Embarrassed and denounced
Khaled Amayreh from Ramallah
In monumental fashion, recent events in Geneva have roundly earned Fatah and Abbas's Palestinian Authority the contempt of ordinary Palestinians.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is facing an extremely embarrassing situation following its decision earlier this week to endorse deferring the ratification of the Goldstone Report at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva.
The report, compiled by South African judge Richard Goldstone, accused Israel of committing, knowingly and deliberately, war crimes and crimes against humanity during its winter onslaught on the Gaza Strip in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of whom were innocent civilians, including more than 300 children, with thousands others injured or badly incinerated by phosphoric bombs. Thousands of homes, mosques and public buildings were destroyed in the 22-day blitz.
PermalinkJohn Lennon's 69th, me and U2
eileen fleming
John Lennon would have turned 69 today. I have been listening to his music all week. And I will be at a U2 concert in Tampa tonight.
You say you want a revolution?
Well, you know we all want to change the world,
but when you talk about destruction,
don't you know that you can count me out: IN!
Me2!
The Beatles - Revolution (Live)U.S. ‘Personality Assassination’ of a Palestinian Ally
By Nicola Nasser*
The report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which the head of the mission, Judge Richard Goldstone, presented to the Human Rights Council (HRC) on September 29, prematurely plunged the Palestinian Authority (PA) in a short ?lived euphoria over what it first envisaged as a political prize that would hit two major birds of its political adversaries simultaneously, namely the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its Palestinian rival Hamas.
But the report has backfired to put the very survival of PA’s presidency of Mahmud Abbas in the balance and make both adversaries come out winners with Abbas himself as the only looser, thanks to the blundering of the U.S. Administration of President Barak Obama, who seemed to shoot his own diplomacy in the legs by undermining the leadership of the only rubber ? stamping ally of his country among the Palestinian polity, and “threatening” as well his own “global public diplomacy options” and “scrupulously graduated approach to whatever passes for a Middle East Peace process (according to Ian Williams in Foreign Policy in Focus on September 23, 2009).
Economic Democracy Demands One World Balance
Aetius Romulous
Economic Democracy has been living exponentially. It's a big word, and it's a big concept.
What it boils down to is this; that nobody alive in any culture of "progress" today knows anything other than bigger. Alternatively, if you like, all participants in democratic free markets have the shared expectation that they will have more tomorrow than they did today. In fact, we can go further and say that anything other than more, bigger, or better represents a failure of our governance that we all battle with equal fear, and vigor.
OBAMA'S DO NOTHING PRESIDENCY HEADING FOR DISASTER / DESPITE NOBEL PRIZE
Allen L Roland
As Obama continues to equivocate and lose the political capital he gained with his election and mandate of change on January 20th ~ I am struck by the sheer audacity of his do nothing presidency as well as his cavalier approach to an illegal Afghanistan occupation which is destined for a humiliating defeat, despite winning a now tainted Nobel Peace prize:
Saturday night Live hilariously tallies up the scoreboard of the Obama administration's broken promises in this 5 minute must see video clip ~ http://ampe
dstatus.com/saturday-night-live-rips-no-change-do-nothing-obama-video
The Orwell Peace Prize
Martha Rose Crow
Right after Christmas, my nephew is leaving for another tour in Afghanistan. My Sister’s heart and my heart are broken. We are ‘Intuitive’ or psychic. We know this time he’s coming back in a box with a flag on top of it.
But in many ways, he’s dead already. Like many soldiers who’ve come back from the middle east, he’s wired on self-destruct. My Sister has told me that she can’t count the times she’s taken guns away from him when he was threatening suicide because those times have been so many.
When I was a child, I was highly idealistic. I wanted to swim the English Channel. I wanted to live an exceptional life. I wanted to graduate from the university and perform work that would improve the lives of others. I wanted to be a peace maker and I wanted to earn a Nobel Peace Prize.
Back then, I didn’t know about the dirty money connected with the prizes; that they came from money made from munitions or that the principal of the endowment was invested in more implements of war and/or of human oppression like capitalism that rapes the world for cheap natural resources and cheap human labor.
Sweatshop Conditions in US Cities
by Stephen Lendman
A new low-wage industry study by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment exposes the dark side of workforce exploitation in America's three largest cities - New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
From January through August 2008, researchers conducted 90-minute interviews with 4,387 "front-line" workers, aged 18 or older, using "innovative, rigorous methodology" to reach vulnerable people "often missed in standard surveys, such as (undocumented) immigrants and those paid in cash." The goal was to be as statistically representative of workplace violations as possible for a population of about 1.64 million workers, or 15% of the total workforce studied.
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