Rafe Mair (Canada)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Tuesday January 23, 2013.

Today, with the weather was cold and clear in Washington, D.C. as Barak Obama was sworn in for his second term after a landslide victory where he carried all but two states. He had capitalized on his stern warnings that the United States had to get, in American football parlance, into a “hurry up offence” to wean itself off its reliance on oil as offshore supplies were looking less and less reliable.

That very afternoon, reminiscent of the day Jimmy Carter heard on the day his hated rival Ronald Reagan was inaugurated that on Iran had released its American hostages, the new fundamentalist Peoples Islamic Republic of Arabia (formerly Saudi Arabia) announced it was reducing its oil exports to the US 10% each month until the US withdrew all support, financial and military, of Israel. Mr. Obama pointed out that while out of the 30 million barrels a day the US consumes (up since he first became president in spite of efforts to reduce consumption) Saudi Arabia supplied 1.5 million barrels slightly more than Venezuela and about the same as Mexico. That day oil traded just under $200 per barrel but instantly went up to $225 on the news from Arabia. The president, in warning about the crisis, took solace in the fact that its largest supplier at just under 3 million bbls, was their old and faithful friend, Canada...

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Robert Wenzel
EconomicPolicyJournal.com

"Troubled Wall Street" (Corbis Images)

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a speech before the the Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council in Providence, Rhode Island. In the speech, he warned about the current state of the government finances. His conclusion, the situation is dire and "unsustainable".

It is remarkable that mainstream media has given this speech no coverage. I repeat, the central banker of the United States says in his own words:

Let me return to the issue of longer-term fiscal sustainability. As I have discussed, projections by the CBO and others show future budget deficits and debts rising indefinitely, and at increasing rates. To be sure, projections are to some degree only hypothetical exercises. Almost by definition, unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debts will never actually transpire, because creditors would never be willing to lend to a country in which the fiscal debt relative to the national income is rising without limit. Herbert Stein, a wise economist, once said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."9 One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget will certainly occur at some point. The only real question is whether these adjustments will take place through a careful and deliberative process that weighs priorities and gives people plenty of time to adjust to changes in government programs or tax policies, or whether the needed fiscal adjustments will be a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis.

This is as close as you are ever going to see a central banker admit that his country's financial situation is so dire that it could breakup at any time.

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Stephen Lendman

Long planned, the current economic storm erupted violently in late 2007. It wasn't by accident. It was engineered years back, so financial racketeers could profit from wrecking global economies and destroying their middle class, including America's.

On February 1, 2009, former high-level Wall Street and government insider, Catherine Austin Fitts, explained it an article headlined, "Financial Coup d'Etat," saying:

A global financial cabal "engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble; illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used 'privatization' as a form of piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder....Clearly, there was a global financial coup d'etat underway," its magnitude overwhelming and incomprehensible to most people, as planned.

Many trillions of dollars have been stolen, shifted from public to elitist private hands - by far, the greatest ever wealth transfer in history, a global heist, sucking capital out of one country after another, including America. It's an ongoing "de-moderniz(ation)" process, transforming Western countries into third world ones - in real time, in plain sight, yet few people understand.

In stark terms, Fitts says it's more than just "a process designed to wipe out the middle class. This is genocide (by other means) - a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts."

It's a government-business cabal for enormous profits through "legislation, contracts, regulation (or lack of it), financing, subsidies," and massive handouts to Wall Street favorites. Carefully rigged for powerful elitists, the public is so cleverly harmed that few understand what's happening - literally that their livelihoods, welfare and lives are being destroyed in real time. The America older generations knew no longer exists, the dream of millions wiped out, and it's also happening throughout Europe.

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Bill van Auken

[Codename: Operation Enduring Turmoil - Zionist Neocon Plans for Pakistan and rest of the World. Read this document to understand the game plan]

"Following the strategy dictated by his generals, Obama, just like his predecessor in the White House, is attempting to exploit US military superiority to offset American capitalism’s long-term economic decline. This course is producing regional and global instability that threatens to drag the people of Pakistan and the entire world into a far bloodier conflagration."

The week-old standoff between Washington and Islamabad over US military attacks inside Pakistan and the blocking of a vital NATO supply line in retaliation underscores the growing threat that the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan is spiralling out of control.

A dramatic escalation of US attacks on Pakistan set the stage for the sharp deterioration in relations over the past week. September saw 22 missile strikes by CIA drones against Pakistani targets, a record number since the attacks began.

The Pakistani government and intelligence services have tolerated and collaborated in the drone attacks, but the US military carried out a qualitative escalation of the assault on Pakistan last week, staging a series of cross-border raids by US helicopter gunships based inside Afghanistan.

While the first of these raids claimed the lives of scores of Pakistanis described by Washington as “militants”—and by residents of the area as local tribesmen—the last killed three members of the Pakistani military’s Frontier Corps and blew to pieces a border post.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, defended this attack as an act of “self defense.” It was nothing of the sort. The US military sent its attack helicopters across the border hunting for targets. If there was any act of self defense, it was by the Frontier Corpsmen, who apparently fired shots to warn the helicopter that it had crossed the border in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

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Chris Sands
Le Monde Diplomatique

On 7 October 2001, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began. Barely a month later, Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance. It was, it seemed to observers at the time, a short and relatively painless conflict. A new type of war that relied on using proxy local militia commanders and the power of the American air force appeared to have been fought with ease. No sooner had the world been made to take notice of the Taliban than they were defeated.

Today, that first autumn after 9/11 has long faded into memory for the people of Afghanistan. At best, it conjures up the same kind of sad emotions as an old photograph. At worst, it feels like a sham: a bitter prologue to yet another story of occupation and bloodshed. Much of what has happened since can be traced to that early period, when the war was painted just in black and white. Even then, victory was not certain and the boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, were never clear-cut.

The questions being raised about the conflict now could, and should, have been asked at the very start. The seeds of the Taliban’s resurgence and the corruption of the Karzai administration were planted immediately, when many of the US troops who later died here were only children.

Relying on the Northern Alliance certainly meant that few US citizens were initially put in harm’s way in a country known for its hatred of foreign invaders. But it also demonstrated a profound or wilful ignorance of another aspect of Afghan history: the same militia commanders financed and supported by Washington in 2001 were already systematic human rights abusers whose actions had helped inspire the original formation of the Taliban movement.

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Robert Parry
consortiumnews.com

Last week’s grotesque revelation about American public health doctors infecting nearly 700 Guatemalans with venereal disease to test penicillin from 1946-48 marked just the start of the U.S. government’s post-World War II abuse of that Central American country.

Indeed, as troubling as the VD experiments were, U.S. administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan would do much worse, treating Guatemala as a test tube for Cold War counterinsurgency experiments that led to the slaughter of some 200,000 people, including genocide against Mayan Indian tribes.

Guatemala’s special place as Washington’s experimental lab for repression began in 1954 when President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to try out new psychological warfare strategies in destabilizing and removing Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz.

Arbenz had offended U.S. business and government leaders by implementing a land reform project that threatened the massive holdings of United Fruit and by letting leftists compete within the political process.

The CIA ousted Arbenz with a combination of clever propaganda and armed insurrection, leading to a series of repressive military dictatorships that further radicalized Guatemala’s indigenous poor and urban intellectuals.

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Stephen Lendman

For nearly two centuries, America dismissively called Latin America its "backyard," the 1823 Monroe Doctrine asserting a declaration of regional dominance, stating:

"....as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any
European powers....we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.... (impossible to) behold....with indifference."

Thereafter, it was all downhill against Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Grenada, Venezuela, and at one time or another, practically all other parts of the Americas, directly or indirectly.

In 1905, in fact, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Washington to be "the policeman" of the Caribbean and Central America, and by implication, the entire hemisphere. To date, nothing has changed, Ecuador just the latest targeted nation, an earlier article explaining the failed coup attempt, accessed through THIS link.

On September 30, Ecuador's President Raphael Correa was targeted. First elected in November 2006 with a 58% majority, he was easily reelected in April 2009 with a 55% majority against seven challengers. His current term runs until August 10, 2013, and will extend until 2017 with another electoral victory.

Yet, Ecuador's volatile history is now in focus. The country's eighth president in 14 years, Correa's easily the most popular, though less so after earlier imposing austerity measures. Pro-business ones also, including policies favoring oil, mining, and agribusiness interests at the expense of local communities and environmental considerations.

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Jonathan Cook
Palestine Chronicle

Obama's promise to Israel ● US veto of UN Security Council proposals on Israeli-Palestinian conflict ● No further extensions of settlement building freeze ● Permanent Israeli military presence in occupied Jordan Valley ● Permanent Israeli control of Palestinian borders ● US to give Israel enhanced weapons systems, security guarantees ● An increase [in] its billions of dollars in annual aid ● US to create anti-Iran regional security pact /table> The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by President Barack Obama last week to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more sceptical about US and Israeli roles in the current peace talks. According to the leak, Obama made a series of extraordinarily generous offers to Israel, many of them at the expense of the Palestinians, in return for a single minor concession from Netanyahu: a two-month extension of the partial freeze on settlement growth. A previous 10-month freeze, which ended a week ago, has not so far been renewed by Netanyahu, threatening to bring the negotiations to an abrupt halt. The Palestinians are expected to decide whether to quit the talks over the coming days. Netanyahu was reported last week to have declined the US offer. The White House has denied that a letter was sent, but, according to the Israeli media, officials in Washington are privately incensed by Netanyahu’s rejection.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

A French soldier patrols the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

"The timing of the alert, coming less than a month before a national US election, suggests a political motivation. President Obama’s Democratic Party is trailing in many pre-election polls, and could lose control of the House of Representatives, the US Senate, or both."

The US State Department issued a terror alert Sunday for American citizens traveling anywhere in the continent of Europe, an unprecedented action that seems calculated to spread alarm without actually helping anyone avoid becoming the target of a terrorist attack. The Pentagon imposed a weekend curfew on troops at the US Air Force Base at Ramstein, Germany, ordering soldiers not to wear their uniforms off base “in response to a threat condition.”

Britain, Japan, Sweden and Canada all followed suit, issuing alerts to their own citizens who might be traveling to Europe. In each case, they cited the US alert as evidence that there was an increased danger of a terrorist attack at European transit hubs and tourist attractions.

The actual statement from the US government speaks only of “the potential for terrorist attacks,” without any specifics. “Current information suggests that Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks,” the State Department said.

Since this has likely been true of every day since Osama bin Laden issued his “declaration of war” against the United States in 1996, it is not clear that the alert has any objective basis or represents a new threat.

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Philip Giraldi
Campaign for Liberty

["The National Security State uses fascism to protect capitalism while they say they're protecting democracy from communism." ~ Michael Parenti]

It is not far fetched to speculate that the United States has, over the past ten years, been sliding into a form of authoritarianism that retains only some aspects of the constitution and a limited rule of law. America's president can, for example, commit soldiers to combat overseas without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war by congress while it is quite possible to be detained by the authorities and locked up without any prospect of trial or opportunity to defend oneself. The government even believes it can kill American citizens based only on suspicion. I prefer to think of this transformation as the National Security State because it rests on a popular consensus that liberties must be sacrificed in exchange for greater public safety from various threats, international terrorism being the most prominent. It might just as well be called the National Warfare State as it also requires constant conflict to justify its existence.

Three elements are necessary for the creation of a National Security State. First, there must be a narrative that can be sold to the public justifying the transformation. Second, a system of laws and regulations must be created that enable the state to act with impunity and also to protect the government from challenges to its authority. Third, technology must be harnessed to enable the state to surreptitiously monitor and control the activities of its citizens. All of these elements have fallen into place over the past decade.

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Stephen Lendman

An earlier article discussed Iraq's dire conditions after seven years of occupation, and over a decade of sanctions, accessed through THIS link.

It presents a grim overall picture, besides Gideon Polya's September 13, 2010 estimated eight million "War on Terror" deaths, mostly in Iraq, what he calls "avoidable mortality and under-5 infant mortality" ones, accessed through THIS link.

Conditions now include:

● 4.5 million refugees;
● 2.8 million internal ones (IDPs), one-third in squatter slums;
● mass impoverishment and depravation;
● rampant human rights abuses; and
● settlements without basic services, such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, health care, and education.

Nir Rosen's September 13, 2010 ZNet article adds more, accessed through THIS link.

"Welcome to the new Iraq," he says, "same as the old Iraq," including:

● "automatic weapons pointed at your head out of military vehicles;"
● mountains of garbage everywhere;
● the stench of sewage; and
● daily violence, chaos, terror, and toxic environment, the same conditions everywhere under direct or proxy US occupations. The definition below explains how Iraqis see their "liberation."

Merriam-Webster defines dystopia as "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." Other definitions include extreme deprivation, oppression, and terror. These conditions apply to Iraq, a living hell under occupation, not the sanitized Western image when anything at all is reported.

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Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling

"Apparently the American people, long the targets of illegal driftnet spying by the intelligence and security apparatus, will soon find another door slammed shut, even as the administration claims sweeping new powers, including the right to assassinate American citizens deemed "terrorists," in secret and without due process, anywhere on the planet. And they call this transparency..."

In a reprise of the crypto wars of the 1990s, the U.S. secret state is mounting an offensive that would force telecommunication companies to redesign their systems and information networks to more easily facilitate internet spying.

Touted as a simple technical "fix" that would "modernize" existing legislation for wiretaps, government security officials will demand that telecommunication firms and internet service providers provide law enforcement with backdoors that would enable them to bypass built-in encryption and security features of electronic communications.

With the Obama administration rivaling, even surpassing antidemocratic moves by the Bush regime to monitor and surveil the private communications of the American people, The New York Times reported last week that "federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet."

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Francis A. Boyle
Dissident Voice

"Destruction of Leviathan". 1865 engraving by
Gustave Doré.

"In fact, Israel has never been a State but just an Army masquerading as a State — a Potemkin Village of a State. Israel is the archetypal Great Band of Robbers described by St. Augustine in The City of God."

On November 15, 1988 the Palestine National Council (P.N.C.) meeting in Algiers proclaimed the Palestinian Declaration of Independence that created the independent state of Palestine. Today the State of Palestine is bilaterally recognized de jure by about 130 states. Palestine has de facto diplomatic recognition from most of Europe. It was only massive political pressure applied by the U.S. government that prevented European states from according to Palestine de jure diplomatic recognition.

Palestine is a member state of the League of Arab States and of the Islamic Conference Organization. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague—the so-called World Court of the United Nations System—conducted its legal proceedings on Israel’s apartheid wall on the West Bank, the World Court invited the State of Palestine to participate in the proceedings. In other words, the International Court of Justice recognized the State of Palestine.

Palestine has Observer State Status with the United Nations Organization, and basically all the rights of a U.N. Member State except the right to vote. Effectively, Palestine has de facto U.N. Membership. The only thing keeping Palestine from de jure U.N. Membership is the implicit threat of a veto at the U.N. Security Council by the United States, which is clearly illegal. Someday Palestine shall be a full-fledged U.N. Member State.

From a world-order perspective, the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence created a remarkable opportunity for peace with Israel because therein the P.N.C. explicitly accepted the U.N. General Assembly’s Partition Resolution 181(II) of 1947 that called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the Mandate for Palestine, together with an international trusteeship for the City of Jerusalem, in order to resolve their basic conflict:

Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination following upon U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this Resolution that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty and national independence.

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Henry Siegman
London Review of Books, Vol. 31 No. 2 · 29 January 2009

Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

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Matthew Nasuti
Kabul Press

"Killing 20 Taliban costs $1 Billion / Killing all the Taliban would cost $1.7 Trillion"

The Pentagon will not tell the public what it costs to locate, target and kill a single Taliban soldier because the price-tag is so scandalously high that it makes the Taliban appear to be Super-Soldiers. As set out in this article, the estimated cost to kill each Taliban is as high as $100 million, with a conservative estimate being $50 million. A public discussion should be taking place in the United States regarding whether the Taliban have become too expensive an enemy to defeat.

Each month the Pentagon generates a ream of dubious statistics designed to create the illusion of progress in Afghanistan. In response this author decided to compile his own statistics. As the goal of any war is to kill the enemy, the idea was to calculate what it actually costs to kill just one of the enemy. The obstacles encountered in generating such a statistic are formidable. The problem is that the Pentagon continues to illegally classify all negative war news and embarrassing information. Regardless, some information has been collected from independent sources. Here is what we know in summary and round numbers:

1. Taliban Field Strength: 35,000 troops

2. Taliban Killed Per Year by Coalition forces: 2,000 (best available information)

3. Pentagon Direct Costs for Afghan War for 2010: $100 billion

4. Pentagon Indirect Costs for Afghan War for 2010: $100 billion

Using the fact that 2,000 Taliban are being killed each year and that the Pentagon spends $200 billion per year on the war in Afghanistan, one simply has to divide one number into the other. That calculation reveals that $100 million is being spent to kill each Taliban soldier. In order to be conservative, the author decided to double the number of Taliban being killed each year by U.S. and NATO forces (although the likelihood of such being true is unlikely). This reduces the cost to kill each Taliban to $50 million, which is the title of this article. The final number is outrageously high regardless of how one calculates it.

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Stephen Lendman

Straightaway, Obama's promised "change" and "yes we can" became hard line foreign and domestic extremism, betraying his loyal constituency and any hope for kinder, gentler policies. His populist hypocrisy now exposed, voters are losing faith, but most remain mindless about the harm he commits daily, much of it touching them directly.

Several recent articles explain, accessed through the following links here, here, here & here. Recet updates here (October 02, 2010).

Many others add exclamation points about a rogue administration rampaging at home and globally, most recently involved in a failed Ecuadorean coup, and for sending FBI goon squads against Chicago and Minneapolis anti-war/pro-Palestinian activists. No arrests were made, but their homes were ransacked, agents seizing computers, cell phones, books, photos, papers, correspondence, and other possessions. They were also ordered before grand juries from October 5 - 12, potentially facing serious criminal charges for providing material support to terrorism.

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Henry Makow
Henry Makow's Blog

Jews run the US media and control perception. When Rick Sanchez said so, he was fired. Point made.

Rick Sanchez didn't understand that his role was to obscure this fact. He was Latino window dressing. He was the gentile front man. The shabbos goy.

His role was to keep the Left-Right puppet show going. But he committed the cardinal sin. He pointed to the Illuminati Jewish puppeteer.

He was sore that CNN was replacing him with "Parker-Spitzer." He was sore for being treated like the token Latino. He was sore that CNN wouldn't take him seriously and that the Jewish comedian Jon (Leibowitz) Stewart ridiculed his ambitions to be a serious commentator.

On Pete Dominick's talk show Friday, Sanchez said they were prejudiced. When Dominick suggested that Stewart, who is Jewish, is also a minority, he scoffed at the notion that Jews are now persecuted and implied that they control CNN and other networks.

"Yeah, very powerless people. [laughs] He's such a minority. I mean, you know, please. What are you kidding? I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?" (MSNBC)

About 20% of the Jews in the Chicago area are on food stamps. Obviously we're not talking about them. We're talking about Illuminati (i.e. Masonic) Jews -- the Murdochs, the Newhouses, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, the Meyers. These are the elite Jews that secretly persecute other Jews, and everyone else.

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Barry Grey
WSWS

More than two dozen trucks and oil tankers carrying supplies for the US military offensive against Kandahar in Afghanistan were destroyed in two separate attacks Friday in southern Pakistan. The attacks compounded the crisis for the US and NATO occupation forces arising from the Pakistani government's closure the previous day of a key border crossing.

It is estimated that 80 percent of supplies to US, NATO and allied occupation forces in Afghanistan, including 50 percent of fuel, passes through Pakistan.

The Khyber Pass route that connects Peshawar in northwest Pakistan and Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan was closed to NATO supply convoys in response to two US air attacks on Pakistani military posts Thursday that killed three Pakistan Frontier Corps troops and wounded three others. Washington is continuing to justify these attacks, carried out by helicopter gunships inside Pakistan in flagrant violation of Pakistani territorial sovereignty, as “self-defense”.

These attacks followed US helicopter strikes on the Pakistan side of the border the previous weekend that killed an estimated 55 Pakistanis. Last month the US sharply increased its use of CIA drones to fire missiles on alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s tribal regions, launching 20 or more such attacks in September.

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Stephen Lendman

Sept. 30: A police officer demonstrates next to a bonfire during a protest of
police officers and soldiers against a new law that cuts their benefits at a
police base in Quito, Ecuador. (AP)

Post-9/11, Washington sponsored four coup d'états. Two succeeded - mostly recently in Honduras in 2009 against Manuel Zelaya, and in Haiti in 2004 deposing Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Two others failed - in Venezuela in 2002 against Hugo Chavez, and on September 30 in Ecuador against Rafael Correa - so far. Two by Bush, two by Obama with plenty of time for more mischief before November 2012.

From his record so far, expect it. He continues imperial Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations. In addition, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, North Korea, and other countries are targeted, besides deploying CIA and Special Forces armies into at least 75 countries worldwide for targeted assassinations, drone attacks, and other disruptive missions.

More than ever under Bush and Obama, America rampages globally, Ecuador's Raphael Correa lucky to survive a plot to oust (or perhaps kill) him. September world headlines explained, including by New York Times writer Simon Romero headlining, "Standoff in Ecuador Ends With Leader's Rescue," saying:

"Ecuadorean soldiers stormed a police hospital Thursday night in Quito where President Rafael Correa was held by rebellious elements of the police forces, and rescued him amid an exchange of gunfire...."

AlJazeera explained more in an article headlined, "Ecuador declares state of emergency," saying:

Coup plotters shut down airports, blocked highways, burned tires, and "rough(ed) up the president." They also took over an airbase, parliament, and Quito streets, the pretext being a law restructuring their benefits, despite Correa doubling police wages.

In fact, Washington's fingerprints are on another attempt against a Latin leader, some (not all) of whose policies fall short of neoliberal extremism.

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Khalid Amayreh

Israeli triumphalism at the ending of a temporary ban on settlement construction contrasts with the muted, and confused, Palestinian and Arab response, writes Khalid Amayreh from the occupied territories.

With the Arab world and Palestinian Authority seemingly caught in a spiral of weakness and vacillation, and the Obama administration unwilling or unable to pressure Israel, the Israeli government has allowed anti-peace Jewish settlers to embark on all-out drive to build as many settler units as possible.

The audacious move came hours after a 10-month moratorium on settlement expansion expired Sunday night, 26 September.

Gleeful celebrations continued for hours as settler leaders and government officials delivered speeches with bulldozers, concrete mixers and other construction equipment in the background. During the celebrations, thousands of balloons were released into the air, signifying the number of units settlers intend to build.

With nearly all restrictions on settlement expansion now removed, the settlers, with the explicit backing of the government, are vowing to "compensate" for the 10-month hiatus by intensifying settlement construction to an unprecedented degree.

Settler leaders say they intended to build "tens of thousands of units" in addition to opening new roads and other forms of infrastructure which will require the seizure of large swathes of Palestinian land.

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