Sherwood Ross

The war in Afghanistan today hangs like some cloud of poison gas over Washington that won’t blow away. It sickens everything as it spreads. It continues to suck precious tax dollars out of the Treasury, money this country cannot afford to squander, especially as millions of Americans are sinking into poverty and joblessness exceeds ten percent. Writing in USA Today last March 10th, Susan Page reported, “In one year, 24 million slide from ‘thriving’ to ‘struggling’ and “Some fear that the American dream may be in peril as well.” Worse, the U.S. is turning poverty-plagued Afghanistan, a long-suffering nation of 25 million souls into another Iraq, perhaps even another Viet Nam. Afghanistan has already been under U.S. assault for eight years and President Obama’s top military advisers are telling him it will take many more years to achieve “victory,” a term having utterly no meaning for skyrocketing numbers of dead and dismembered civilians.

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Gareth Porter

In support of the official United States assertion that Iran is arming its sworn enemy, the Taliban, the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Dennis Blair, has cited a statement by a Taliban commander last year attributing military success against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces to Iranian military assistance.

But the Taliban commander's claim is contradicted by evidence from the US Defense Department, Canadian forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban themselves that the increased damage to NATO tanks by Taliban forces has come from anti-tank mines provided by the United States to the jihadi movement against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Taliban claim was cited by the ODNI in written responses to questions for the record from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence following testimony by Blair before the committee on February 12, 2009. The responses were released to the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act on July 30.

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Allen L Roland

August 2009 marks the 19th straight month we have lost jobs as a nation ~ that's 6.9 million jobs gone ! The Obama top down multi-billion dollar bailout and bank rescue has artificially inflated stocks and credit markets but has left Main Street destitute, jobless and unprotected:

The Obama Administration has tried to re-inflate the credit bubble that just burst by bailing out Wall Street and flooding the banking Industry with more money and debt with the notion that consumers would continue to spend and go further in debt ~ while ignoring the fact that 6.2 million Americans are jobless and most likely in debt.

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Mickey Z.



1. How to be a good organizer

a) Spend some time thinking about trees
b) Imagine what clear cutting looks like, sounds like, and feels like
c) Recognize that 80% of the world's forests are gone
d) Be a good organizer

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Salim Nazzal

In the wake of the crisis after a Swedish newspaper revealed the heinous, and criminal activity, of Israel which has been harvesting organs and body parts from murdered Palestinians and selling them on to the USA it seems that Israel is facing another crisis, this time with Norway. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund, which has $400 billion in assets under management, has sold its $5.4 million holding in Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems Ltd.

The Israeli company Elbit systems Ltd provide a monitoring system which is the key contribution to the construction of the racist wall. The Norwegian finance minister Kristin Halvorsen from the social democrat party the alliance of the labor party in the current government supported earlier wider boycott against the state of Israel due to its apartheid policy. Halvorsen made it clear that Norway will not fund companies, which contribute in violations of international humanitarian law.

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by Brian McAfee

The current battles over the American health-care system are indicative of a wider philosophical and social divide. What is at stake and what is the desired outcome of each side? To answer such an enquiry, we must first look at the current health-care system as it exists in the United States.

The World Health Organization ranks U.S. healthcare well below most of Europe, Canada and Japan. France and Italy rank at number one and two while the U.S. is in the thirty-seventh slot. Most of the countries that rank above the U.S. have some form of socialized medicine. Japan, which ranks tenth on the WHO list, is at number one in life expectancy with 74.5 years being the average while the U.S. is twenty-fourth in life expectancy, again well below much of Europe, Canada and Australia as well.

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Khalid Amayreh

I don't know for sure why they are refusing to hand him over to us to bury
him,” Fawzi (left) told IOL about the body of his slain son. “These people
have no morality, save the morality of murder and lies," Shahin, (right)
said about Israeli authorities still holding the body of his son."

RAMALLAH – The controversy triggered by a Swedish newspaper report about Israel’s harvesting of Palestinian organs has salted the wounds of many Palestinian families haunted by the memories of loved ones who suffered the same fate.

“They claimed they came to arrest him, but in truth they came to murder him, which they did,” Walid Masalmeh, a resident of the small West Bank town of Dura, 10 kilometer west of Al-Khalil (Hebron), said about his relative Bassam.

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Mary Shaw

This nation was founded as a democratic republic, specifically a representative democracy. As voters, we like to believe that we play a significant role in our government's affairs by more-or-less directly choosing who will represent us in Washington.

But, with few exceptions, the men and women in Washington do not represent the voters. Instead, they represent the special interests which have the money to influence the voters at election time. And, while history class taught us that we have a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," what we've really ended up with is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Whether it's the big bank vs. the foreclosed homeowner or the insurance industry vs. the sick, the rich corporate interests win almost every time.

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(LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche

September 3, 2009 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche forcefully warned that any effort to cover up the crimes committed by the Federal Reserve Bank, during the Bush and Obama administrations, will be "tantamount to treason."

LaRouche was responding to reports from reliable sources close to the Obama White House, that the top leadership of the Democratic Party is "desperate" to block any disclosures of the Fed's role in the preferential bailout of certain key American banks, during the period since the August 2007 blowout of the financial system. As reported in the Washington Post on Aug. 28, 2009, as the result of the actions of the Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department, under the Bush and Obama presidencies, four big U.S. banks—JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo—along with Goldman Sachs, have consolidated almost total control over the entire U.S. banking system, managing one-third of all deposits, one-half of all mortgages, and two-thirds of all credit card debt.

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Written by Mohammed Mesbahi

Introduction

The World Health Organisation produces a report every year on the health of the world population, based on statistics compiled from the 193 member states that form the United Nations. The latest report shows that, in the developing world, life expectancy is shorter than in OECD countries, women are more prone to die in childbirth and babies are more likely to die before the age of five.

The report illustrates that global inequalities in healthcare are much greater than they were 30 years ago. While people in the West can expect to live until their late 70s, people living in poor countries, such as Burkina Faso or Chad, are unlikely to live beyond 46 or 47 years of age. In Africa, half the population lives on less than US$1.25 a day with little or no access to safe water. According to the UN, 12 million people die of preventable diseases every year, often caused by water-born parasitic diseases like dysentery, insect-born parasitic diseases such as malaria, or from other factors related to wider economic and social problems such as malnutrition and lack of medical care.

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