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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.
A Peace Prize Winner's Resumé
Michael Allen
[This post first appeared as a comment on Chris Floyd's great blog Empire Burlesque.]
Then there's the matter of his actual policy and political record. If Obama is such (as many "progressives" seem to need to believe) an "antiwar" candidate, why has he offered so much substantive policy support to the criminal occupation and the broader imperial "war on terror" of which Bush says O.I.F. is a part? Here are some highlights from a summary of Obama's U.S. Senate voting record recently sent to me by the Creative Youth News Team (CYNT 2007), a progressive African American advocacy organization.
Upside Down World: Warmonger Wins Peace Prize
Paul Craig Roberts
It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.
“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”
I would add, “Lie is Truth.”
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.
The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”
WHO ARE THE TALIBAN?
Anand Gopal
The Afghan War Deciphered
If there is an exact location marking the West's failures in Afghanistan, it is the modest police checkpoint that sits on the main highway 20 minutes south of Kabul. The post signals the edge of the capital, a city of spectacular tension, blast walls, and standstill traffic. Beyond this point, Kabul's gritty, low-slung buildings and narrow streets give way to a vast plain of serene farmland hemmed in by sandy mountains. In this valley in Logar province, the American-backed government of Afghanistan no longer exists.
Instead of government officials, men in muddied black turbans with assault rifles slung over their shoulders patrol the highway, checking for thieves and "spies." The charred carcass of a tanker, meant to deliver fuel to international forces further south, sits belly up on the roadside.
The police say they don't dare enter these districts, especially at night when the guerrillas rule the roads. In some parts of the country's south and east, these insurgents have even set up their own government, which they call the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the name of the former Taliban government). They mete out justice in makeshift Sharia courts. They settle land disputes between villagers. They dictate the curricula in schools.
Just three years ago, the central government still controlled the provinces near Kabul. But years of mismanagement, rampant criminality, and mounting civilian casualties have led to a spectacular resurgence of the Taliban and other related groups. Today, the Islamic Emirate enjoys de facto control in large parts of the country's south and east. According to ACBAR, an umbrella organization representing more than 100 aid agencies, insurgent attacks have increased by 50% over the past year. Foreign soldiers are now dying at a higher rate here than in Iraq. The burgeoning disaster is prompting the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and international players to speak openly of negotiations with sections of the insurgency.
From Delusion to Vindictiveness, Interpreting the Zionist Dream
by Gilad Atzmon
“The socio-economic structure of the Jewish people differs radically from that of other nations. Ours is an anomalous, abnormal structure.” (Ber Borochov- The Economic Development of the Jewish People 1917)
“You [Jews] lack the right notion of honour, feeling for duty, morality, patriotism, idealism….” (Max Nordau - Address at the 1st Zionist Congress 1897)
“But labour is the only force which binds man to the soil… it is the basic energy for the creation of national culture. This is what we do not have, but we are not aware of missing it. We are a people without a country, without a national living language, without a national culture. We seem to think that if we have no labour it does not matter - let Ivan, John or Mustafa do the work…” (A.D. Gordon, "Our Tasks Ahead" 1920)
Early Zionism was indeed a cheerful dream, it was all about the transformation of the ‘Jew’ into a ‘civilised, respectful and authentic human being’. The founders of Zionism were inspired by the notions of ‘people like any other people’ and ‘nation amongst nations’. Reading early Zionists such as Nordau, Borochov and Gordon provides us with some very contemptuous references to Jewish character and identity that would make Nazi ideology look mildly liberal.
Will Tel Aviv Take the U.S. to War – Again?
By: Jeff Gates
Tel Aviv long ago proved its mastery at waging war “by way of deception” – the operative credo of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and foreign operations directorate. Yet its latest operation reveals a need to freshen up its repertoire of dirty tricks. As Israel’s patron, those of us who live in the U.S. are painfully familiar with such duplicity. Yet the recent frequency of its frauds renders their latest treachery remarkably transparent.
Consider the similarities. First a network of pro-Israelis fixed the intelligence that induced us to invade Iraq in support of an expansionist agenda for Greater Israel. Who can forget Iraqi WMD, scary images of mushroom clouds and secret meetings in Prague? Who can fail to recall the yellowcake uranium from Niger and those ominous warnings of “high-level contacts” between secular Baghdad and the religious fundamentalists of Al Qaeda?
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