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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.
Out-of-Control Human Rights Abuses in Iraq
by Stephen Lendman
On February 21, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) press release headlined, "Iraq: Vulnerable Citizens at Risk," announcing its new report titled, "At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-Led Invasion." Besides many others, two previous articles discuss more, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/one-of-historys-greatest-crimes_7099.html
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/10/us-war-crimes-in-fallujah.html
The top link explains that over the past two decades, America devastated Iraq by genocide, vast destruction, terror, occupation, and contamination - a monstrous combination of unspeakable ongoing crimes.
At issue is:
Western Journalists Fail to Report the Facts about Libya Objectively
By Timothy V. Gatto
I wrote an article that ran on a few different websites entitled “Another Corporate-Inspired War?”. I received some information about Libya and some facts about Col. Gadhafi from a few of my readers. I have no way of completely fact-checking all of this information and so initially I wasn’t going to write about all of the information I received. After I watched a number of news shows about Libya and saw that very few of them were trying to show an objective outlook on Gadhafi or on Libya, I decided that another perspective really needed to be presented to the American people. I have decided to write on the information presented to me and let the readers of this article make their own judgment on the information presented.
Britain cherry-picks which war criminals to prosecute and where to impose no-fly zones
Stuart Littlewood
After maintaining a deafening silence about Israel’s atrocities against civilians, Britain suddenly wants a “day of reckoning” for war criminals – as long as they are Libyan.
While protestors’ attempts to oust Gaddafi and his scum continued, the UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham, called on the UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Libya to take whatever steps were necessary “to ensure that those responsible for the awful human rights violations that are currently occurring in Libya are held to account”.
He said the Libyan Government was trying to stop the world seeing what was happening. “We are appalled by the levels of violence… The use of military force against civilians and the attacks on funeral processions have caused deep anger throughout the country and across the world… We join the High Commissioner in calling for an international inquiry into the violence… The United Kingdom will do everything we can to make sure those responsible in the Libyan regime are held accountable for their actions…"
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