Stephen Lendman

Photo above of Rep. Chaka Fattah, right, watching a woman in
his district receive discounted heating oil from Joseph P. Ken-
nedy II, chairman and president of Citizens Energy Corporation,
as part of the CITGO-Venezuela heating oil program. (AP photo
by Matt Rourke)

On February 23, HR 4646: Debt Free America Act was introduced "To establish a fee on transactions which would eliminate the national debt and replace the income tax on individuals."

Sponsor Representative Chaka Fattah's (D. PA) same day press release said:

The bill offers a "simple new approach to paying off the debt now escalating past" $13.6 trillion as of late October. "The breakthrough legislation proposes a 1 percent fee (on) all payment instruments including cash transactions, checks, credit cards, those processed through the Federal Reserve Bank, and those collected at the point of sale."

"In addition, taxpayers would receive a 1 percent tax credit for gross income up to $250,000 to offset the impact of the fee," supposedly helping middle and lower-earning households. The bill will also establish a Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action "to control and limit federal spending." Once the debt "is paid down...broad-based tax reform" would follow.

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Ian Cobain

Exclusive: Methods devised in secret in recent years may breach international law

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. "Get them naked," it says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands." Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that "Cpers" – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are "valid operational reasons". It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

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Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report

What a guy! Barack Obama has neutralized Blacks, the white left, and the majority of his own party in service to Wall Street, and some still call him “liberal” (The insane call him “socialist.”) With Social Security and Medicare in his sights, “the stage is set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.”

“Obama invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished ‘entitlement’ programs.”

One thing is certain: the corporations will win and civilization will lose on November 2nd. The outcome is foreordained, since the dwindling electoral forces of civilization don’t have enough candidates in contention even to fill an effective caucus.

With 83 nominal members, the Progressive Congressional Caucus is, on paper, the largest of the House ideological groupings, but has been neutered since Barack Obama entered the White House. The Congressional Black Caucus has not been a coherent force for progressive change for most of this century, and now behaves as if lobotomized by the presence of a Black chief executive. Having allowed themselves to be whipped, kicked and scorned by a White House concerned only for the president’s most narrow interests and schemes, “left” Democrats are at their nadir of legislative influence, despite their chairmanships.

Whether the GOP actually wins one or both chambers of Congress or not, the people’s interests are in deep trouble. The most immediate threat looms, not from the Tea Party, which will no doubt have its own little caucus in the next Congress, but from Barack Obama and his President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. When the right-heavy commission makes its recommendations in early December, the stage will be set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master. Barack Obama will triangulate himself.

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Stephen Lendman

It's the American way. More for the rich. Crumbs for the rest, and fraud as a way of life since the republic's beginning, though hardly on today's scale. Perhaps the first prominent example was in 1792, involving former Assistant Treasury Secretary William Duer. Appointed by Alexander Hamilton in 1789, he left a year later to profit from insider trading, or so he hoped.

At the time, US bonds were junk paper. The market for them was volatile, so profiting meant being savvy enough or tipped off in advance to buy or sell ahead of news. As a former Treasury official, Duer had insider information. Using leverage, it paid handsomely for a while until too much money caused a speculative glut, an earlier type bubble that took down much of the New York Stock Exchange when it burst, Duer with it.

Way over his head in debt, he, nonetheless, hung on, expecting to beat the market but failed. Instead of getting richer, he went bankrupt, ended up in debtors prison, and Alexander Hamilton had to buy worthless bonds as the lender of last resort. Sound familiar?

In 1795, Georgia sold 35 million acres of western land to four companies for half a million dollars, less than two cents an acre in one of America's most corrupt ever deals. By taking bribes for their votes, every member of the legislature, except one, profited, but not for long. Voters caught on, tossing them out next election. The fraudulent contract was annulled. In 1802, the federal government bought the land for $1,250,000, but it didn't end there. The Supreme Court got involved, ruling the original deal, though flawed, was legal, forcing Congress to award the claimants over $4 million.

Corruption and fraud flourished during the Civil War in the form of tainted beef and pork, shoddy blankets and uniforms, knapsacks coming unglued in the rain, guns that blew off soldiers' fingers when firing them, and much more, war profiteers benefitting handsomely.

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Kourosh Ziabari

Jeffrey Blankfort is an American photojournalist, radio producer and Middle East analyst. He is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist whose articles and writings have appeared on Counter Punch, Voltairenet, Palestine Think Tank, Dissident Voice and many other publications.

He currently hosts radio programs on KZYX in Mendocino, CA and KPOO in San Francisco. Blankfort was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. In February 2002, he won a lawsuit against the Zionist organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which was found to have been spying on the American citizens critical of Israel and its expansionistic policies.

Jeffrey joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the influence of Israeli lobby on the decision-makers of the U.S. government, Israel’s illegal, underground nuclear program, the prospect of Israeli – Palestinian conflict and the imminent threat of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Blankfort is quite outspoken in his criticism of the apartheid regime of Israel and believes that Israel is the most immediate threat to the future of our planet.

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Andy Worthington

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The article is cross-posted below (and I’ve added some additional links).

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Barry Grey
WSWS

The response of the New York Times to WikiLeaks’ posting of classified American military documents exposing US war crimes in Iraq is to downplay the atrocities and portray WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as the criminal party.

The newspaper of record of the American liberal establishment is not outraged by further proof of murder and torture on a mass scale, implicating the highest officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations, but instead reserves its fury for those courageous individuals who have dared to breach the government-media wall of silence and give the public access to some portion of the horrific truth about the US war in Iraq.

The Times assigned the job of character assassination to an old hand at penning cover-ups and apologetics for US imperialist operations, John F. Burns. The British-born journalist has headed Times bureaus in such strategic capitals as Moscow and Beijing. As head of the Times’ Baghdad bureau in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq, Burns played a major role in the newspaper’s promotion of US government lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Burns has been London bureau chief since mid-2007. On Sunday, the Times published a front-page piece over the joint byline of John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya and bearing the disparaging headline: “WikiLeaks Chief on Run, Trailed by His Notoriety.” The article purports to be based on an interview with Assange conducted in London on October 17. By that time, the Times had had access for close to two weeks to the nearly 400,000 military logs released to the public on Friday by WikiLeaks.

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Joe Bageant

A popular spot for the elite, especially for a lot of politicians, Martha's
Vineyard is a getaway location, serving the purpose to relax in style.
It has been a hot spot, as well as a home, for the elite for centuries.

Honk if you love caviar

How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.

Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.

Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite's behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation's most privileged and ambitious young moths.

They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires -- probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi's net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.

Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.

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Emily Dugan, Nina Lakhani, David Randall, Victoria Richards & Rachel Shields
The Independent

"The largest leak in history reveals the true extent of the bloodshed unleashed by the decision to go to war in Iraq – and adds at least 15,000 to its death toll."

So now we begin to know the full extent of what Tony Blair called the blood price. A detainee tortured with live electrical wires here, children shot by US troops at a checkpoint there, insurgents using children to carry out suicide bombings somewhere else; on and on, through 391,832 documents. At the Pentagon, these messages were the day-to-day commonplaces of staff inboxes; for Iraqis, they detail, in the emotionless jargon of the US military, nothing less than the hacking open of a nation's veins.

Today, seven and a half years on from the order to invade, the largest leak in history has shown, far more than has been hitherto known, just what was unleashed by that declaration of war. The Iraqi security services tortured hundreds, and the US military watched, noted and emailed, but rarely intervened. A US helicopter gunship crew were ordered to shoot insurgents trying to surrender. A doctor sold al-Qa'ida a list of female patients with learning difficulties so they could be duped into being suicide bombers. A private US company, which made millions of dollars from the outsourcing of security duties, killed civilians. And the Americans, who have always claimed never to count civilian deaths, were in fact secretly logging them. At a conservative estimate, the new documents add at least 15,000 to the war's death toll.

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Henry Makow
Henry Makow's Blog

Mr. Walter Rothschild riding on one of his tortoises...

Jeff Rense's website and radio program represent an oasis of truth for countless people around the world who can still think for themselves. That's why it was both puzzling and painful to witness a vituperative attack on Jeff by his erstwhile friend and ally Mark Glenn. Both these men are courageous and outspoken opponents of Zionist World Government. What triggered Glenn's attack?

Among the thousands of articles Jeff has posted since last summer were two which Mark felt were anti Islam. Mark felt they played into the hands of Zionists who are trying to pit Christians against Muslims and asked Jeff to remove them. Jeff refused. He will not permit anyone to censor his news content or tell him how to run his site. Mark retaliated by launching a vitriolic attack on Jeff.

Ironically, both imitated the hated Zionists by playing the "hate card." Mark accused Jeff of inciting hatred against Muslims. Jeff accused Mark of inciting Muslim terror against him personally. Jeff threatened to call the FBI and Homeland Security on Mark. Mark said Jeff was threatening Mark's wife and nine children.

When I suggested to Jeff that Homeland Security is the antithesis of everything he represents, he agreed. He was just trying to get Mark to understand how seriously he took Mark's readers' vitriol.

Jeff argued that these two articles were exceptions among thousands that are pro-Muslim or expose the Zionist NWO threat.

One was a ridiculous Zionist propaganda piece that he had meant to label as such. He expected his readers to recognize it.

Mark Glenn certainly didn't nor did he accept Jeff's explanation. It was called "Demoting Islam's Religious Status," by Martel Sobiesky and argued that Islam isn't a religion.

The other article by Devvy Kidd had the inflammatory title, "Islam a Cancer Oozing Across America" and described the excesses of radical Islam. Jeff felt Devvy was a respected contributor and had a right to examine these excesses. Jeff points to his Disclaimer at the bottom of every article. Posting does not necessarily mean his endorsement.

Mark basically felt that Jeff should present a consistent party line. Jeff felt that good journalism means presenting a range of views. He consistently posted links to Mark's own articles. By Mark's own estimation, Jeff was responsible for 10-15,000 readers each time. In any case, we had two people who should have been cooperating, draining each others' batteries.

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Stephen Lendman

Besides mass slaughter and destruction, wars create refugees, millions at times, uprooted, displaced and homeless, on their own somehow to survive. Israel's "War of Independence" was no different, dispossessing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, a story Western media reports don't explain or even mention.

In his book, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story," Ramzy Baroud recounted his father Mohammed's story. Born in 1938 in Beit Daras village, he saw it conquered, leveled and erased, except from the memory he took to his grave. A captive in his own land, he lived years as a Gaza Nuseirat camp refugee, raising his family including son Ramzy, dreaming always of going home, struggling as a freedom fighter to end decades of conflict, violence, occupation, and oppression, what Edward Said called "a slow death," shattered hopes, and inexorable toll of its incalculable horror to so many.

Spanning over seven decades of history and survivor recollections, it tells a powerful firsthand story of those who lived it, not the airbrushed Western version of the new Israeli state, born in blood, mass slaughter, destruction, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of survivors, to this day oppressed, harassed, intimidated, humiliated, attacked and arrested for being Muslims, not Jews on their own land, in their own country, illegally occupied for decades.

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Flora Nicoletta
uruknet.info

Emad Marzuq, 2006 - Photo by Caritas-Gaza

"One night Emad was walking in the neighborhood of Shejayia in Gaza City. While he was speaking on his cell phone a missile was fired at him. His brothers explained me that inside such kind of missile there are some sort of turning knives which cut everything."

"In our Qur'an it is written that everyone of us has two angels on his shoulders. On the right, angel Atid registers all our good actions. On the left, angel Raqib registers all our sins and bad actions. On Judgment Day, angel Esrafil will ask us to stand up in front of God and the books will be read.

We the Palestinian people keep a book like the two angels for all the countries and all the men. We will never close the books till the day will come for their Judgment. They will have to respond to all the crimes and atrocities committed against our nation, since more than a century." ~ Mohammad, Gaza.

When, in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the then Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan declared it would be an enlighted occupation. And, indeed, since 33 years now the occupied experience day in, day out the enlighted occupation.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Many, many years ago, I noted in the Moscow Times that shortly after the 2003 invasion, the United States had begun hiring some of Saddam's old torturers as the invaders sought to quell the then-nascent "insurgency" -- i.e., the opposition to foreign occupation that when carried out by white men, such as the French during World War II, goes by the more ringing name of "resistance." Here's part of that report, from August 29, 2003:

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" – aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

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Stephen Lendman

An earlier article, titled "UN Peacekeeping Paramilitarism" explained that although Blue Helmets are supposed to restore order, maintain peace and security, and help people transition to stability, they usually create more conflict than resolution as imperial enforcers, committing human rights abuses against vulnerable people, nearly always unpunished.

The article can be accessed through THIS link.

Wherever they're deployed, it's the same. In Haiti, for example, where for the first time ever, an illegal MINUSTAH mission enforced coup d'état authority against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, instead of staying out or backing his right to return.

It's no better elsewhere. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, where MONUC (renamed MONUSCO in July 2010) never brought peace and stability, and may be involved in reports of mass rapes and other atrocities. It wouldn't be the first time there or elsewhere.

In December 2004, the London Times reported the following about DR Congo:

● UN staffers committed 150 or more sex crimes, including pornographic videos and photos, "now on sale in Congo;"
● two Russian pilots enlisted girls for sex in exchange for jars of mayonnaise;
● UN peacekeepers in Kisangani, on the Congo River, impregnated 141 Congolese women and girls; others were accused of rape;
● Congo's Minister of Defense, Major General Jean Pierre Ondekane, told a top UN official that all peacekeepers in Kisangani would be remembered "for running after little girls," not doing their job;
● at least two UN officials, a Ukrainian and Canadian, were forced out of DR Congo for impregnating local women;
● many other abuses involved sexual abuse and exploitation, involving sex trafficking and rape; and
● then UN Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told the Times: "The fact that these things happen is a blot on us. It's awful. What is important is to get to the bottom of it and fight it and make sure that people who do that pay for what they have done."

Unfortunately sexual abuse, rape, and sex trafficking are more commonplace than occasional, wherever Blue Helmets are deployed.

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Sampath Perera
WSWS

"With much fanfare, the Obama administration has pledged several hundreds of millions of dollars in flood aid to Pakistan."

Seven of the 21 million Pakistanis affected by this summer’s floods are still without shelter, the United Nation’s Pakistan Office reported this week. And an estimated 14 million continue to need urgent humanitarian assistance.

These figures are an indictment of the Pakistan ruling elite’s incompetently organized and poorly funded flood relief effort.

They also are an indictment of the imperialist powers. Under conditions where Pakistan has faced what the UN has repeatedly described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in decades, the agency has repeatedly had to plead for the “international community” to come to assist Pakistan.

The western-dominated IMF and World Bank have tied flood aid to their demand for Pakistan to implement market reforms. Washington, meanwhile, has intensified its pressure on Pakistan to expand its counter-insurgency war against Taliban-aligned groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistan’s floods began with heavy rains in the country’s north-east in late July and continued as the water travelled the length of the Indus Valley over the next two months. More people were displaced in Sindh, the country’s southern-most province, than anywhere else, although authorities had weeks of warning about the impending floods. The vast majority of those now lacking shelter are from Sindh.

According to the Government of Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority the floods killed 1,961 people. But these figures could still rise sharply due to the spread of disease in relief camps, inadequate food aid, and the disruption of the country’s food supply.

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Stephen Lendman

Wallerstein is a Yale University Senior Research Scholar, former President of the International Sociological Associatiion (1994 - 1998), and chair of the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the the Social Sciences (1993 - 1995). His writing focuses on three domains of world systems analysis, the historical development of the modern world system, the structures of knowledge, and the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world economy.

His many books include "The Capitalist World Economy," "After Liberalism," "The End of the World As We Know It," and "The Decline of American Power," in which he wrote:

"America has been a fading global power since the 1970s, and the US response to the (9/11) terrorist attacks has accelerated this decline....the economic, political and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming US decline."

Chalmers Johnson shares that view, notably in his books, "Sorrows of Empire" and "Nemesis," saying America is plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy," combined with growing authoritarianism and loss of personal freedom.

Hence, the title "Nemesis," the goddess of vengeance and punisher of hubris and arrogance in Greek mythology. She's here among us, says Johnson, unseen and patiently stalking our way of life, awaiting her chosen moment to make her presence known. Johnson compares her to Wagner's Brunnhilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen, saying unlike Nemesis, she collects heroes, not fools and hypocrites.

They both, however, announce themselves the same way, saying "Only the doomed see me," even though Nemesis' presence will have a profound real world effect.

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Marc J. Sirois
lobelog

"Here, then, is the real reason why America and Israel fret over the likes of Ahmadinejad: their policy has always been to divide and control (Arab vs. Persian, Sunni vs. Shia, oil producer vs. consumer, monarchist vs. republican, etc.) and anyone who even speaks about uniting these elements – regardless of how unsuccessful he is likely to be – threatens to expose the glaring weakness at the heart of their position."

The run-up to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon called forth a barrage of comment from neoconservative circles. Unlike the savvy campaign for war in Iraq, however, they now tend to make straightforward claims that are self-evidently at odds with reality. In other words, they’re not even telling very good lies any more.

A case in point was Iraq War propagandist Judith Miller’s Fox News article, whose central complaint seems to be that Ahmadinejad’s trip came at the behest of a single party, the Shia party/militia Hezbollah, rather than in response to an official invitation from the Lebanese government; “Who Invited You?” her headline indignantly blared.

Two problems undermined this approach. The first was that then-Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh quite publicly relayed just such an invitation to Ahmadinejad from his Lebanese counterpart, Michel Sleiman, in July 2008. The other was that Sleiman travelled to the Islamic Republic in November of that same year, making a reciprocal visit by Ahmadinejad what should have been a foregone conclusion.

That likelihood was placed in considerable doubt by the U.S. government’s having presumed the right to draw up Lebanon’s diplomatic schedule. While Miller rightly reported that Washington viewed the visit as “provocative,” she neglected to mention that heavy American pressure was applied on Beirut to cancel the visit. The U.S. demand was made in the name of Lebanese sovereignty (yes, really), which is rather ironic coming from a country that has supplied the tools for Israel’s occupation and violation of Lebanese territory, airspace and maritime boundaries for decades.

Undaunted by the untruths at the core of her position, Miller proceeds to expand on it.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." ~ Gore Vidal [*]

President Barack Obama began his longest campaign swing of the 2010 elections Wednesday, a four-day tour of the West Coast and Nevada to urge a vote for beleaguered Democratic Party candidates. At each stop, he warned that the outcome of the November 2 congressional election would set the direction of the country “for the next 20 years,” making dire predictions of the right-wing policies that a Republican-controlled Congress would carry out.

While his pseudo-populist rhetoric against Wall Street won applause at large rallies in Oregon and Washington, packed with college students, there is little practical difference between the policies the Obama administration is already implementing and the measures the Republicans would carry out if they return to power.

Obama suggested that the Republicans would “cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires,” “cut rules for special interests, including polluters” and “cut middle-class families loose to fend for themselves.” These charges would be a fair summary of the domestic policies of his own administration.

Continuing the bailout of Wall Street that was begun under Bush, the Obama administration has carried the largest handout of public funds to the wealthy in American history. This was followed up by the enactment last summer of a financial system “reform” bill so toothless that it punishes no one for the greatest outbreak of swindling in history.

The White House assiduously protected oil giant BP from the repercussions of the greatest environmental disaster in US history and last week lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

As for leaving ordinary families “to fend for themselves,” the Obama administration has imposed the burden of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression on working class families, rejecting any serious action as mass unemployment, mass poverty and mass foreclosures have become permanent features of American life.

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Sam Pizzigati
AlterNet

"1,000 billionaires worldwide, but average income is $10,000."

Who owns, right now, the wealth of the world? Until just over a week ago, we really didn’t have much in the way of specifics for an answer.

The United Nations University in Helsinki, in 2006, did try to tally household assets for the entire world. But that UN University World Institute for Development Economics Research report didn’t cover data from any year beyond 2000.

Now two of the scholars behind that 2006 report, Anthony Shorrocks and Jim Davies, have joined with the Credit Suisse Research Institute in Zurich to produce an even more ambitious global wealth tally, current all the way into 2010.

This new body of research, the first Global Wealth Report the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse has published, crunches the data for over 200 countries worldwide. The data cover the wealth holdings of the world’s rich -- and everybody else.

That makes this effort something of a statistical landmark. Other global banks have, over recent years, tried to total the wealth of the world’s wealthy. The new Credit Suisse research has targeted “the entire wealth spectrum,” from the super rich “at the top of the wealth pyramid to individuals at the bottom.”

So what does all this targeting have to tell us? Those inclined to see the sunny side will certainly try to give the new Credit Suisse numbers a positive gloss. The Credit Suisse figures show that total global net worth, despite the 2008 global economic meltdown, has rocketed up 72 percent since 2000.

The world’s 4.4 billion adults, notes the new Credit Suisse research, now hold $194.5 trillion in wealth. That’s enough, if shared evenly across the globe, to guarantee every adult in the world a $43,800 net worth.

But the world’s wealth, of course, does not stand evenly divided, and the new Credit Suisse study, to its credit, neatly breaks down the arithmetic of our staggering global unevenness.

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Lawrence Davidson
Redress

Lawrence Davidson unpicks the subtext behind the current emphasis by Zionists on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which he says is aimed primarily “at undermining the growing boycott movement that seeks to isolate Israel and call into serious question the legitimacy of a state designed exclusively for one ethnic or religious group”.

“...it is the practice of Zionism, and not lack of recognition of its alleged Jewishness, that is causing Israel’s legitimacy crisis. Demanding that the Palestinians, or indeed the whole world, call Israel the Jewish state cannot mask its real nature.”

Michael Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This means he stands in a line of foreign diplomats who are often quite out of the ordinary. For one thing, they may well be ex-Americans.

Oren (né Bornstein) was born in upstate New York and grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. He switched countries in 1979. For another, Israeli ambassadors do not hesitate to engage in public debates aimed at swaying American public opinion. Actually, this is very un-diplomatic behavior and you don’t see the ambassadors from China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay or Liechtenstein, ad finem, doing that sort of thing. Yet, Oren has done this several times by sending op-eds to the New York Times. On 13 October he did so again with one entitled, "An end to Israel’s invisibility".

It is an odd title, for if there is one thing Israel is not, it is invisible. But the ambassador is arguing from a peculiar point of view. Essentially, he claims that the Palestinians have yet to officially acknowledge that Israel is a "Jewish state". For Oren, it is the Jewish aspect of Israel that remains "invisible". As odd as this sounds, the ambassador’s complaint echos a current theme across the political spectrum in Israel. At the same time that he put out his op-ed, Ari Shavit, the centre-right contributor to Ha’aretz, published a piece that made a similar argument but extended the failure of recognition accusation to Europe and beyond. It appeared on 14 October and is entitled “The core of the conflict". All of this might appear as something of a mystery.

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