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Bankrupt, Shmankrupt — Bank of America Executives Enjoy Taxpayer-Funded Superbowl Festivities
It’s Not Going to Be OK, By Chris Hedges
Obama’s New Bank Giveaway, by Michael Hudson
By Paul Craig Roberts
February 02, 2009 “Information Clearinghouse”
Vast numbers of people in the United States and abroad are hoping that President Obama will end America’s illegal wars, halt America’s support for Israel’s massacre of Lebanese and Palestinians, and punish, instead of reward, the shyster banksters whose fraudulent financial instruments have destroyed economies and imposed massive sufferings on people all over the world. If Obama’s appointments are an indication, all of these hopeful people are going to be disappointed.
James Petras examines Obama’s foreign policy appointments and finds the largest collection of Zionist militarists outside of Avigdor Lieberman’s far right political party in Israel.
Petras concludes that Obama’s “diplomatic” team has Iran in its sights, an hostility that meshes with Israel’s own intent. Not realizing that a member of the press had been mistakenly invited to a selected audience, the Israeli ambassador to Australia said that Israel’s attack on Gaza was a dress rehearsal for a major attack on Iran. Netanyahu, the expected winner of Israel’s March elections, has again declared that Israel will not permit Iran to have a nuclear energy program as it would provide the basis for developing nuclear weapons.
By Chris Hedges
February 02, 2009 “TruthDig”
The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
[…]
via TruthDig
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Letter to Editor: Chris Hedges omits key truths in ‘It’s Not Going to Be OK’
By Marc W. Herold
ICH
February, 02, 2009 — “RAWA”
“Change” Afghans Should Look Upon with Skepticism
Simple arithmetic reveals that the eleven days under the Obama clock were 18-50% more deadly for Afghan civilians than the twenty days under the Bush regime
The New Year’s first Afghan civilian killed by U.S/NATO action was a boy named Marjan (tr. Coral), killed on January 2nd. (1)The boy had allegedly wandered into a prohibited area in the Deh-Sabz district of Kabul. Marjan was walking home with friends when “international forces” gunned him down. The occupation soldiers got out of a white vehicle, shot Coral and sped away. Marjan is only one of 73-88 civilian Afghans or tribal Pashtuns killed by the U.S/NATO occupation forces during January 2009. Three days later, eight Afghan women, two children and two civilian men were killed by Australian forces in the Chora district of Uruzgan Province.
Much official ado has been made in Washington D.C. and in the U.S. corporate press about how the new Administration will be taking far greater care as regards Afghan civilians. Data analyzed below for January 2009 suggests that the deadliness of the Afghan war for civilians under the Obama clock significantly exceeds that registered under the outgoing Bush regime. Boys, women, girls, tribal leaders all have perished at the hands of the foreign occupiers.
During January 2009, twelve U.S/NATO forces’ actions (including one road accident where a MRAP military armored vehicle crushed an Afghan civilian car) resulted in 73-88 dead Afghan civilians (including five Pashtun tribes people in North Waziristan killed in a U.S. drone strike). The following table presents details:
[…]
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Afghanistan and Pakistan’s “Salvador Option”, by Tom Burghardt
Bill Moyers Journal: Bombing Civilians + The Cost of Ignorance
US air raid fuels Afghan anger
By John Tirman
The Nation
February 02, 2009
We are now able to estimate the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration. Looking at the empirical evidence of Bush’s war legacy will put his claims of victory in perspective. Of course, even by his standards — “stability” — the jury is out. Most independent analysts would say it’s too soon to judge the political outcome. Nearly six years after the invasion, the country remains riven by sectarian politics and major unresolved issues, like the status of Kirkuk.
We have a better grasp of the human costs of the war. For example, the United Nations estimates that there are about 4.5 million displaced Iraqis — more than half of them refugees — or about one in every six citizens. Only 5 percent have chosen to return to their homes over the past year, a period of reduced violence from the high levels of 2005-07. The availability of healthcare, clean water, functioning schools, jobs and so forth remains elusive. According to Unicef, many provinces report that less than 40 percent of households have access to clean water. More than 40 percent of children in Basra, and more than 70 percent in Baghdad, cannot attend school.
[…]
h/t: ICH
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch
2.02.09
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment — and that’s to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
[…]
via Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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Updated: 2.03.09 added video
Jeremy Gantz
The Raw Story
February 1, 2009
Update at bottom: Did LA Times get ‘punked’? Liberals push back against LA Times story
Two days after taking the helm of a country ready for change after eight years of George W. Bush, President Obama has allowed one controversial “War on Terror” tactic to remain in place: rendition.
Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.
Other executive orders shuttered the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harsh interrogation techniques that have been termed torture. And in his most widely noticed break with his predecessor, Obama signed an order to close Guantanamo Bay’s prison within one year.
But rendition will remain. Obama and his administration appear to believe that the rendition program was one piece of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard, the Los Angeles Times reported.
[…]
via The Raw Story | Obama preserves rendition two days after taking office
by Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling…
2.01.09
With a rightist insurgency raging on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the United States is resorting to a tried-and-true method to stem the rising fundamentalist tide: direct military intervention and massive violence.
On January 23, twenty-two people, including 8 to 10 alleged members of al-Qaeda, the rest civilians, were killed when CIA Predator drones slammed into houses in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
In the last six months of 2008, the CIA mounted some 30 such attacks. Inevitably, civilian casualties were high while American officials predictably reported that the strikes failed to kill “senior al-Qaeda commanders.”
[…]
via Antifascist Calling…: Afghanistan and Pakistan’s “Salvador Option”.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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Over 100,000 people, mostly Tamils, came from across the UK to march in central London on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Sri Lanka and the atrocities carried out by the military. The WSWS interviewed participants on the protest.
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Over 100,000 demonstrate in London against Sri Lankan war
By Ajay Prakash and Paul Mitchell
http://www.wsws.org
2 February 2009
Over 100,000 people, mostly Tamils came from across the UK to march in central London on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Sri Lanka and the atrocities carried out by the military. During the march itself reports came in of a cluster bomb attack that killed 39 civilians and wounded 128 more.
Dandelion Salad 