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Obama's Nobel & START: Peacemaker arrives empty-handed
Eric Walberg
There are many a smirk as US President Barack Obama flies to Oslo to be crowned Peacenik of 2009, but it is the Russians who get the prize for taking the shine off Obama's trophy.
Obama desperately needed a new nuclear arms treaty to replace START I to provide some justification for the Nobel Committee's gamble. The award in the face of US imperial wars and hubris is proving to be extremely embarrassing to everyone, left and right. In awarding the Nobel Prize to Obama on 9 October, the selection committee “in particular looked at Obama’s vision and work toward a world without atomic weapons,” giving him an out, if he could at least bring a nuclear arms treaty with him.
Obama and the Same Old Bush Lies, for the Same Reasons
By: Peter Chamberlin
The war in Afghanistan is being escalated on false pretenses. There is zero chance to “win” the war with the “new” (which is the same old failed) strategy and everybody involved with it knows it. When Obama and McChrystal use the words “win” and “victory,” they are not using the same dictionary used by the rest of the human race. “Victory” to them, means that the greater undefined mission can continue, not come to an end.
Afghanistan, like Iraq, will never see the withdrawal of American/NATO forces; that’s why all the giant super-bases are needed in both countries. That also applies to the massive super-embassy being built in Islamabad. “Victory” is not winning, but is the point in the war when large numbers of troops fighting this war can be safely transferred to the next war. This is what we are seeing in the so-called withdrawal from Iraq and will probably see in the anticipated withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011. There will never be a real American withdrawal from any of these countries, unless it is forced upon them by the people.
OBAMA'S SURGE / A HOLLOW ECHO OF BUSH SURGE
Allen L Roland
President Obama's announced 30,000 troop surge is a hollow echo of Bush's Iraq surge and it's being met with indifference and skepticism by the majority of Afghans who have fought and successfully defeated other ambitious foreign occupying powers such as the United States:
New Study Asserts Climate Change Will Increase Conflicts in Africa
By Cyril Mychalejko
Darfur just may be the tip of the melting iceberg. A new study suggests that if world leaders fail to reach a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen to curb climate change, Africa will be ravaged by more wars and corpses in the coming decades.
"If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering," said UC-Berkeley's Marshall Burke, the study's lead author.
Is it a flogging offence to send friendly greetings to Gaza’s beleaguered PM?
Stuart Littlewood
The great Viva Palestina convoy is on its way. It left London on Sunday, with the media doing their best not to notice despite photo opportunities and a press event laid on in front of the Houses of Parliament.
The hundred or so vehicles, carrying humanitarian aid, are expected to arrive in Gaza on 27 December – the anniversary of the launch of Israel’s murderous blitzkrieg.
I asked the organisers if they provided a Gaza postbag for delivering seasonal greetings from supporters and well-wishers. Nobody trusts ordinary mail that has to pass through Israel. The answer seemed to be ‘no’ so perhaps the idea was too much of a burden on an already complex operation.
You Want to Understand Anti-Semitism? Just Look in the Mirror
by Gilad Atzmon
Benjamin Weinthal, the Jerusalem Post’s correspondent in Berlin wondered earlier this week whether Germany has learned from its Nazi history? The question is in itself very intriguing. Considering its past, one may expect Germany to oppose any form of racist, discriminatory, expansionist and nationalist ideology. Bearing in mind Israelis are considered the ‘Nazis of our time’ by more than just a few commentators, one may expect the Germans to advise the Israelis what not to do. One may also expect Germany to stand by the Palestinians for the Palestinians are, de facto, the last victims of Hitler.
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
by: Jeff Masters
In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: "the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the "Manufactured Doubt" industry.
Our Lie-Based Reality
By: Peter Chamberlin
Our government cannot function without the trust of the people. Without unshakeable faith that the people will allow the government to proceed, the governing coalitions of politicians will not dare to implement their own plans. Fear of popular reprisals (which could diminish their power) restrains even the most devious politicians from acting. Even Hitler himself would not have dared to proceed with his vile plans, if he hadn’t believed that the people would let him get away with it. When government plans are so repulsive that no sane person would support them, then it becomes necessary to construct a false version of reality to spoon-feed the people, in order to gain the requisite trust, and with it, the people’s consent.
This is our current situation in America and throughout the Americanized world.
Dr King Spanks Obama: Part 4
By David Kendall
Some months ago, at the 23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Celebration in San Francisco, attendees were asked to answer the question, "What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?" [1] This article series is an effort to provide Dr. King an opportunity to answer that question for himself from the pages of a book he wrote in 1967 entitled: "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?". But more than a mere contrast between two persons, this article series seeks to compare recent American history with contemporary struggles, and to explore visions of a more desirable future. This is the spirit of Dr. King's book title and of Obama's campaign slogan, "Change We Can Believe In". At this point, we've reached chapter 5 of Dr. King's book, which advances the following centerpiece of his philosophy:
CONFRONTING DISPOSSESSION: CREATING FACTS IN THE MIND
by Karen AbuZayd
Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner General United
Nations Relief and Works Agency
Sixty years ago today the United Nations General Assembly voted into existence a temporary body known as UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA’s task was to deal with the humanitarian consequences of the dispossession of some three quarters of a million Palestine refugees forced by the 1948 Middle East War to abandon their homes and flee their ancestral lands. Just two decades later, the Six Day War generated another spasm of violence and forced displacement, culminating in the occupation of Palestinian territory. Today, anguished exile remains the lot of Palestinians and Palestine refugees. The occupation of Palestinian land persists, there is no Palestinian State and the human rights and fundamental freedoms to which Palestinians are entitled under international law do not exist.
The occupation, now over forty years old, becomes more entrenched with every infringement of human rights and international law in the occupied Palestinian territory. Political actors hold in their hands the power to redress the travesties Palestinians endure. Yet, the approach has been, at best, to equivocate over the minutiae of the occupation – a checkpoint here, a bag of cement there – or, at worst, to look the other way, to acquiesce in or even support the measures causing Palestinian suffering.
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