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State Terror Put to the Ultimate Test: Qaddafi’s War on Libya
By Numerian posted by Michael Collins
The extraordinary brutality employed by the Qaddafi regime against its own people has few modern precedents. Dictators tend to reserve their use of state terror for political or sectarian enemies. Saddam Hussein attacked those segments of Iraqi society not content to submit to a government reserved exclusively for Sunni Arabs, and Saddam’s Ba’athist neighbor Hafez al-Assad killed up to 20,000 members of the Syrian arm of the Moslem Brotherhood when they threatened his rule. (Image)
Perhaps the only equivalent instances occurred in Cambodia under the psychotic dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge, and in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. In both cases, the oppression was identified more with the ruling party than with a dictator; China’s government was in fact leaderless following the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, which precipitated the Tiananmen protests. Libya, on the other hand, has been under the unforgiving dictatorship of Muhammar Qaddafi and his family since 1969.
Wisconsin Democrats Plan Capitulation
by Stephen Lendman
Three weeks and counting since Wisconsin public workers began heroically protesting for rights too important to lose, including collective bargaining without which all others are threatened.
Daily, many thousands braved cold and snow - marching, demonstrating, and sleeping over, sacrificing personal comforts to keep struggling for justice. Teachers, police, firefighters, nurses, maintenance workers, and other public employees were joined by union and nonunion private sector ones, along with doctors, lawyers, other professionals, and thousands of college and high school students from across Wisconsin and other states.
Libya, Gas Prices, and the Big Payday at Your Expense
Another Triumph for The Money Party
Michael Collins
The average price for a gallon of gas rose 30% from $2.69 in July 2010 to $3.49 as of March 6. Most of that 30% has come in just the last few days.
We're about to embark on another period of let the markets take care of it. The Money Party manipulators are again jerking citizens around in the old bottom-up wealth redistribution program. Their imagineers are writing the storyline right now.
The conflict in Libya is causing the spike in oil prices over the past ten days or so according to the media script. Take a look at the chart to the right. Can you find Libya among the top fifteen nations supplying the United States with crude oil?
Why the Current Panic Over Gas Prices?
The general explanation points to the crisis in Libya as the proximate cause. The anti Gaddafi regime revolution began in earnest on February 17. But if the Libyan revolution were the cause, we'd have to attribute a 50% drop in a 2% share of the world's oil supply as the cause of the panic. We would also have to attribute the increase in US gas prices to a nation that doesn't impact the US crude oil supply and, as a result, should not impact the price of gas here..
For International Women's Day, the true recipe for equality
Mary Shaw
March 8 is International Women's Day (IWD), a day celebrated worldwide to mark the economic, political, and social achievements of women. And, while women's rights have advanced considerably in a world of still mostly patriarchal cultures, we nevertheless have a long way to go to achieve true equality.
This year's IWD theme, as designated by the United Nations, is: Equal access to education, training, and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women
I completely agree that access to those resources is necessary for women to progress in the workplace. However, there are other, more basic, considerations that must not be overlooked: Access to sex education and family planning services. After all, even today in the modern industrialized West, many girls and young women still find themselves having to drop out of high school or college due to pregnancy. And this sets them on a potential course to lifelong underachievement. Most pregnant teenagers do not share Bristol Palin's socio-economic privileges, and cannot feed their families by dancing with the stars.
The Social Snobbery of Free Trade
Ian Fletcher
Skepticism about free trade is often stigmatized with ad hominem attacks. These mostly come down to variations on the following:
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“Protectionists are dummies, losers, incompetents, hippies, rednecks, dinosaurs, closet socialists, or crypto-fascists.”
Thomas Friedman’s version in The World is Flat (the Das Kapital of Globalism) runs thus:
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Let’s face it: Republican cultural conservatives have much more in common with the steelworkers of Youngstown, Ohio, the farmers of rural China, and the mullahs of central Saudi Arabia, who would also like more walls, than they do with investment bankers on Wall Street or service workers linked to the global economy in Palo Alto, who have been enriched by the flattening of the world.
U.S. Human Rights Policy is Self-serving and Duplicitous: George Katsiaficas
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
George Katsiaficas is a renowned university professor, sociologist, author and activist. He is a visiting American Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea where he teaches and does research on the 1980s and 1990s East Asian uprisings.
Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.
He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.
In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association's Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.
America's War on Libya
by Stephen Lendman
Since WW II alone, America waged direct and proxy wars against Korea, Southeast Asia, Central and South American countries, African ones, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and now Egypt and Libya. One down, one to go, besides dozens of attempted and successful coups, as well as numerous other interventions to control world markets, resources and people. Imperial America doesn't sleep. It plots, deciding where next to strike.
Despite popular passion for democratic change, uprisings in Egypt and Libya were externally orchestrated, funded and armed by Washington to replace one despot with another. Democracy won't be tolerated. It's never been at home.
Has The Lebanon Tribunal Drama Become Farce?
Franklin Lamb
Zahle, Lebanon
This observer had a wild day in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley yesterday. Then again, for one reason or another, it seems that every time I go to the Bekaa it turns into a wild day.
It was to be a quick trip to the city of Zahle to attend a trial of a friend in the Mahkama Genaeya (Criminal Court). All I had to do was make a brief appearance to testify as a character witness for a member of the Bekaa Valley's largest tribe. The defendant is a sometime journalist who has done plenty of favors for visiting Americans over the past few years at my request. When delegations of Yanks arrive in Lebanon I am sometimes asked if I could help arrange meetings with political leaders, a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp, perhaps a trip to the south or to the amazing Bekaa Valley. It's a fact that I don't think much of US government policy and actions in this region, but frankly I do like fellow Americans quite a lot and try to assist them with contacts whenever I can.
Extrajudicial Assassinations: Official Israeli Policy
by Stephen Lendman
Extrajudicial assassinations are willful, premeditated, cold-blooded murder. Nonetheless, they're official Israeli policy. Killers get impunity. Investigations rarely happen. Occasional ones absolve crimes, letting new ones repeat freely. Israel's Turkel commission sanctioned the Mavi Marmara massacre. A previous article discussed it, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/01/gaza-flotilla-massacre-whitewash.html
Israel's internal 2008 - 2009 Cast Lead investigation absolved brazen Gaza crimes of war and against humanity, explained through the following link:
"Bail-out: There's a hole in the bucket" (OpEdNews 404 – Repost)
By Robert Singer
Click here to read why “this article is not currently available” at OpEdNews.
September 29, 2008
Bail-out: There's a hole in the bucket
We can postpone the inevitable with the bail-out, but we can't avoid the financial reckoning that awaits us. Drastic changes in our way of life are about to become a reality, but maybe that won't be so bad. Today we have more stuff than we need, but we have less time for the things that really matter, such as family, friends and leisure time.
I put my betting money on Congress coming through and supporting the landmark bail- out of imperiled financial markets. But I can’t help wondering if things aren't a whole lot worse in Washington than we have been told. A press release from the Army Times reports that for the first time in American history, a president has mobilized regular combat troops to quell the potential domestic unrest that his administration fears might erupt over the greatest economic emergency and financial disaster since the Great Depression.
Its hard to imagine the 4,000 soldiers that make up the 1st Brigade Combat Team could do much to subdue angry American citizens who go shopping and find that local businesses will no longer take their devalued dollars. However, the threat of unrest is enough to convince Congress that it better go through with the bail-out.
For at least six decades, we Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Western world based on our ability to import cheap raw materials (thanks to the CIA) and ship refrigerators, cars, airplanes and military hardware to the rest of the world. Soon the rest of the world caught on, and the refrigerators, cars, airplanes and even our socks started to be produced elsewhere. But we still had one more product to ship offshore, and beginning in 1980’s the Reagan administration embarked upon the greatest export of all: OUR DEBT. We got away with it for 28 years, but the ability of the rest of the world to finance our outsized standard of living has come to an end. And maybe the outcome won’t be as bad we fear; after all, in the 50’s our national happiness peaked just before we embarked on this mania for consumption.
As Bush’s father put it in 1992, "The American way of life is not negotiable”--a statement unthinkingly endorsed by nearly all Americans. For 30 years we have lived the motto: ”It is our God-given right to spend ourselves out of house and home” in a world where Americans have 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 30 percent of the world’s resources and create 30 percent of the world’s waste. Well, the American way of life is going to change and, unfortunately, there is nothing to negotiate.
Again, we can postpone the inevitable with the bail-out, but we can’t avoid the financial reckoning that awaits us. Drastic changes in our way of life are about to become a reality, but maybe that won’t be so bad. Today we have more stuff than we need, but we have less time for the things that really matter, such as family, friends and leisure time.
What matters most is how we as Americans work to change this old-school consumption mindset. There’s a new school of thinking on how much ”stuff” we need, and it’s based on sustainability and equity. I am willing to make one more bet: We will work together to get through this troubling period in history and make the U.S. and the world a better place to live.
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