Iran 112

'Bush all set to attack Iran: Report Press Trust of India

"Express India" -- - London, February 17:

The Bush administration's preparation to strike Iran is complete with the top commander of the US Central Command having received computerised plans for ‘Operation Iranian Freedom’, a report has said. "American military operations for a major conventional war with Iran extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD (weapons of mass destruction) facilities and will enable President George Bush to destroy Iran's military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons," the journal New Statesman has claimed. In a story titled Attack-Revealed: America's Plans to Invade Iran, the journal quoting British military sources, said ‘the US military switched its whole focus to Iran’ as soon as Saddam Hussein was removed from power. The White House continued this strategy, even though it had American forces bogged down in Iraq. The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerised plans under the name TIRANT (Theatre Iran Near Term). Even as the sending of a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf has been highlighted, the US navy can put six carriers into battle at a month's notice. The report said any US general planning to attack Iran could now assume that at least 10,000 targets could be hit in a single raid, with warplanes flying from the US or Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
© 2006: Indian Express Newspapers.'

Zioe: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17098.htm

Het Neoliberale Geloof 19

Een simpele vraag aan socialistische, liberale en christelijke autoriteiten:

'Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World
By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this? Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs. The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating. The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations. By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws. In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage. The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States. U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries. The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt. A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries. Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations. The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF. But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations. They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations. So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17102.htm

Het Neoliberale Geloof 18

Een stukje geschiedenis:

'To Restore Democracy : First Abolish Corporate Personhood
By Thom Hartmann
Thomas Paine said it best:
“It has been thought,” he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, “…that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”Thus, Paine and others of the Revolutionary Era reasoned, any institution made up by and of humans - from governments to churches to corporations - must be subordinate to individual living people in terms of the rights and powers held by the institution.Because of the unique frailties and depths of passion unique to humans, just after the United States Constitution was ratified Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began a campaign to amend it with a 12-point explicit statement that would clearly and unambiguously place humans - who had created government - above their creation. This was the birth of what would become the Bill of Rights, and it originally had twelve - not ten - protections for citizens’ rights.On December 20th, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said, bluntly, that it was deficient in several areas. “I will now tell you what I do not like,” he wrote. “First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.”Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t just be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”The following year, Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Mr. A. Donald, on February 7th, 1788, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights: “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the constitution as an amendment, which would guarantee liberties for citizens, prevent companies from growing so large they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government, and reduce the possibility of the nation being taken over by a military coup.On February 12th, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the US Constitution was about to be ratified, but also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw.“With respect to the new Government,” he wrote, “nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.”By mid-summer of 1788, things were moving along and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison to write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison: “I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.”'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17103.htm

Het Neoliberale Geloof 17

'The Corporation I believe this is one of the best and most important documentary films to be made in many years. This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit. After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the common good of the people, and who will go to any lengths, legally and otherwise, in the pursuit of profit and the bottom line. Reviewer: C. Middleton (Australia)
CLICK PLAY TO VIEW - Run Time: 145 minutes
Download Windows Media File - Download Real Video File

You may need to download Windows Media Player 10 to view this video. Its FREE.

Zie: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12998.htm

Martelen 68

De New York Times bericht:

'Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET02/17/06 "New York Times" -- --

DAMASCUS, Syria — In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American military after two years and three months in captivity.He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family discuss his case with a reporter.But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows? “I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get out of this place.”Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,” he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.” His mother, Intisar al-Ani, raised her arms in the air, palms up, praising God. “It was like my soul going out, from my happiness,” she recalled. “I hugged him hard, afraid the Americans would take him away again.”Just three weeks earlier, his last letter home — with its poetic yearnings and a sketch of a caged pink heart — appeared in The Times in one of a series of articles on Iraq’s troubled detention and justice system. After his release from the American-run jail, Camp Bucca, Mr. Ani and other former detainees described the sprawling complex of barracks in the southern desert near Kuwait as a bleak place where guards casually used their stun guns and exposed prisoners to long periods of extreme heat and cold; where prisoners fought among themselves and extremist elements tried to radicalize others; and where detainees often responded to the harsh conditions with hunger strikes and, at times, violent protests. Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime; he said he was questioned only once during his more than two years at the camp.American detention officials acknowledged that guards used electric devices called Tasers to control detainees, but they said they did so rarely and only when the guards were physically threatened. The officials said that detainees had several ways to report abuse without repercussions, and that all claims were investigated.'

Lees verder: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/middleeast/18bucca.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin Of:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17096.htm

The Empire 178

'Business As Usual
By Irene Rheinwald

The more things change, the more they stay the same. What seemed an earthquake on November 7, 2006, has turned into a mere ripple in a volatile pond. Despite proclamations to the contrary, Democratic control of Congress cannot be termed a reversal of the ill advised, disastrous, policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. Will the Democrats perpetuate the Iraq war? Or will they seek a viable solution that incorporates a full and immediate withdrawal from the escalating conflict? The mere presence of foreigners – namely, American combatants – irritates the social fabric of Iraq. Muslim memories are long. The Crusades are a still fresh source of inspired struggle. Muslim traditions, accomplishments and history are distinguished and extraordinary. The Western perception, based on colonial self-indulgence and ignorance, rests upon an assumption of cultural inferiority. George W. Bush always has a “raison de jour” for invading Iraq: first, to ostensibly to avoid the “mushroom cloud”, then the war against terror, then to liberate the Iraq people and bring democracy to the benighted. It is now some nebulous “success”. As we watch the situation deteriorate, and fatalities mount in almost incomprehensible numbers on all sides, a genuine turn of policy is vital. We wonder where it all went so terribly wrong. Are we the first to make such errors, or can history teach us about the madness of making war? Most important, are we willing to learn? Governments, states, empires, kingdoms, from ancient times to modern, frequently embrace policies at odds with international stability and focus instead on short-term economic gains. From ancient Rome to Egypt, to the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, Victorian colonialism, and the Soviet Union, political and religious institutions have sought to absorb autonomous neighbours. Empire building, the consequence of self-delusion, arrogance, and xenophobia, is actually economic exploitation. The spoils of war are paramount: not democracy, not enlightenment, nor freedom, liberty, and certainly not self-determination. To assert such lofty motives is disingenuous dissembling. Why is the United States only interested in “liberating” countries swimming in natural resources such as oil? Why did the United States not champion former Soviet Republics in 1989? What of Chechnya’s struggles? Why has the United States ignored human catastrophes such as Darfur, Rwanda, or ethnic cleansing in Palestine? Aids in Africa? And what of medicare, social security, education in the United States? How far would the almost four hundred billion spent on the invasion of Iraq go towards bettering American society? So what do with Iraq? Does the “you break, you buy” admonition still apply? George W. Bush would have us believe that Iraq was broken under Saddam Hussein, and that the people desperately needed and wanted American glue. Not so: from the 1980s until the 2003 illegal invasion, Iraq was perceived as a moderate Middle Eastern entity; a progressive, secular, stabilizing force amongst “evil” Islamic fundamentalists. Western powers overlooked, even tolerated, Saddam Hussein’s excesses. Indeed, Iraq had an extraordinary number of intellectuals of both genders – most now dead or in exile. At this point, the situation is a complex warren of militias, factions, sects, tribes, political alliances, mercenaries, imported terrorists and religious ideologues, clashing with American occupying forces and each other, based factional collusion with the United States. A sub-current is the return of ex-patriot Iraqis into positions of power under, again under the auspices of the United States. Is America now willing to prop up al-Malaki’s friendly government with massive force? Are we so deluded to think al-Maliki’s regime is legitimate, representative, and independent? Democracy has no history in the Middle East, outside of the despised Israel. Moreover, democratic movements are borne of internal stirrings in a nation with a strong middle class. Military invasion and perpetual terror against civilians alienates “hearts and minds”. Democracy cannot, must not, be imposed from without, under any circumstances. To do so simply invites bitterness and violence against the oppressors. The Soviet Union brutally invaded the democratic Baltic nations to “liberate” them – same coin, different side. One might say Iraq is in a state of civil war, but doing so overlooks a fundamental point and is ultimately misleading. Conflict amongst Islamic sects date back to the seventh century CE, and relate to Mohammed’s successors. Occupation by Western powers such as the United States is a recent phenomenon, deeply resented by all. All Muslims are brothers when faced with a common enemy. Hence, George W. Bush and his administration, by speaking of “evil-doers” and protecting American interests, escalate Middle Eastern resentment. The entire area is destabilized. Continuing this occupation exacerbates the conflict, and does not contain violence, as the current administration charges. Even the oft-bandied proposal that Iraq be divided into three countries (Sunni, Shi’ite, Kurd) is disingenuous, favouring Western domination: it is easier to control the resources of three smaller countries than a large and diverse one. Worse yet, it does not remove the United States as “puppet master”. To speak of civil war deflects from the occupation crisis and places blame on the supposedly inferior people and structure of Iraqi society; the West therefore justifies continued military presence under the guise of future stabilization. Quite the rationalization. Rather than “sectarian violence” or “civil war”, this is repression; artificial divisions imposed by the United States on a foreign culture and society. That is the crux of the conflict.'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17101.htm

The Empire 177

'American Betrayal.
By David Michael

Green Some people are hopelessly foolish. Some can’t help it entirely (though a little less TV time would certainly go a long way), because they have been purposely trained to be so. They may be excused. But too many others know better. That makes them cowardly and self-serving, and there is no excuse for that. Not when people are dying by the tens of thousands there. Not when the republic is being savaged here. History will record this as America’s most shameful – most inexcusable – moment, and probably the beginning of the end of any further such significant American moments whatsoever, as the empire begins its slow descent. Generations of responsible statesmen and women handed over a largely healthy, sometimes pacific, broadly admired republic to the present administration, which has taken quantum leaps toward unraveling those centuries of painstaking work. It would be easy to cast the blame for our present predicament on a single ideological movement, or even a single generation, and it would not be wholly inaccurate to do so. The contemporary regressive right is without question a vicious cancer that has invaded the body politic to devastating consequences. Its predations were immensely facilitated by the self-reverential concerns of the Baby Boomers, who not for nothing were once called the Me Generation (that’s capital M, capital G, if you don’t mind). Rest assured, there are no statesmen today because to be one requires consciousness of others, sacrifice of self, moral sensitivity and historical sagacity, all qualities notably absent from this generation. It is not only the Boomers to blame, however, but their parents as well. Ironically, the so-called “Greatest Generation” – which was indeed great in many ways – was also responsible for at least two crucial mistakes that deeply haunt us today. One was to raise a bunch of self-serving, self-interested children, well-trained for the pursuit of happiness, but woefully unprepared for comprehending or sacrificing what is necessary to sustain and advance the greater good of the commonweal. The other was the failure of their political class to stand up one last time, at the end of their days, for the values they knew to be crucial, at a time during which those values have been so deeply imperiled. And why didn’t they? For what did they exchange their silence? In the end, the saddest truth is that both generations traded away everything for nothing. In the end, those who had the most only wound up dissipating their honor and their reputations in a failed attempt to cosset their self-serving pusillanimity. There have always been scandals and offenses against the republic and its values. But in the past, the worst of these were called out by name, regardless of partisan affiliation. It may have taken a while, but ultimately it was Barry Goldwater and fellow Republicans who put an end to Richard Nixon. And not only because he was destroying them politically, but also because they were offended by his offenses against the nation. But as the radical right and its scorched earth practices have come to power over the last quarter-century, fewer such patriots seemed to appear, just when they were needed most. In 1996, I wondered who amongst the members of the American political pantheon would ask “Where’s the outrage?” when Bob Dole was asking “Where’s the outrage?” concerning a Bill Clinton who was virtually untouched by scandal at that time. And when he was subsequently impeached for lying about having oral sex, not nearly enough of those who could have made a difference stood up and called this attempt at political assassination what it was. But the new millennium brought a whole other level of abdication to the fore, and in late 2000 the most shameful political exercise of my lifetime (until then) was unraveling before our eyes. I couldn’t help thinking at the time, “Where is the great stentorian voice of reason, honor and fairness from our elder statesmen and women, booming across the land, as the most fundamental principle of the republic was being undermined?” When Antonin Scalia took it upon himself to actually stop the counting of votes on that dark December day, where were those who’d spent a lifetime earning a reputation for probity amongst the American public, and who’d also enjoyed the same lifetime reaping the benefits of living in a free, secure and prosperous society? Certain of these people perhaps could not stand up because their prior political affiliations would have been used as cudgels against them by the radical right. (But then again, so what? That happens regardless.) Jimmy Carter, who has for decades been far more a humanist, statesman and small-d democrat than he ever was a big-D Democrat, nevertheless probably falls well within this category. I think we now know without question that the Karl Rove machine would have unleashed its savage dogs of defamation against Carter, and branded him a sore loser partisan, or worse, had he stood up then. Which was why it was even more crucial that the voice of reason should have come from the other side of the aisle. What I really wanted to know back then was, where was Jerry Ford? Where was Bob Dole? Jack Kemp? Howard Baker? (It is truly telling, as an aside, that the list of ‘reasonable voices’ from the GOP leadership of the last several decades ends here, and is perhaps already one or two names too long. Nevertheless, the question remains.) Where were the patriots who understood that principle must come before party, and therefore that if you’re gonna call it a democracy, you damn well need to count the votes? Of course, it only got worse from there. An eerily similar silence greeted George Bush’s radical agenda when he did come to office the following January. Even before 9/11, these neocon-artists were hurriedly dismantling two generations worth of painstaking diplomacy that had created a host of successful international regimes and multilateral institutions. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had kept a peaceful balance in a nuclear-armed world, had to go. The International Criminal Court? Had to go. The Geneva Conventions? Quaint and obsolete. The Kyoto Protocol? A balanced Middle East policy? All these and more were unceremoniously chucked out the window by a president whose utter lack of foreign policy wisdom is only now becoming apparent to many Americans. But where were those who did know better, and why did they stand by and allow their life’s work and the country they loved to be ruined by the political equivalent of drunken adolescents operating heavy machinery?'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17105.htm
Zie ook: http://informationclearinghouse.info/