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What are US troops dying for in Afghanistan?
Bill Van Auken
What are these sacrifices for? Why are young American men and women being sent seven-and-a-half thousand miles from US shores to face horrible deaths and to carry out brutal repression against a population that does not want them there?
At least 21 US soldiers and Marines have been killed in Afghanistan since last weekend, making October the bloodiest month for US forces since they invaded the country eight years ago. Still more have been wounded by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire.
Among those killed in the last several days was a 24-year-old California mother of two young daughters, Sgt. Eduviges Wolf, who died of wounds suffered when her vehicle was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade in Kunar province. Devin Michel, a 19-year-old Army private, little more than a year out of high school in Stockton, Illinois, was killed by a roadside bomb in Zhari province. Gregory Fleury, a 23-year-old Marine corporal, lost his life in one of the three helicopter crashes on Sunday. The Anchorage Daily News quoted his grandfather as saying that, after serving two tours in Iraq, Fleury was set to end his active duty, but “the government extended his service” for deployment to Afghanistan. He had been scheduled to come home in early November.
Is Obama “Playing the Game?”
By Frederick Alexander Meade
In recent weeks, the Obama administration has come under considerable fire, as it has attempted to advance its agenda regarding national health care reform. Much of the opposition directed towards the President’s plan has expressed itself in a manner which many believe to pertain less to the proposal and more to the Head of State himself. African Americans, among other citizens, have voiced concerns over disturbing images and utterances emerging from those who oppose Obama’s political intentions; as these expressions, in numerous instances, have been observed by some as acts deeply rooted in racism.
In late August, a series of rallies organized by a conservative advocacy group - Tea Party Express - were staged over the course of several weeks, in an effort to quell the President’s efforts to gain public support for his Health Care Plan. Significant attention was drawn by these events as many in some quarters regarded the organized protests as nothing more than “Confederate style”, gatherings wherein racial epitaphs and covert language imbedded in “white supremacy”, substituted for civil expressions of opposition. Such assessments germinated as numerous ralliers displayed signs portraying Obama as an “illegal immigrant”, an African “witch doctor” , “Adolph Hitler” and even “Satan” amidst vocalizations suggesting that he as a result of his political orientation is somehow less “American” than those in possession of dissimilar views. Additionally, other attendees held signs stating, “We Didn’t Bring our Guns (This Time),” a reference to a prior presidential event in which some outside protesters boldly brandished firearms, as Obama addressed constituents in regard to his health care initiatives. These acts, composed what many interpreted to be, indirect threats to the physical safety of Obama. Such widely regarded misconduct would not only surface within the boundaries of less formal public events, but also too, within the confines of an official government institution.
THE WARNING / OTC DERIVATIVE MARKET STILL DANGEROUSLY UNREGULATED
Allen L Roland
In the midst of the Clinton 1990's raging bull market ~ a lone regulator, Brooksley Born, stood up against the Washington elite and warned them about the unregulated dark OTC Derivative market . Her truth was ridiculed, violently opposed and is now seen as self evident ~ but the OTC derivative market still remains dangerously unregulated:
Click on the photo or enclosed links and watch 55 minutes of PBS at its best ~ THE WARNING / How Greenspan, Summers & Rubin conspired to silence Derivatives whistleblower Brooksley Born. the warning | PBS
I watched it on last week and it confirmed what I have long suspected ~ the ticking time bomb, that still exists in the Obama administration, is the continuing concerted Wall Street effort not to regulate the highly-complex and lucrative OTC derivative multi-trillion dollar crap shoot which still continues to rake in millions for the financial elite while Main Street stagnates. See my UNSPOKEN CAUSE OF MARKET COLLAPSE IS DERIVATIVE TRADING written on October 13, 2008 http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/10/13.html
Black Women, Power and African Hair
Written by Frederick Alexander Meade
In recent times, women of African descent within many industrialized nations have begun to garner significant financial, social and political standings.
This phenomenon finds its expression especially within the confines of the United States of America. With the emergence of such figures as Oprah Winfrey, Tyra Banks and more recently Michelle Obama, African American women have started to establish themselves within previously male dominated industries and have thus increased their visibility within exclusive social and political circles.
With the status of some women of African descent ascending to exceedingly high societal echelons, rather new dimensions have started to develop in relation to the physical images projected of Black women.
LET THEM FILIBUSTER
by Mary Pitt
The Democrats are terribly worried about their ability to gain the sixty votes required for cloture in order to vote for passage of their health plan in the Senate. There are many of us, particularly on the Progressixe side who see the benefits of bringing the bill to the floor regardless of the pre-vote count and let the speeches begin!
The Republicans are griping that the discussions regarding the content of the bill have not been open and transparent as promised by Candidate Obama. Committees have had meetings and administration officials have consulted experts in closed door sessions. Now it is time for the "transparecy" for which they pine.
Nuke Gaza
By Jeff Gates
Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more.
Israel's "legitimacy" will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these:
When and how will the recognition of Israel's nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world's largest open-air prison.
TWO PUPPETS ARE NOT BETTER THAN ONE
Eric S. Margolis
The US government has wanted to dump the hapless Karzai, but could not find an equally obedient but more effective replacement. There has been talk in Washington of imposing an American `chief executive officer’ on him. Or, in the lexicon of the old British Raj, an imperial Viceroy. This may yet happen.
Here we go again with more political theater in war-ravaged Afghanistan. -The last vote, held in August, was so blatantly rigged that Washington put a gun to the head of its Afghan client, Hamid Karzai, and forced him into the humiliation of holding a runoff vote in November against rival Abdullah Abdullah.
As Henry Kissinger once observed, being America’s ally can be more dangerous than being its enemy.
Israel, the United States and international law
Jean Shaoul
Israel has responded to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s endorsement of the Goldstone report accusing it of war crimes during its assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 by denouncing the UN and seeking to overturn existing international law.
The explicit aim of Tel Aviv is to give the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) carte blanche to do as it likes in the name of “combating terrorism.”
The report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone said the war on Gaza was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
Goldstone said that the UN Security Council should refer the case to the International Criminal Court if Israel failed to carry out an independent investigation into the military’s conduct. Those countries that were signatories to the 1949 Geneva Conventions had a duty to use their powers of “universal jurisdiction” to search for and prosecute those responsible for war crimes, he added.
A little R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Even for War Criminals?
eileen fleming
The passionate Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, was the first to be arrested on October 15, 2009, when 30 activists vocally disrupted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during his speech at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
Olmert was Prime Minister during Israel's Dec.-Jan. attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and also during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon that killed 1,200. As Prime Minister and the top civilian commander of Israel's armed forces, he was involved in and responsible for planning and execution of both attacks.
ISRAEL SEEKS FINAL CONFRONTATION AGAINST IRAN
Damien Lataan
The reality is this: Iran, as it keeps telling the world, has no nuclear weapons program and is intent only on generating electrical energy. Israel insists that Iran does have a nuclear weapons program – despite the total lack of evidence – because it wants to use it as an excuse to attack Iran.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to the entire world now that, no matter what Iran does with regard to its nuclear program, it will never be enough for Israel and Israel will continue to pursue its witch-hunt against Iran until the regime in Iran has been changed and it will use Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ as the excuse they need to eventually instigate a final confrontation that they hope will lead to that regime change.
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