Emilio Dabed

Old Strategies Against New Enemies: Chile 1970-1973 and Palestine 2006-2009

“You said we’d never defeat them: On the contrary, we needed to help them defeat themselves. No one is defeated from the outside; every defeat is internal…they have fallen into the whirlpool of defeat, and it’s up to us to keep them going in this direction.” -Elias Khoury, Bab al-Shams

The explanations given by Israel to justify the onslaught on Gaza in last December were confused. The goals advanced by military and political Israeli apparatus varied, depending either on the person speaking or on the moment in which they were stated: from overthrowing the Hamas-led government and annihilating the movement, to putting an end to the launching of Hamas rockets from the Strip, to destroying Hamas’s military capabilities, to stopping the smuggling into Gaza, and so on. However, none of these stated objectives were met. The Hamas government remains in Gaza.

Indeed, immediately after the cease fire was declared, the TV screens showed the Gaza police putting the streets in order while the armed resistance groups were firing rockets into Israel again. The message was clear: Hamas government holds power in Gaza, its capability to fire on Israel was far from being destroyed and the underground economy of Gaza continued to grow, becoming more and more sophisticated. But despite these facts, the Israeli establishment triumphantly declared that its war objectives were reached. [1] How do we reconcile these statements with the reality? Should we interpret it as a sort of “cognitive dissociation”, a tendency to hold as “reality” what is constantly belied by the facts? Indeed this is a resilient historical trend in Israeli policy.

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Aletho News

By now we know that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has been built on a mixture of hype and massaged data. Various carbon tax schemes have been put forward, even unprecedented proposals for a world wide taxation authority to be overseen by the UN. Does it follow that the primary agenda behind the fraud was the implementing these new taxes, or, were these proposed tax schemes secondary and part of a proclivity on the part of the state to seize any opportunity to enhance revenue?

In the three decades since AGW was made into a political tool by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party, tax laws have been "reformed" many times in Britain, as well as other Western nations dominated by the AGW meme. Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party were known for their opposition to social leveling through taxation. Reduction of public services, combined with hectoring the disadvantaged about self reliance, were hallmarks of British politics through the 1980's and beyond. In Europe and North America, today's overall level of taxation is not higher than that prevalent in 1979.

In Britain and the US, governments have been able to utilize the issuance of sovereign debt to increase military budgets while at the same time reducing capital gains and corporate tax rates creating an era of "borrow and spend" growth for the state sector. In the US, the higher income tax brackets have come down while middle class employees have seen increased social security deductions from their paychecks. These revenues were then "borrowed" by the general fund and in fact replaced the revenues lost due to the reduction of corporate taxes.

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Arthur Silber

To all those who repeatedly claimed that, no matter what "mistakes" he might make and regardless of the scope of the devastating effects of those errors, Obama had to represent a markedly better choice than McCain, take note: in certain respects, Obama is far more dangerous than McCain could have been. For the same reasons, Obama is also more dangerous than Bush was. I remind you that I have written numerous essays damning Bush for almost every single one of his policies. It is hardly the case that I viewed Bush in anything approaching a positive light, however remotely.

In large part, the danger represented by Obama arises from the fact that Obama's election gutted whatever effective opposition might have existed. To their eternal shame, the Democrats never opposed Bush in any way that mattered -- but at least the possibility of opposition had not been obliterated entirely. In the near term and probably for longer, that possibility now appears to have been extinguished. I've been writing about this aspect of Obama and what he embodies for some time; see, as one example, "The Fatal Illusion of Opposition." As I noted in a later article:

I confess that I am very fearful for the future of this country, even more fearful than I have been in the Bush years. And that, I also confess, is a development I would never have predicted. But there had been the possibility of opposition over the past seven years, although it finally became clear that all such opposition was a deadly illusion, and that the nominal opposition was in certain respects even guiltier than the Bush criminals.

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Ray Krone

Ray Krone. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter

In 1992 Ray Krone, a former sergeant in the US Air Force, was sentenced to death row for the murder of Kimberly Ancona, a bar manager found stabbed to death in a restaurant near his home in Arizona. Ten years later, after running newly developed DNA tests on the victim's clothes, he was found innocent and freed. Krone was the 100th prisoner in the US to be exonerated from death row. Now a campaigner against the death penalty, he describes the long fight to clear his name.

Being arrested was quite a surprise. On the day they found the body, they brought me in to the police station and questioned me for three hours. I told them everything I knew and thought that would be the end of it.

The next day they brought me to the police station to take blood and hair samples, as well as dental casts of my teeth, and they questioned me for yet another three hours. But again, I told them the truth. I knew I had nothing to hide. The next day was New Years Eve, December 31, 1991; I’d just got home and was in my driveway, getting out of my car, when all of a sudden a van screeched up behind me, the doors flew open and people were shouting “Freeze! Don’t move!” Armed officers in full riot gear spilled out of the van and arrested me right there.

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Sarah Standish

Innovative practices in Indian health care are make surgeries more affordable. [World Bank]

The numbers alone say a lot: A heart surgery that costs between $20,000 and $40,000 in the United States can cost only $2,000 in India.

The medical tourism industry has always taken advantage of lower health care costs in India and other developing countries. Some, however, are thinking beyond that. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Dr. Devi Shetty, an Indian physician who has radically rethought the way heart surgery is managed and priced to make it more affordable than ever before.

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Stephen Lendman

Ahead of his address to the nation on December 1, The New York Times broke the news in an Eric Schmitt article titled, "Obama Issues Order for More Troops in Afghanistan," saying:

During a late November 29 Oval Office meeting with top Pentagon brass, "Obama issued orders to send about 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan (over the next six months in) what may be one of the most defining decisions of his presidency." Compounding months of public betrayal, it's perhaps another outrage that will make him a one-term president, the way Vietnam ended Lyndon Johnson's hope for a second term.

An additional 30,000+ will raise US forces to about 100,000 plus whatever additional numbers NATO countries provide that at best will be small and come grudgingly for a war no one believes can be won, and some feel never should have been waged.

To these numbers, add a shadow footprint consisting of tens of thousands of private contractors - 73,968 according to a September 21, 2009 Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report as of June 2009. Included are familiar names like Kellogg, Brown and Root, Fluor Corp, Lockheed Martin and hired guns like DynCorp and Xe (formerly Blackwater USA) costing tens of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan for lack of oversight so scandalous that rampant waste, fraud, and abuse go unmonitored and will worsen with more troops.

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Justin Raimondo

After 92 days of waiting for the Word from on high, the nation received its marching orders from our commander-in-chief – and it was a flop of major proportions. As his West Point audience looked on disdainfully – applauding only twice, and then tepidly – President Obama tried to make the case that his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is really just a prelude to withdrawal. But is it?

"It is important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. … As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda … Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban – a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere."

Those who were hoping for some real change in our rhetoric, if not our foreign policy, with Obama in the White House are no doubt sorely disappointed right now, because George W. Bush could just as easily have spoken these very same words – and, indeed, he did utter endless variations on this identical theme when justifying our actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the truth of the matter is that there are barely one-hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan – so what are we doing there?

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Susan Swift

Anthropogenic, or manmade, global warming is not open to debate. High Priest Al Gore said so. And how do we know this?

The climatology scriptures (peer review journals) proved it. If warming skeptics had legitimate claims, so the argument goes, then naturally their arguments and supporting data would appear in such journals – a persuasive argument, ably assisted by the fact that global warming zealots controlled those journals.

Problem is, at least one such peer review journal broke ranks *gasp* and, in Galilean fashion, began publishing articles questioning “The True Faith” of climatology. Heresy!

How does the Church of Global Warming deal with heresy? Well, burning at the stake would impose too large of a carbon footprint, so instead they resort to the age-old traditional method of shunning.

Enter “Climate gate,” the recent disclosure of certain East Anglia emails (East Anglia is, in short, the Vatican of global warming theology, or, research), and some of the disclosed emails provide insight into the secretive workings of the Brotherhood of Climatologists.

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Stephen M. Walt

And no, I'm not suggesting a return to isolationism, a retreat to "Fortress America" or any of the other labels that hawks use to try to discredit those who want a more restrained foreign policy. [...] Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed with suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned.

I was struck by Louis Uchitelle's article in the Sunday NY Times on the dearth of big public works projects here in the United States. "For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way," he says, and then reports that:

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Maidhc Ó Cathail

“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.” --The New Scofield Study Bible

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign should widen its scope to target non-Israeli companies who contribute significantly to the oppression of Palestinians. As part of this broader strategy, priority should be given to one of the most egregious offenders, the prestigious British publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP). As unlikely as it may seem, the world’s largest university press is responsible for one of the greatest obstacles to justice for Palestinians.

Since it was first published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans. When John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, said that “50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with 5 million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel,” it was the Scofield Bible that he was talking about.

Although the Scofield Reference Bible contains the text of the King James Authorized Version, it is not the traditional Protestant bible but Cyrus I. Scofield’s annotated commentary that is the problem. More than any other factor, it is Scofield’s notes that induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel.

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Chris Floyd / Laila Lalami

Professor As'ad AbuKhalil, aka The Angry Arab, reports on the remarkably under-reported major story in Switzerland this week: the popular vote to ban minarets in the country. In a piece entitled, "Religious Bigotry in the New York Times" (referring to this story), he writes:

What happened in Switzerland is quite significant. Of course, only an ignorant would associate Switzerland with equality and tolerance: just remember -- as I always remind my students -- that women were only granted the right to vote in 1971. Enough said. But what is quite outrageous is the extent to which US (and Western) media are not treating this as the international outrage that it is. Just ask yourselves: how would the Western media have reacted if the ban affected synagogues and not mosques? Would you not have seen stories against it on the front pages of ALL US newspapers? If this ban affected synagogues, for example, the US government would have convened a special session of the US Security Council and the special UN commission on Human Rights. Worse, look at the way in which media will now begin justification of the ban, and notice how the Western media link religious intolerance with references to fanatical groups and to Bin Laden. What is the link? I don't get it, I guess. And here is the New York Times' first sentence in covering the story: "In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam..." Can you imagine the New York Times ever justifying, or even explaining away, a ban affecting Judaism with a sentence like: "In a vote that displayed widespread anxiety about Judaism..." And is anxiety about a religion not an exact case of religious intolerance? I mean, Nazis displayed widespread anxiety about Judaism and that is why we condemn them as the anti-Semitic bigots that they were.

Juan Cole has more on the vote and its significance in "Bigotry wins in Switzerland," at Salon.com.

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Eric S. Margolis

America would not have won independence from Great Britain without generous military and financial support from France and its monarch, Louis XVI.
But France spent itself into bankruptcy supporting the American colonists. France’s financial ruin was a major cause of the ensuing French Revolution that cost the unfortunate Louis his head.

Wars are hugely expensive. Money plays as great a role in them as soldiers and weapons.

US Congressman David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has come up with a novel idea: American should pay for the wars they are currently waging. Obey’s proposal, which is backed by other congressmen of both parties, sounds startling – until one realizes that both the Bush and Obama administrations have never properly financed their foreign wars by forcing Americans to pay for them through higher taxes.

Instead, Washington has deferred the $1 trillion to date costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by simply adding them to the national debt, and paying interest on the balance owing. President Lyndon conducted similar financial slight of hand with the Vietnam War, inflicting serious injury and instability on the US economy.

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FOS

Our goal is to educate the public about climate science and through them bring pressure to bear on governments to engage in public debates on the scientific merits of the hypothesis of human induced global warming and the various policies that intend to address the issue.

While FoS does not do any original scientific research, it draws on the worldwide body of work by scientists in all fields relating to global climate change.

It is our opinion that the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change.

Variations in solar activity and cosmic rays correlate to temperature much better than CO2. This may be because an electro-magnetically active sun diverts cosmic rays from hitting the atmosphere. Cosmic rays have been shown experimentally to assist in cloud formation. Fewer cosmic rays result in reduced low cloud cover, which allows more sunlight to warm the Earth’s surface.

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Rick Wilson

In recent years, a growing body of scientific research indicates that human health and longevity aren't just matters of genes and habits. Rather, they seem to have a lot to do with our relative status or position in society.

The wonky term for this kind of thing is "the social determinants of health," which was recently the topic of a presentation to the West Virginia Legislature by epidemiologist and physician Dr. Camara Jones of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. While the focus of Dr. Jones' presentation was on racial disparities, she said that inequalities and inequities affect the health of all people, regardless of racial or ethnic backgrounds.

A pioneer in this field of research is the British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, who among other things studied English civil servants over a period of decades. Here's the short version of his findings: people higher up the ladder lived longer and were less sick than those lower down, even when we take individual behavior into account. This was true despite the fact that England has universal health care. Without it, the differences would no doubt have been even worse.

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Shattered Paradigm

[This Big Brother Bus Stop ad in Australia uses blue tooth technology to send cell phone users within range of the bus stop text messages. The first message reads “I’m watching u. Ur at the bus stop on St George’s tce, out in front of Boost Juice.” The second message (sent 30-40 seconds later) reads “Big Brother is back. 7pm weeknights on TEN.” Nothing attracts viewers like making them feel like they’re being stalked..? Creepy Big Brother Ad]

When George Orwell wrote 1984, he probably never imagined that society would actually become that oppressive. Yet in some nations of the world it has. In fact, in nations such as the U.K., "Big Brother" controls have now been implemented that are so bizarre that Orwell could not have possibly envisioned them during the time in which he lived. The truth is that the U.K. has become a society run by elitist control freaks. The most intimate and personal details of the lives of millions of people in the U.K. are tightly monitored and controlled by a ruthless technocracy that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The following are 20 signs that the U.K. has now become the most oppressive Big Brother society on earth...

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