Wednesday, December 31, 2008

TAKING LEAVE OF A MURDEROUS 2008: US FROM LEADER TO LOSER ISRAEL With elections in view and the need to prove themselves tough as tough can be, the Israeli government has decided to enact another stage in their ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Israel has become a nation that tries to emulate the Blut und Boden Nazi ideology, going against all international laws and UN resolutions. So now it may be time for the UN and NATO to invade Israel, bomb Tel Aviv like NATO did with Yugoslavia and destroy its nuclear facilities in Demona. After all, Israel is doing the same to the rightful owners of the Palestinian land. I even heard words from Israeli politicians that amount to their support for an Endloesung for the Palestinian problem. The recent attacks have nothing to do with retaliation, it is plain racism and fascism. Killing hundreds of Palestinians, among whom women and children, is mass murder. If the Israeli equal the death of one Israeli to the death of hundreds of Palestinians then there is no other conclusion than that the Israeli are fundamentally racist. Anyway, Israel is the secret supplier of rockets and arms to Hamas. How could Gaza ever import arms when Israel is completely surrounding, even blocking, Gaza? Israel needs an enemy to continue with its policy of land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing. So it's all a cynical murderous game to permit them to perpetrate their racist policies and give the international community a semblance of justification to attack the population. At least, instead of bombing Tel Aviv, it is high time to do something about Israel's militarism, even when Obama is too much of a coward to lambast Israel. Israel is guilty of war crimes. GlobalResearch: "The United Nations General Assembly must immediately establish an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) as a 'subsidiary organ' under U.N. Charter Article 22. The ICTI would be organized along the lines of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was established by the Security Council. The purpose of the ICTI would be to investigate and prosecute Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Peoples of Lebanon and Palestine - just as the ICTY did for the victims of international crimes committed by Serbia and the Milosevic Regime throughout the Balkans." AfterDowningStreet: "The Dignity, a Free Gaza boat on a mission of mercy to besieged Gaza, is being attacked by the Israeli Navy in international waters. The Dignity has been surrounded by at least half-a-dozen Israeli warships. They are firing live ammunition around the Dignity, and one of the warships has rammed the civilian craft causing an unknown amount of damage. Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus - despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so." YNet: "For his part, the Israeli traveler goes out of his way not to be identified as an Israeli, not due to security concerns but simply for fear he will not be welcome. And he makes great efforts not to go where other Israelis go, not for the sake of exclusiveness, but simply because he knows that his countrymen will be the first ones to screw him over. The Israeli pig is the product of years-long and ongoing cultural corruption. He will force the locals to watch episodes from the reality show 'the Big Brother' and give them Israeli nick-names just for laughs. His language is poor, and he is utterly uninterested in broadening his horizons. He is hostile towards Arabs and hostile towards foreigners in general and feels obligated to cheat them whenever he can (empty the open buffet; sneak six people into a double room at night so as not to come out 'a sucker'.) He takes over drug and women trafficking hubs just for the sense of power and bullying. And this image can no longer be altered. Look at them and see us: a violent horde that treats the world as yet another policing mission, a destination that needs to be conquered and subdued. No wonder that in Hebrew the verb 'to do' refers both to the act of sexual conquest and to the completion of the Israeli traveler's tough, military-style trip abroad: 'I did Bolivia.'" IRAQ BUSH IS A WAR CRIMINAL USWarCrimes: "Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush's pursuit of the 'war on terror' have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment. The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush's war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children's hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as 'collateral damage' during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world." LATimes: "They nicknamed themselves the Lethal Warriors, and during two tours in Iraq, the soldiers of the Army's 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry regiment confronted some of the war's cruelest fighting, hunting insurgents through the warrens of Baghdad and Tikrit amid roadside bombs, mortar fire and close-quarters firefights. By June 2007, in what one field commander called the 'heart of darkness', the unit was losing a soldier a day in a body bag or on a stretcher. Over two tours, 33 of them had died. On Nov. 30, 2007, Kenneth Eastridge, a wiry, heavily tattooed survivor of the fighting, found himself at a rough Colorado Springs bar called the Rum Bay, not far from the unit's Ft. Carson base. Eastridge, a high school dropout from the projects of Louisville, Ky., had joined the Army to escape what seemed the dead-end prospects of civilian life, only to run repeatedly afoul of Army rules and face a court-martial. So on that cold night just two days after his discharge, Eastridge was at loose ends again, in the company of two other war-coarsened vets from his unit, Louis Bressler and Bruce Bastien. Police say the trio plotted a robbery in the company of an Army private, leaving Bressler worried that the private would divulge their plot. Later that night, police say, Bressler shot the soldier to death with a .38-caliber revolver. Now Eastridge, 25, sits behind bars in a Colorado prison, having agreed to a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony. The Army was quick to downplay any link between what he and the other soldiers saw in Iraq and the allegations against them. 'Anybody that does crimes of that nature, it goes deeper and farther back than anything in the U.S. Army,' said Lt. Col. Brian Pearl, the 2-12's commanding officer. 'Nothing here has trained them to do what they are charged with.' Yet there is a larger story of those who fought with the 700-soldier unit: a string of alleged robberies, domestic violence and senseless murder. Six of the veterans are behind bars, implicated in four separate shooting incidents and five slayings since August 2007. The killings stretch from Colorado to an Orange County beach town, where a veteran of the company is accused of beating his girlfriend to death." RawStory: "Monday, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney made a startling statement on a nation-wide, televised broadcast. When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called 'high value prisoner' at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture." Only in America, folks, only in America do mass murderers and torturers go unpunished. CounterPunch: "On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure." AMERICA HAS LOST ANOTHER WAR. It has left Iraq devastated and has ruined its own economy. Next year Obama will concentrate on the war in Afghanistan and he will be defeated likewise. At least I hope so. America is cornered. The only way for them to continue is to cheat, to lie and waste; and that is a matter of a few years before total collapse. Reuters: "The U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan has ordered a merger of the office that releases news with 'Psy Ops', which deals with propaganda, a move that goes against the alliance's policy, three officials said. The move has worried Washington's European NATO allies - Germany has already threatened to pull out of media operations in Afghanistan - and the officials said it could undermine the credibility of information released to the public. Seven years into the war against the Taliban, insurgent influence is spreading closer to the capital and Afghans are becoming increasingly disenchanted at the presence of some 65,000 foreign troops and the government of President Hamid Karzai." MoscowTimes: "NATO ... is dying. Death, of course, comes to all living things. And, as NATO approaches its 60th birthday next spring, there seems no immediate urgency about writing its obituary; 60-year-olds may reasonably look forward to another decade - perhaps two or even three - of active and productive life. But perhaps it is now time for some discrete reflection on the fact that 'the old man' will not always be with us. Human institutions, like human beings, can collapse with surprising speed once they have outlived their usefulness. The dramatic dissolution of the Soviet Union stands as a reminder of what can happen to organizations when doubts take hold as to whether they still serve any real interests other than those of their own apparatchiks - and how suddenly such doubts can grow when they attempt to convert themselves into something they are not. NATO has, of course, shown remarkable tenacity. It should have disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact evaporated because its job was done. But then came the Balkan crises of the 1990s... And then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and this kept NATO in business, spreading its activities to Afghanistan. But NATO's repeated demonstrations of resilience should not blind us to the fact that it no longer provides a healthy basis for the transatlantic security relationship. As long as NATO's raison d'etre was to keep the Russians out and the United States in, NATO's internal dynamic of U.S. leadership and European obeisance was both inevitable and appropriate. But each now resents the behavior of the other. Americans find their patience tried by Europeans who are free with their advice and criticism, yet reluctant to shoulder risks. Moreover, the United States learned from the Kosovo experience of 'war by committee' to distrust NATO as a place to run operations, and now Afghanistan highlights the organization's limitations as a mechanism for generating force contributions. As for Europeans, they are unhappy about pressure to participate in a U.S.-led 'global war on terror' that they regard as dangerous and misconceived. They are also averse to policies seemingly designed to antagonize their more difficult neighbors like Russia and the Islamic world." I donot agree with the conclusions of this article. America is a dying giant and Europe has no business supporting this giant on clay feet when it has trouble enough remaining on its own feet. The foreign policies of the US were disastrous. It's time to start a new era of cooperation, peace and trade with Russia, China and Asia. The interests of the US are diametrically opposed to those of Europe and the rest of the world. The recent financial crisis has shown that the leadership of the US is not sustainable. WallStreetJournal: "For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument - that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. - very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media. Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces - with Alaska reverting to Russian control." Of course, there's an element of wishful thinking in the Russian academic's words. But why not? It could happen. Yugoslavia has been broken up with the help of German revanchists Kohl and Genscher who supported and armed the Croatian rebels. This can also happen in the US. Why wouldn't the rich Arab nations for once start arming the Southern states like Texas and incite them to a secession from the Feds? The South has always felt that they shouldn't pay taxes and tribute to progressive states like New York and California. Anyway, America is going down and other nations should start doing what the US has always done to them: direct the local policies abroad for their own interests. America no longer is the leader, but the loser. THE FINANCIAL CRISIS GlobalEurope: "The G20-meeting held in Washington on November 14/15, 2008, is in its essence a historical indicator that the Western - above all Anglo-Saxon - monopoly on global economic and financial governance, is coming to an end. Nevertheless, according to LEAP/E2020, this meeting also clearly demonstrated that this kind of summits is doomed to inefficiency because they concentrate on curing the symptoms (banks' and hedge funds' financial difficulties, derivative markets' explosion, financial and currency markets' dramatic volatility, ...) rather than the fundamental root of the current crisis, i.e. the collapse of the Bretton Woods system based on the US Dollar as sole pillar of the global monetary system. Without a complete overhaul of the system inherited from 1944 by summer 2009, the failing of the current system and that of the United States at the center, will lead the whole planet to an unprecedented economic, social, political and strategic instability, and more specifically to a breakdown of the global monetary system by summer 2009. In light of the technocratic jargon and calendar of the declaration released after this first G20-meeting (totally disconnected from the speed and scope of the unfolding crisis ), it is more than likely that the disaster will have to happen for the fundamental problems to be seriously addressed and for the beginning of a reply to be initiated. Four key-factors are now pushing the Bretton Woods II (2) system to collapse in the course of the year 2009: - Fast weakening of the central players: USA, UK - Three visions of the future of global governance will be dividing world[base ']s largest players (United-States, Eurozone, China, Japan, Russia, Brazil) by spring 2009 - Unbridled speeding-up of the last decade's (de-)stabilizing processes - Increasing number of more and more violent backlashes." Capitalism is resorting to the Calvin solution. And you will have to pay for it, that's how they see it. AlterNet: "President George W. Bush, fabulist-in-chief, articulated the rationale for the program in that trademark way of his - as if addressing a nation of slow-witted 12-year-olds - on Sept. 24: 'Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse ... [and] began holding onto their money, and lending dried up, and the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt.' Bush said that if Congress didn't give Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson the trillion dollars (give or take) for which he was asking, the results would be disastrous: 'Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.' For the most part, the press has continued to echo Bush's central assertion that there's a 'credit crunch' preventing even qualified borrowers - that's the key point - from getting loans, and it's now part of the conventional wisdom. But a number of economists are questionioning the factual basis of the credit crunch narrative. Columnist David Sirota recently looked at those claims and concluded that Americans 'had been punk'd' - that 'the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false', and the threat of a systemic banking crash was used by the Bush administration to overcome popular resistance to the 'bailout'. Of course, no one disputes the fact that as the economy has tanked, the number of new loans being issued to American families and businesses has plummeted. But is this because credit has dried up for qualified borrowers? Economist Dean Baker doesn't think so. He explains the situation in simple terms: The media, he argues, 'are blaming the economic collapse on a 'credit crunch' instead of the more obvious problem that consumers just lost $6 trillion of housing wealth and another $8 trillion of stock wealth.' It's a commonsense argument: much of the economic growth of the Bush era existed on paper only, built on the rise of a massive bubble in real estate values rather than growth in productive industries. When all that ephemeral wealth vaporized - and with the economy shedding jobs like a dog with dermatitis - consumers stopped buying, and businesses, anticipating a long slowdown, stopped seeking the loans that they might have otherwise tapped to expand their operations." The buying power of the citizen is the crucial drive of the economy. When people don't or can't buy, the economy suffers. And when people are laid off everything spirals down. It all boils down to the level of wealth and welfare of the citizens. If that suffers, the economy suffers. If someone should be 'bailed out', it is the people. BailOutThePeopleMovement: "Given the remarkable scope of the government's intervention into the financial sector of the economy to shore up the banks, it is shockingly criminal that the government hasn't declared a moratorium on the evictions and home foreclosures that throw thousands of families onto the streets everyday. It is no less shocking that the government has done nothing to stop the waves of cruel budget cuts that are forcing students to quit school, raising public transportation fares, making healthcare even more inaccessible for millions, and pushing more workers onto the unemployment line." 12:55:27 PM

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