared the United States of any responsibility for the pollution. The Department of Defense told Stars and Stripes it has no authority to undertake or pay for environmental cleanup at the closed bases. Philippine government efforts never gained traction. Philippine President Joseph Estrada formed a task force in 2000 to take on the issue, but it fell dormant and unfunded after he left office a year later. Efforts by private groups and environmentalists to force a cleanup have largely fizzled. After two decades, the base closing agreement has run up a troubling environmental record. Filipinos claim exposure to U.S. pollutants has brought suffering and death. ...

Barak: Without Syria peace, we could be headed for all-out war
Amos Harel Ha'aretz Israel February 2, 2010

Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Monday that the stalled peace process with Syria could augur ill for the future of the Middle East. "In the absence of an arrangement with Syria, we are liable to enter a belligerent clash with it that could reach the point of an all-out, regional war," Barak told senior Israel Defense Forces officers on Monday. "Just like the familiar reality in the Middle East, we will immediately sit down [with Syria] after such a war and negotiate on the exact same issues which we are have been discussing with them for the last 15 years," the defense minister said. "A political arrangement is not the dream come true of the other side," Barak added. "This will be a choice of no choice. If the other side believes that it is possible to bring down Israel, to wage a battle of attrition against it, or lure it into a honey trap, then it will prefer to do so." The defense minister has long called for a resumption of peace talks with Damascus, yet his warning of a regional war is significant in that it is uncharacteristically sharp and strident. ...

As for Iran, Barak said the Islamic republic poses a threat to world peace and that, from Israel's standpoint, all options remain on the table. "The United States is supposed to lead the international drive for sanctions beginning next month," the defense minister said. "The Americans' chances for enlisting the Chinese and others in sanctions are not great given the recent events in China and the U.S."

Jordan: Loss of Palestinians’ citizenship is assailed
Associated Press/New York Times USA February 2, 2010

A human rights group criticized Jordan on Monday for stripping the citizenship of nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin in recent years. Concerned about increasing numbers of Palestinians, who make up nearly half the population, Jordan began in 2004 revoking the citizenship from Palestinians who do not have Israeli permits to reside in the West Bank. Human Rights Watch said Jordan stripped about 2,700 Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their citizenship between 2004 and 2008, rendering them stateless.

In Yemen, the truth is a casualty of war. As the government steps up its war against extremists, news releases tout the number killed. But many turn out to be alive. Or at least not proved dead. Until they're reported killed, again. Maybe.

In Yemen, the truth is a casualty of war
Jeffrey Fleishman and Haley Sweetland Edwards Los Angeles Times/Freedom Syndicate USA February 1, 2010

The terrorist who's dead is still alive. A perverse contradiction? No, just another day in the Yemen news cycle, where rebels, separatists, extremists and government officials conjure a surreal world of spin, lies and propaganda. It makes one wonder if reality exists at all in this cruel and beautiful land. Yemen is a testament to the maxim that the first casualty of war is truth. And the conflicts here are many: Civil war in the north, secession pangs in the south, running battles with Al Qaeda across tribal strongholds rich in weapons and oil. Hunkered men with Internet connections and laptops post videos on YouTube and hyperbolic messages on extremist websites challenging the government's take on everything from body counts to who captured whom when. In the last month, since the government intensified its war against the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's affiliate in Yemen, news releases posted on the government's news website killed off almost a dozen enemies of the state who later turned out to be alive. Or if they're not alive, there's no proof they're dead. "I don't write anyone is dead until there's a body," said an exasperated local reporter. "You show me the body, I'll write the story." In the good old days, rebels and militants literally were voices in the wilderness, hoping at best to finagle a fax machine or a telex. Today, before a missile explodes or a grave is dug, the music is cued and the word is out. Who to believe on any given afternoon amounts to a gulp and the toss of a coin.

Reportedly. Purportedly. Allegedly. Words to live by. The fog of scurrilous sound bites and dicey intelligence drifts through most wars. U.S. news briefings during the Vietnam War were known as the Five O'Clock Follies. Reliable information often takes a while to burn through scrims of calculated illusions and earnest mistakes. But Yemen has a mesmerizing and maddening panache for building puzzles where the pieces don't quite fit. ...

This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them. - William R. Polk

US commanders in Afghanistan admit they have lost the military initiative. The resistance is steadily gaining ground. ... US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are like a man trying to fix a chimney on the roof of a burning house. - Eric Margolis

"I have already made my peace with God because this war is different, it's not conventional. These Taliban have learned their lesson. They adapt as fast as we do...." - Lance Corporal Justin Blancas, 1/6 Marines, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The role of the 1/6 is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver.

Missteps on Afghanistan
William R. Polk History News Network USA February 1, 2010

... Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas. Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.

Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.” This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them. ...

Light at the end of the Afghan tunnel?
Eric Margolis LewRockwell.com USA February 2, 2010

Is it finally light at the end of the Afghan tunnel, or an oncoming express train? Total confusion erupted last week as the US, NATO, the UN and the Kabul government all issued differing views on new plans to end the nine year Afghan war by bombarding Taliban with tens of millions in cash instead of precision bombs. One thing is clear: the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan in spite of their fearsome arsenal of high-tech weapons and war chests of billions of dollars. Lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen are living up to their legendary reputation of making Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. So Washington and London, both in dire financial straits, say they are now ready for a possible peace deal with the Pashtun Taliban and its nationalist allies. But, in spite of a $1.4 trillion deficit, President Barack Obama is asking Congress for an additional $33 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. If you can’t bomb them into submission, then try buying them off. ...

The US and its allies need a face-saving way out of Afghanistan. Real peace talks are the answer. Not the ruse long proposed by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal to try to bribe away low-ranking Taliban and so split the Afghan resistance. This stratagem worked to a degree with Sunni tribesmen in Iraq, but is unlikely to succeed with the proud Pashtun tribes who value honor more than money. Theirs is an antique concept most westerners cannot understand. Taliban, an anti-Communist religious movement, knew nothing about al-Qaida’s plans to attack the United States. That plot was hatched in Europe, not Afghanistan. Many members of the anti-Communist Taliban and its allies Hisbi Islami and the Haqqani group were former allies of the west and were hailed by President Ronald Reagan as "freedom fighters." After 9/11, Taliban refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden to the enraged United States without proper evidence of his guilt because he was an honored guest and hero of the anti-Soviet jihad. Taliban chose war with the US before betraying a guest. Such men are not to be easily bought.

Related: US Marines facing a 'different war' in Afghanistan
Jason Gutierrez Agence France-Presse/Yahoo! News France/USA January 31, 2010

SOUTHEAST OF MARJAH, Afghanistan (AFP) – For the US Marines deployed to the battlefields of southern Afghanistan, life is fragile and thoughts focus on the day they see their families again, but something about this war is different. They are preparing for an offensive on Marjah, one of the Taliban's big urban strongholds in the southern province of Helmand, but progress is slow with the militants apparently preferring fight to flight. The Marines will soon be joined by tens of thousands more soldiers, the lion's share of the 30,000-strong troop surge promised by US President Barack Obama in December to try and turn around the grinding Afghan war.

A foot patrol for one platoon of Marines ends with a dash under a hail of bullets across a heavily-mined poppy field. The soldiers have been pinned down in a muddy mound, the thorny weeds cutting through skin. They recover soon enough, however, manoeuvring away from the Taliban's crosshairs and driving them away with heavy machine-gun fire. "I pray in the morning and at night, hoping that someone up there is looking after me," says Lance Corporal Justin Blancas, serving with the Marines 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment Alpha Company's 2nd Platoon. "I have already made my peace with God because this war is different, it's not conventional," the 23-year-old bespectacled Chicago native says. "These Taliban have learned their lesson. They adapt as fast as we do, but we are bound by our strict rules. They are not," he adds, panting after a 100-metre dash for cover behind an abandoned mud house. "It can be a death run like this every day." ...

Noted: AWOL Afghan soldiers arrested in Denmark
Agence France-Presse/Herald Sun France/Australia January 31, 2010

Danish authorities have detained two Afghan soldiers who ran off after completing training exercises in Germany, Danish police said. The two soldiers, aged around 20, were stopped in a car with three other people, Joern Traet, a Danish border police officer in the southern town of Maribo, said. As the men did not have proper papers apart from their military identification, they were sent back to Germany the following day, Mr Traert said. They were apparently trying to make their way to relatives in Finland. The soldiers had just completed three weeks' training with NATO on a US military base in southern Germany ahead of deployment in Afghanistan, according to Der Spiegel magazine, due out tomorrow. They were due to return home on December 16 but after passing customs controls at Frankfurt airport retraced their steps and slipped out of the airport.

I WRITE MY BIG NEWS. THAT'S HOW ALL OF THE PEOPLE KNOW WHERE IS OLD CROW. BEFORE THE NEWS GO OUT NOBODY KNOW WHERE IS OLD CROW. JUST WHEN I SEND MY NEWS PEOPLE KNOW WHERE IS OLD CROW.

JUST WHEN I PASS AWAY, THAT'S THE TIME MY NEWS WILL CUT OFF.

One hundred twenty miles south of the Arctic Ocean and eighty miles north of the Arctic Circle, the Yukon village of Old Crow straggles along a bluff above the Porcupine River. The 200-plus people who live there are mainly Loucheaux Indians of the Vuntut Gwich'in tribe - the "People of the Lakes." For the past 38 years, the story of their doings has been told by Edith Josie in a regular column in the Whitehorse Star. ... - Edith Josie: Here Are The News

Yukon writer Edith Josie dies
CBC News Canada February 1, 2010

Gwich'in elder Edith Josie, who wrote a column about life in the small Yukon community of Old Crow, died of natural causes at her home Sunday morning. She was 88. Josie's column appeared for 40 years in the Whitehorse Star and it was also syndicated to newspapers in Toronto and Edmonton. Her daughter, Jane Montgomery, said the column was important to her mom. "She wanted to let the outside world know what the community was all about, what people were doing in the community, about our way of life," Montgomery told CBC News. "It was important to her to let the outside world know because we are a fly-in community, so she put Old Crow on the map."

"Well I like to write more about people what are doing, like used to be." Josie said in a CBC interview in the 1980s. Whitehorse Star publisher Jackie Pierce said Josie's column was already world famous when she took over the newspaper in the early 70's. "When her column would come in we would give it to the newest typist and she would try and correct it," Pierce said. "And we would give it back to her and say you have to type it just the way it is. That's what made it the column it is, just the way she spoke."

Montgomery said her mother would get calls from people from all over the world about her columns, which were translated into German, Italian, Spanish and Finnish. They were also collected into the book, Here Are The News, named for the column. Josie was born in Eagle, Alaska and lived there until her family moved to Old Crow when she was 16. She received many awards, including the Canadian Centennial Award in 1967 and the Order of Canada in 1995. ...

Here Are The News about Edith Josie
Patty Osborne Geist British Columbia Canada May 28, 2009



... In 1963 Edith started writ­ing the news from Old Crow for the Whitehorse Star and the column was so success­ful that it went into syndication which for Edith meant that she used a couple of pieces of carbon paper between sheets of foolscap when she hand­wrote her columns. I remem­ber hearing Edith’s regular reports to Peter Gzowski on [CBC Radio's] “This Country in the Morning” (even that small amount of exposure left an impression on me) but the movie [Here Are the News which played at DOXA (Vancouver’s own documentary film festival] made me realize how important she was to both her community and the preservation of her language and traditional ways. Edith is an engaging, smart person with an infectious sense of humour and an infectious laugh that ripples through her whole body and if that’s not enough to express her feelings, she’ll break into dance. ...

"In the time frame that they were with us the team deeply fell in love with the children. They are very precious kids that have lost their homes and their families, and are so, so in need of God's love and compassion and a very nurturing setting." - Laura Silsby, spokesperson for the detained members of The New Life Refuge, a Christian group from Idaho

30 In reply Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two silver coins[a] and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'

36 "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?"

37 The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him."
Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

"We talked to the little girl, maybe nine. And she told us, crying, that she does have parents. She says she thought she was being sent to boarding school or to summer camp." - Georg Willeit, a spokesman for the Austrian-run orphanage, SOS Children's Village, where the children were taken after being removed from The New Life Refuge bus

Mistrust in the eyes of rescued Haitian 'orphans'
Paula Bustamante, in Croix des Bouquets Agence France-Presse/Daily Telegraph France/UK February 1, 2010


Some of the 33 Haitian children, including a child of around 13 months (second left), at the SOS Children's Village in Croix des Bouquets, outside of Port-au-Prince. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

A one-year old girl, dressed in red and surrounded by children aged four, five and seven, glared at adults who came to find out how she was doing. She firmly clutched the hands of a friend, who seemed to be about four years old, seated on a bench next to her. The children were rescued from being illegally taken out of Haiti by Americans who say they belong to a US-based charity. Patricia Vargas, the regional director of the orphan charity SOS Children, said that for legal reasons the children's identities cannot be revealed. Vargas answered a call from Haitian authorities to meet the children, who were returned from the border with the neighbouring Dominican Republic, on Saturday. "The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone numbers," said Vargas, a Costa Rican who is in charge of SOS Children's operations in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. ...

While the children rested at the SOS Village, an oasis of sorts amid the widespread devastation in the Haitian capital, the one year old girl does not loosen the grip on her friend's hand. The older children take turns protecting her, sitting her on their laps and giving her warm hugs. Inside the SOS Village scores of volunteers from countries including Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica do not hide the shock of the news. "Even if we had ... [suspected] that this was happening in Haiti after the earthquake, it is a shock," said SOS spokesman Georg Willeit, an Austrian. Willeit takes visitors around one of the center's cabins, which is decorated like a home, but also makes sure that no outsider questions the children. "Several of them were very scared last night," said Willeit. ...

U.S. group seized in Haiti for child trafficking
Xinhua China February 1, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) -- Ten members of a U.S. charity group have been detained by Haitian police for allegedly trying to traffick children from the earthquake-devastated country, Haitian authorities said. The five men and five women with U.S. passports were caught late Friday while they were about to cross border to enter the Dominican Republic with 33 children, aged between two months to 14 years. Head of the charity group told police they had good intentions and came to help local children who had lost parents in the quake or were abandoned. However, when questioned, most of the children said their parents are still alive and some could give contact information of their families. ...

Haiti 'orphans' case: Misunderstanding or kidnap?
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Port-au-Prince BBC News UK February 1, 2010

For children, the streets of Port-au-Prince are some of the most dangerous in the world. Even before the earthquake, kidnap gangs were estimated to take thousands of children from the slums and streets of the Haitian capital every year. But the quake has made the situation even worse. Now there are thousands of new orphans, and thousands more children separated from their families. On Saturday afternoon I suddenly stumbled into the middle of a case that is now grabbing headlines around the world.

In the front office of the child protection police at Port-au-Prince airport I found 33 tiny children crammed on to benches and tables. I had no idea who they were or where they had come from. The policeman on the door told me there were white people inside, Americans, and they were trying to smuggle the children out of the country. The rumour mill turns fast in Haiti, and soon a dozen local journalists were turning up. Then - as we all scrambled forward with our microphones outstretched - a prosecutor came out to talk to us. "These people were caught while on their way to the border with 33 children," he said. "They had no documentation on them at all, and no proof that these children are orphans." But who were the white people inside the police station? No-one could tell us. Then - as they were being taken to the back of the station - one of them, a middle-aged woman, managed to slip us a piece of paper. ...


Seven of the ten arrested US citizens appear at a police station in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Press TV, Iran

Church group held in Haiti
Tom Leonard and agencies National Post Canada February 1, 2010

Nine American Baptists who were trying to take dozens of Haitian orphans out of the country will appear in court in Port-au-Prince today after being arrested at the border with the Dominican Republic. ... The Americans were arrested on Friday night in a bus carrying children aged from two months to 14 years old who had been caught up in the earthquake. A spokeswoman for the group said they intended to set up an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where the children could enjoy a better life. Their "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" was described as an effort to save abandoned, traumatized children. "In this chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing," said Laura Silsby, the group's spokeswoman.

However, Haiti's government has suspended international adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the Americans could face serious accusation. "We did not arrest Americans, we arrested kidnappers," Mr. Bellerive told Reuters. "We just hope that the people were acting in good faith and that they were doing what they were doing to try to help the children." The Americans were last night being held at the judicial police headquarters in the Haitian capital. ... The head of a Canadian international development organization said yesterday that even if the church group was trying to help the vulnerable children, there are problems with the idea of removing young earthquake survivors from their homeland. "Even if this wasn't child trafficking, from a child-protection perspective this is wrong," said Rosemary McCarney, president of Plan Canada, an organization that has been working to improve the lives of children in Haiti for 36 years. "We should not be removing children from Haiti. ...

Related: Profile: New Life Children's Refuge
BBC News UK February 1, 2010


The group went out to Haiti with the aim of rescuing orphans.

... New Life Children's Refuge (NLCR) is the brainchild of Laura Silsby, 40, and Charisa Coulter, 23, who are both members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. The charity, which Ms Silsby incorporated in Idaho in November last year, says it is "dedicated to rescuing, loving and caring for orphaned, abandoned and impoverished Haitian and Dominican children, demonstrating God's love and helping each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ". Before the earthquake devastated Haiti, NLCR had planned to buy land and build an orphanage, school and church in Magante on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic.

But after the disaster, the mission's aim became to "rescue Haitian orphans abandoned on the streets, makeshift hospitals or from collapsed orphanages in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, and bring them to New Life Children's Refuge in Cabarete, Dominican Republic", the charity stated in an online document. A group of 10 churchgoers - five from the Central Valley Baptist Church and at least three from the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho - headed out to Haiti. The two churches are part of the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination which has extensive humanitarian programmes around the world. According to its planning document, the NLCR group was planning to take the children to a rented hotel at a beach resort in the Dominican Republic. "Given the urgent needs from this earthquake, God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now versus waiting until the permanent facility is built. He has provided an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45-room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building is complete," the document states. ...

0800 hours PST: CBC Radio One reports Haiti is considering sending the 10 to the United States for prosecution.

Photo: Top News, India.

Tony Blair offered no apologies for the Iraq War before an investigating committee; in fact, he offered an inspiring defense of it. Concerning Blair’s political courage, says Alex Massie: "The old fox showed once again that he's the war's last surviving passionate and convincing salesman." Alex Massie is a former Washington correspondent for The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph. He currently writes for The Spectator.

What I can say about Blair is that he has been quite consistent. State sovereignty and international did not matter to him in 1999, and they didn’t matter to him later in 2002-03. Given his remarks at the Chilcot inquiry about Iran, I am quite sure that he would have no difficulty supporting and even joining in an illegal attack on Iran were he still a minister in the British government. This makes him one of the most unabashed, unapologetic advocates of aggressive war alive today, and I’m not sure that this requires much courage when there have been and continue to be absolutely no consequences, legal or otherwise, for his actions. - Daniel Larison, a Ph.D. graduate from the University of Chicago, where he recently completed his dissertation on the sixth ecumenical council and the monothelete controversy. A convert to Orthodox Christianity since 2003, he serves as a reader at a local Russian Orthodox parish in the Chicago area. He is contributing editor at The American Conservative and writes a column for The Week online.

Blair's gutsy stand
Alex Massie The Daily Beast USA January 29, 2010

The build-up to Tony Blair's appearance on Friday before the Public Inquiry investigating the Iraq War was dominated, above all else, by two things: a palpable thirst to see the Prime Minister publicly humiliated and a nagging sense that Blair's testimony would be anti-climactic. Both expectations proved ill-founded. Protesters outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center chanted "Tony Bliar! [sic] War Criminal!" but the old fox showed once again that he's the war's last surviving passionate and convincing salesman. Not only did he defend the decisions that were made; he'd do it all again today. This was vintage, bravura Blair: After six hours of questioning he remained defiant, unabashed, and proud. ...

If military action had been delayed, he said, there was every prospect that sanctions would collapse and, with oil prices rising to $100 a barrel, Saddam would have retained the desire and intellectual capability to reconstitute his WMD programs. Worse, "we would have lost our nerve" to deal with him. It's not enough, Blair said, to consider the options available in March 2003. You need "to ask the 2010 question." What, he suggested, would the situation have been in 2010 had Saddam remained in power? "I have little doubt that today we would be facing a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran, competing on a nuclear capability and competing in terms of support for terrorist groups." ... As for Iran itself, Blair warned that "many of the same arguments apply" today that applied to Iraq back in 2002-2003. The post-9/11 security calculus that made it imperative to deal with Saddam has neither changed nor been rendered obsolete by the Iraq adventure.

Blair's warning on Iran may reflect Britain's experience in Basra where, despite Blair's claims, Britain's armed forces failed in their mission to pacify and restore order in the city. Basra became, instead, a hotbed of Iranian interference. This, Blair claimed, had not been anticipated. Left unanswered was the question of why no one had thought the Iranians might seek to destabilize Iraq. Basra would only be rescued by the U.S.-backed Charge of the Knights and, as COIN expert and U.S. adviser, David Kilcullen noted, “In 2006 the British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq." Understandably, Blair preferred not to dwell on this humiliation, insisting that the post-war mistakes were due to the wrong kinds of problems arising on the ground. Preparations were in hand for a humanitarian crisis that never came but not for anything else. ...

Related: Blair’s monstrous consistency
Daniel Larison The American Conservative USA Webposted January 30, 2010

... One of the reasons why I keep revisiting the illegality and immorality of the intervention in Kosovo long after most people have forgotten about it is precisely because so many opponents of the Iraq war don’t want to acknowledge that Kosovo was every bit as unjustifiable and wrong as Iraq was. By endorsing the war in Kosovo even now, as Obama did again in Oslo, many opponents of the Iraq war have opened themselves up to the attack that Iraq hawks were using from the beginning. If someone pointed out that invading Iraq would violate international law and not have U.N. sanction, the hawks would throw the precedent of Kosovo in his face. Unless he was a principled progressive or antiwar conservative, the opponent of the invasion was always at a loss to respond. If invading Iraq was based on phony or exaggerated intelligence about WMDs, Kosovo was based on lies about preventing genocide and protecting human rights. Unless you are among the fairly small percentage that opposed both, the odds are that you are outraged over invading Iraq in inverse proportion to how outraged you were over bombing Serbia.

Inexplicably, Kosovo is remembered across much of the spectrum, especially the center-left, as a great success, despite having been disastrous for the very people it was supposed to help and despite being based on lies every bit as blatant and outrageous as the invasion of Iraq. As it hapened, Blair was Prime Minister during Britain’s participation in both wars of aggression. As far back as 1999, he has been the chief proponent of liberal interventionism aimed at subverting the normal protections of international law afforded to sovereign states, and he continues to be an outspoken advocate for killing foreigners for their own benefit. What is disheartening about all this is not just that Blair will never be held to account for his responsibility for the war in Iraq, but that he has never had to answer for or defend his decision to support an unprovoked, unnecessary war of aggression against Serbia. Even though the air war led to the expulsions of Albanians from Kosovo it was meant to prevent, and even though the “negotiations” at Rambouillet involved delivering an intolerable ultimatum designed to start a war, this criminal operation continues to enjoy support or indifference from most Westerners. There were no allied casualties, and the war was brief, so there was little time for the publics in NATO nations to grow weary and disgusted with their criminal leaders. ...

Tony Blair and his oh-so-clean conscience
Robert Fisk The Independent UK January 30, 2010

There was – to use a truly vile expression of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara yesterday – a "binary distinction". There was the blood that flowed over my shoes in the emergency room of a Baghdad hospital in March of 2003, the humans shrieking with phosphorous burns, the old man with the blood trickling down a handkerchief from his empty eye socket, the piles of decomposing corpses in the Baghdad mortuary, the screams – oh yes, the shrieks and the pleadings and the animal squeals of the wounded and the dying. And then there was Lord Blair yesterday, sitting in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in his oh-so-clean business suit and his oh-so-clean red tie and his oh-so-clean white shirt and his oh-so-clean conscience. My God, that was a "binary distinction" all right. The difference between the hell of pain and the hell of blissful mendacity. You needed to be in the Middle East to feel that strongly about it. Lord Blair was physically only 2,000 miles away from me. Psychologically, he was in another galaxy, still composing and recomposing the historical record.

Take al-Qa'ida. We all knew about this particular institution. It had, as Lord Blair kept reminding us yesterday, "changed everything" with 9/11. It was one of the reasons why the British and Americans invaded Iraq. Because Saddam had links with al-Qa'ida, so said the Americans,and might give them weapons of mass destruction, so said Lord Blair. But when it turned out that the links were as non-existent as the weapons, Lord Blair was surprised to find al-Qa'ida turning up in post-invasion Iraq. "People did not think that al-Qa'ida and Iran would play the role that they did." Lord Blair went to war because of al-Qa'ida but thought al-Qa'ida would let him win in Iraq. So it was all al-Qa'ida's fault. WE didn't kill 100,000 Iraqis (I noticed he used the lowest available figure). It was THEM, the terrorists, al-Qa'ida, insurgents, Iranians, "sectarians", the bad guys. He played the same dishonest little trick over the Israel-Palestinian war. "It's a constant problem for Israel," he informed us. "They use great force in retaliation. Before you've gone two weeks, they're the people that started it all."

It's a cold winter in the Middle East now, but yesterday I had to loosen my shirt collar from time to time. It seemed Blair was as successful in Iraq as he was in Gaza a year ago. Everything is getting better. Life in Iraq is better – better than it was in 2007, 2003, 2002 and for that matter, 2001. I got it. Before his invasion, it was all Saddam's fault. After his invasion it was all al-Qa'ida's and Iran's fault. And presumably we are now going to invade Iran? ...

Dubai police hint Mossad may be behind assassination
Press TV Iran January 31, 2010

Assassinated Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Head of Dubai's law enforcement refuses to rule out that the Israeli intelligence apparatus, Mossad, may have been behind the recent assassination of a senior Hamas commander. "It could be Mossad," police chief Dhahi Khalfan was quoted as saying by AFP about the targeted killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the co-founder of the Palestinian resistance movement's armed wing, Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in a Dubai hotel on January 20. "Personally, I don't exclude any possibility. I don't exclude any party that has an interest in the assassination," he said. The death squad included "seven or more people holding passports from different European countries," the police chief said. "We are currently in contact with these European countries to verify the authenticity of the passports."

According to the Times of London, the hitmen had subjected Mabhouh to an injection which induced a heart attack, photographed the documents in his briefcase and left a "do not disturb" sign on the door of the hotel room where the crime was committed. Hamas has accused Israel of carrying out the hit. In a statement, the movement said, "we hold Israel responsible for the assassination of our brother and leader." Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Hamas political bureau told Press TV that the victim "spent a long time in Israeli jails and when he was released from prison, they monitored him as he continued to play his important role in continuing to implement resistance activities in Palestinian refugee camps and as a result he was targeted."

Israel: Slain Hamas leader smuggled Iranian arms
Josef Federman Associated Press/Yahoo! News USA January 31, 2010

JERUSALEM – Days after Hamas accused Israel of electrocuting and poisoning one of its commanders in his Dubai hotel room, Israel claimed Sunday that the dead man played a critical role in smuggling rockets from Iran to Palestinian militants in Gaza. ... Relatives and Hamas officials said al-Mabhouh was electrocuted and poisoned, perhaps by having his face smothered with a poison-soaked cloth. Despite surviving what his family says were several earlier attempts on his life, he had traveled without bodyguards to avoid drawing attention. Hamas, which blamed Israel and has vowed to avenge al-Mabhouh's death, released photos Sunday showing that however he was killed, it was brutal enough to leave bruises and red splotches on his face and nose. Hamas has been quiet about the reason for al-Mabhouh's travels, though a brother says he was on a mission for the militant group. One senior Hamas figure, Osama Hamdan, denied al-Mabhouh was on a special assignment or that he was planning to head on from Dubai to Iran. Israeli defense officials said al-Mabhouh was key to smuggling Iranian arms to Gaza, in particular, rockets that could fly as far as the metropolis Tel Aviv, some 40 miles (60 kilometers) to the north. ... The Mossad does not comment on its operations, but many of the details resemble past strikes attributed to the spy agency. One of the Mossad's most high-profile failures bore similarities: In 1997 its agents were caught poisoning the militant group's leader, Khaled Mashaal, in Jordan. Israel was forced to send an antidote that saved Mashaal's life and release Hamas' spiritual leader from an Israeli prison. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was also the prime minister at the time. Today, Mashaal is Hamas' supreme leader. ...

[Al-Mabhouh's] brother said he survived several assassination attempts, one in 1989, another two years ago in Beirut, where a poisoning attempt left him comatose for 36 hours. In neighboring Syria, a bomb was found under a car he was meant to enter. Dubai authorities have said a "professional criminal gang" with European passports was likely behind the killing. Earlier this month, Iran accused Israel of killing a nuclear scientist, and Hezbollah blames Israel for the assassination of a senior military commander in Damascus in 2008. Last year, Sudan — a close ally of Iran and Hamas — accused Israel of attacking a convoy in a remote mountainous desert region of northeastern Sudan. Media reports said the attacks targeted convoys smuggling weapons en route to Gaza. ...

Israel warns officers after Hamas assassination
Josef Federman Associated Press/Yahoo! News USA February 1, 2010

JERUSALEM – The Israeli army said Monday it has warned its top officers to be on guard when traveling abroad following the mysterious death of a Hamas commander in Dubai. Hamas has accused Israel of carrying out the Jan. 20 slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and vowed revenge, hinting it could attack Israeli targets abroad. Hamas has historically limited its attacks to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Although Israel has not acknowledged any role in the killing, military officials said Monday they were taking the threats seriously and had instructed senior officers, military attaches and soldiers on study leaves to exercise caution when traveling abroad. The officials said the military fears Hamas could try to capture Israeli officers outside the country. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a sensitive security matter. ...

Related: Secret CIA-Mossad meeting, preparation for new war?
Press TV Iran February 1, 2010



A secret meeting between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli officials has reportedly centered on Iran's nuclear program. In a secret flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran's nuclear issue in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. The trip, which was originally scheduled to take place in May, follows a recent wave of developments in the Middle East that are strongly imply preparations for a possible new military conflict in the region. Israel has allegedly increased the scope of its undercover operations in the region, particularly against Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas. The extent of this could be seen in recent remarks by Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled, in which the former army general explicitly said that another confrontation with Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah was almost inevitable.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to the claims on Thursday, saying that Israel's threats against Hezbollah are perceived as threats against Lebanon. "We consider the Israeli threats on Lebanon to be a threat to the Lebanese government as a whole, rather than to one particular person," said Hariri during a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Hamas officials say they have concrete evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, staged the recent assassination of a senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on January 20. Their claims have been somewhat supported by Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan. "It could be Mossad," AFP quoted police chief Dhahi Khalfan as saying on Sunday.

To add to the controversy, sources in Turkey's ruling party told Russia's Mignews on Saturday that Israeli spy agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on communication networks in Iran and Syria. According to the sources who were speaking on condition of anonymity, the Signals Intelligence station was solely managed by Israeli intelligence personnel and had become off-limits for members of the Turkish government. For years Israeli politicians have masterminded a wave of undercover operations and terror plots in numerous countries, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Switzerland, and the US. However, much of Israel's espionage operations have lately been focused on the Tehran government, largely because of Iran's uranium enrichment activities, which Tel Aviv has been seeking to portray as a mortal threat. ...

For some reason, (well, a pretty apparent reason) the above items brought the Zionest dream of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) to mind.



Israel's grand design: Leaders crave area from Egypt to Iraq
John Mitchell Henshaw The American Mercury Magazine/Media Monitors Network UK Webposted April 14, 2002

Nearly 34 years ago, an America-firster used The American Mercury magazine to warn of the danger posed by Zionism and its rule of Washington and the Mideast. John Henshaw wrote this article shortly after Israel laid claim to the annexed land during 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This article first appeared in the spring of 1968.

The metamorphosis of tiny Israel from a midget to a giant is in the making. The grand design of Judaic-Zionist expansionist doctrine is to seize all the oil-rich lands from the shores of the Euphrates to the banks of the Nile.

In defining the aims of Zionism, Hebrew scholar Levnoch Osman recently said: "In our eternal Book of Books (the Torah), the lofty ethical teachings of which are cherished by all mankind, the land of Israel is described not as a long, narrow strip of land with wavy, crooked borders, but as a state with broad natural borders. God has promised to Patriarch Abraham the following:

"I give unto them the land where they have sown their seed, from the river of Egypt unto the great river of Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:18). And so, in order to realize the words of this prophecy, the Israeli state had to continue, not in the borders it has today but within its broad historical boundaries."

And as far back as 1952 Moshe Dayan, the present Israeli defense minister, declared:

"Our task consists of preparing the Israeli army for the new war approaching in order to achieve our ultimate goal, the creation of an Israeli empire."

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who served as an adviser on Near Eastern affairs to the British delegation at the Versailles Conference, in a newspaper article published in June last year stated the Zionist aims in these words: ...


The late John Henshaw was chief legman for columnist Drew Pearson, who later broke with Pearson. At that time, Henshaw’s expenses were paid by the Anti-Defamation League, a lobby for Israel, which had a "special relationship" with Pearson. Thus Henshaw’s Middle East insights are unique.

The fantasy of 'Greater Israel'
Daniel Pipes Washington Jewish Week/Daniel Pipes USA July 6, 1989

The Bush administration's first major policy statement on the Middle East was delivered by Secretary of State James Baker on May 22. For the most part, he used standard phrases and recalled traditional American policies. But there was one line at least that was original, even startlingly so. This was Baker's call to Israelis "to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel." Some Israelis responded with alarm at this phrase. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called it "useless." So did some Americans; William Safire called it "inflammatory." But they and many others would have been more upset — indeed, they would be flabbergasted — if they knew the effect Baker's statement had on politicians in the Middle East. For Baker and the U.S. State Department, Greater Israel is a shorthand for the Likud Party's desire to retain control of territories captured in the June 1967 war, particularly the West Bank. But in the Arab world and many of the Muslim countries, it means something much grander: Not Israeli retention of the West Bank, but Israeli conquest of a huge area stretching from Egypt to Iran. This startling definition of Greater Israel derives from God's covenant with Abraham, as described in the Bible. "To your descendants I give this land from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates" (Genesis 15:18). Using this text as their proof, Middle Eastern politicians hostile to Israel spread the accusation of Israeli Nile-to-Euphrates expansionism widely and deeply. What is more, they apparently believed it, and many still do. ...

The American secretary of state's call on Israelis to lay aside "the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel" had two main effects. It provided authoritative confirmation of a deeply held and cherished fantasy; worse, in a strange way, it made the U.S. government a party to the political hallucinations of others. Such a step can have real significance. When Secretary of State Dean Acheson omitted placing South Korea within the United States defense perimeter, the result was a three-year-long war. While such a price is not likely here, this misstep could have long-term consequences. American diplomats will probably not be able to undo entirely the mischief caused by Secretary Baker's speech. Still, they should act quickly in private and in public, to explain that was meant by the reference to "Greater Israel."

Daniel Pipes is an interesting man. Pipes is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank, as well as the founder of Campus Watch, a controversial organization which claims to critique "poor scholarship" concerning the Middle East, but which has frequently been characterized as a vehicle for harassing scholars critical of Israel. According to Andrea Eliot (April 28, 2008): "Among his supporters, Mr. Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled." Throughout the 'naughty' decade of this century, Pipes advocated that the U.S. "unleash" the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) against Iran. Though MEK is listed as a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Iraq and Iran, Pipes describes this listing as a "sop to the mullahs". He writes, "the MEK poses no danger to Americans or Europeans, and has not for decades. It does pose a danger to the malign, bellicose theocratic regime in Tehran."

A ‘Greater Israel’ in the making: Experts
Kazi Mahmood IslamOnline.net/Information Clearing House USA First published April 16, 2003

KUALA LUMPUR, April 16 (IslamOnline.net) - A greater Israel is in the making with the fall of the Saddam regime in Baghdad and with the taming of Syria, Iran and other Arab nations in the Middle Eastern region, said political analysts in the South East Asian region on Wednesday, April 16. The United Kingdom and the U.S. alongside with their allies are assisting Israel in this ‘machiavelic’ plan that includes the partitioning of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, said analysts in Indonesia and Malaysia. “Libya is also a target in what is now to be called the ‘Middle Eastern Axis of evil’ in a bid to secure both oil and strategic regions for the strengthening of the U.S. Empire and the making of a greater Israel in the Middle East,” Abdullai Rauf, a political analyst told IslamOnline.net on Wednesday. “The warnings to Syria, Iran and Libya are part of the plan and is the strategy that will now be adopted by the anti-Arab nation (Israel) in a bid to create a larger, greater Israel that will extend beyond its current borders,” said Abdullai. He was joined in his fears with comments from another professor from Indonesia; Dr Gatut Priyowidodo Msi, who told Antara news agency that he feared Ariel Sharon, the Israeli premier was setting the stage for a “greater Israel” after the fall of Baghdad. In Padang, where professor Priyowidodo is attached to the Internasional Universitas Ekasakti (UNES) and who is a political analyst there, added that Sharon is waiting for the “highway” to be opened to realize his dreams. ...

Why 'Greater Israel' never came to be
Ethan Bronner New York Times USA August 14, 2005

For those who long considered it folly to settle a handful of Jews among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the decision to remove them starting this week seems an acceptance of the obvious. What possible future could the settlers have had? How could their presence have done the state of Israel any good? But for those, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who created and nurtured the settlements, the move to dismantle them is something very different. It is an admission not of error but of failure. Their cherished goal - the resettlement of the full biblical land of Israel by contemporary Jews - is not to be. The reason: not enough of them came. "We have had to come to terms with certain unanticipated realities," acknowledged Arye Mekel, Israeli consul general in New York. "Ideologically, we are disappointed. A pure Zionist must be disappointed because Zionism meant the Jews of the world would take their baggage and move to Israel. Most did not." ...

The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of the early Zionists, as Ambassador Mekel noted, most of the world's Jews have not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world's 13 million to 14 million Jews, a minority - 5.26 million - make their home in Israel, and immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to Israel. Of course, Israel is a remarkably successful state, a democracy with a high standard of living and many proud accomplishments. Yet the misery that Zionists expected Jews elsewhere to suffer has not materialized. More than half a century after the establishment of the Jewish state, more Jews live in the United States than in Israel. The second explanation for the shift in settlement policy is that the Palestinian population has grown far more rapidly - and Palestinians have proved far more willing to fight - than many on the Israeli right had anticipated. ...

Misreading the map: The road to Jerusalem does not lead through Tehran
Leon Hadar Foreign Affairs USA May 15, 2009

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama, U.S. policymakers are being urged to place the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the back burner and spend their time and energy addressing the true menace supposedly confronting Arabs and Jews in the Middle East -- Iran. Deal with that threat, the sirens sing, and the other pieces of peace in the Holy Land will fall into place. Netanyahu framed the issue in a speech he made in Washington earlier this month. "There is something happening today in the Middle East, and I can say that for the first time in my lifetime I believe that Arabs and Jews see the common danger," he told supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This wasn't always the case," he added. Or was it? In fact, there have been many times when key players in Jerusalem and Washington have convinced themselves that focusing on some third party would make Israeli-Palestinian peace possible. But it has not worked in the past, and it won't work now. ...

Jordanian lawyers sue MKs Rivlin and Eldad
Arutz Sheva Israel January 20, 2010

(IsraelNN.com) Authorities in the Kingdom of Jordan has allowed a lawsuit to be filed against the Speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin of the Likud and MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party, claiming they caused damage to Jordan's sovereignty. The plaintiffs, four lawyers, argue that Eldad and Rivlin have called to make Jordan the Palestinian state, and establish what they say is a "Greater Israel" on to the west of Jordan. Over 80% of the population of Jordan is of Palestinian origin.

On the Lebanese border MK Yaakov Katz says: 'We'll form a Knesset majority'.

National Union MKs for unified Ghajar under Israeli rule
Hagai Einav Ynetnews Israel January 24, 2010

Two Knesset members from the National Union faction visited the village of Ghajar on the Lebanese border Sunday, part of which may be transferred to Lebanese sovereignty. Party Chairman Yaakov Katz and MK Michael Ben Ari held a tour in the Golan Heights and in Ghajar as guests of Ayoob Kara, deputy minister of the development of Negev and Galilee. "Whomever will touch Ghajar, will touch the Golan Heights in the future, both shall remain under Israeli sovereignty forever," MK Ben Ari said. ... MK Ben Ari said, "Our purpose is to maintain the sovereignty of the Jewish people in Greater Israel. ...

United we stand
Meron Benvenisti Ha'aretz Israel January 29, 2010

Do Israelis and Palestinians belong to one divided society, or to two separate societies in a situation of forced proximity as a result of a temporary occupation? This is a crucial question. The answer depends on the historical-political-ethnic evaluation of the pre-1967 period, and on one's perception of the entire Jewish-Palestinian encounter since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise. It has profound ramifications for understanding the present situation in Israel/Palestine. ... By placing the post-1967 period within the 120-year history of the conflict, one can see the continuity of the native-settler encounter that has characterized the Jewish-Arab confrontation from the start. This forms the paradigm within which the conditions prevailing in Israel/Palestine can be correctly understood.

Many Israelis perceived the occupation of the territories as a liberation, and even those outside the Greater Israel movement were unwilling to accept the obligations imposed on the occupying power by international law. So an ambiguous term - "administered" - was created. Gradually the term "occupation" was transformed from a juridical definition, describing the condition of belligerent occupation of enemy territory by a foreign army, into a political and value-loaded concept. Like many terms that comprise the dictionary of the conflict, it has become a shibboleth, a code word that makes any argument or clarification redundant. Using "occupation" indicates that one belongs to liberal-leftist circles; those who refrain from using it are considered right-wing bigots. Similar terms are "West Bank" versus "Judea and Samaria," "liberation of Jerusalem," "Palestinian state," "security fence" versus "separation wall," or "withdrawal" versus "redeployment." The occupation in 1967 resulted from military action. But the military element quickly became secondary, while the "civilian" component - the settlements - became the dominant factor, subjugating the military to its needs and turning the security forces into a militia in the service of the Jewish ethnic group.

Sometime in the late 1980s, the settlements crossed the critical threshold beyond which continued demographic and urban growth were assured. From that point on, the number of settlements, and even the size of their population, became immaterial because the apparatus of Israeli rule was perfected to such a degree that the distinction between Israel proper and the occupied territories was totally blurred. Similarly, the takeover of land ceased to be chiefly for the purpose of settlement construction and became primarily a means of constricting the movement of the Palestinian populace and of appropriating their physical space. In the new paradigm, the settlements are no longer important as instruments of spatial control. The separation barrier/wall and its gates, the "sterile roads," and a myriad of military regulations have taken the settlements' place as symbols of Zionism. Forty years after the first settlement was established, "the settlement" - like the kibbutz and the moshav - has become just another exhibit in the museum of Zionist antiquities. The age of ideology is over. The attempt to mark the settlements - and the settlers - as the major impediment to peace is a convenient alibi, obfuscating the involvement of the entire Israeli body politic in maintaining and expanding the regime of coercion and discrimination in the occupied territories, and benefiting from it. By the late 1980s, after two decades of occupation, Israeli control of the territories beyond the Green Line has become quasi- permanent, differentiated from sovereign rule only vis-a-vis the Palestinian residents. As far as Israeli citizens and their range of interests are concerned, the annexation of the territories is a fait accompli. ...

Some 73 cents of every U.S. dollar spent on food goes to distribution, including advertising, trucking, packaging, refrigeration, middle people, and so forth. Seven cents goes to the farmer. - Michael H. Shuman

Community food enterprise: Local success in a global marketplace
Michael H. Shuman Huffington Post USA January 25, 2010

Visit this page for its embedded links.

It's time to connect the headlines between persistent unemployment in the United States and growing food insecurity. The next Obama stimulus package should focus on how local food can address both simultaneously. A study done two years ago found that a 20% shift of retail food spending in Detroit redirected to locally grown foods would create 5,000 jobs and increase local output by half a billion dollars. A similar shift to Detroit-grown food by those living in the five surrounding counties would create 35,000 jobs - far more than ever will come out of the multibillion-dollar bailout of the auto industry. The experience of microenterprise organizations around the country suggests that each of these jobs can be created for $2,000-3,000 of public money--a tiny fraction of the price of the last stimulus. ...

Local food, by the way, also increasingly means cheaper food. Few economists appreciate how inefficient traditional global food production has become. Some 73 cents of every U.S. dollar spent on food goes to distribution, including advertising, trucking, packaging, refrigeration, middle people, and so forth. Seven cents goes to the farmer. A local food business, like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative we studied, has reduced distribution costs to 20 cents on the dollar, which means lower prices for consumers and more income for farmers. This is also why local food is important globally. The worst way to help poor Bangladeshi farmers to get out of poverty is to continue buying their produce, since even under fair trade standards maybe a penny or so of every food-sale dollar reaches them. It's far better for Americans to help Bangladesh residents become more self-reliant on food by sharing our best models of CFEs [community food enterprises] (and their sharing their best models with us) to encourage local ownership of economic stimulating local food businesses. Plus, the community wealth generated by greater food self-reliance will give us more purchasing power to buy those items, like coffee or bananas, that only can be grown in the global south. Spreading CFE models in the name of creating jobs and food security everywhere is the kind globalization all of us can embrace.

Community Food Enterprise

The local food movement is now spreading globally, yet is not well understood. To many, local food is exclusively about proximity, with discriminating consumers demanding higher quality food grown, caught, processed, cooked, and sold by people they know and trust. But an equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses. This report is about the full range of locally owned businesses involved in food, whether they are small or big, whether they are primary producers or manufacturers or retailers, whether their focus is local or global markets. We call these businesses community food enterprises (CFEs).

An equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses. Some dismiss the recent rise of local food and CFEs as just a passing fad. We see it as the natural consequence of the improving competitiveness of CFEs. Not only are CFEs getting more market savvy, but they are also taking advantage of the growing diseconomies of global food businesses. Long, nonlocal supply chains, for example, are increasingly vulnerable to rising oil prices. It’s true that CFEs face special challenges from their modest scale in leadership, finance, secession, and technology, to name a few but they are also developing impressive ways of overcoming them. This report provides a detailed field report on the performance of 24 CFEs, half inside the United States and half international. We show that CFEs represent a huge diversity of legal forms, scales, activities, and designs. From these case studies, we address four questions: ...