Danny Schechter - “We Are Drowning” On A Road To Nowhere: New War on the Horizon

Oil prices are rocketing. Iranian warships are moving into the Mediterranean to shadow the US warships already there. Propaganda news is growing with rumors of Al Qaeda links with Iran, and, then, less speculative news about real links between the terror groups and the armed opposition in Syria.

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi puts it, the smell of war is in the air and on the air, “You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms.”

Read More:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29386

Gary Null - Let Us Stop The Blame

by Gary Null
Progressive Radio Network, February 13, 2012

One of the most famous examples of journalist integrity, that has served as exemplar of how journalism can correct wrongs and bring justice to bear, is the story of Emile Zola – a French naturalist writer and supporter of political liberalization in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The case involves a Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French army who happened to have been Jewish. Following a scandal of French military secrets reaching the German embassy, growing anti-semitism convicted Drefus on charges of treason leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana.  Although evidence was available to implicate another officer, the right wing French government and media refuted it and continued with its original verdict against Dreyfus. Even the French officer, Lt. Colonel Picquart who uncovered the officer who was the real spy, was sentenced to serve a term in a prison.

Taking up the cause on behalf of Captain Dreyfus, Emile Zola risked his career by composing an article entitled – J’accuse – I accuse – that was printed on the front page of Paris’ daily. His article accused the highest echelons of French military and justice, and even the Church which held consider power in France, of anti-Semitism and corruption in accusing Dreyfus.  For his sense of justice, Zola was convicted for criminal libel, but rather than serving prison time, he had fled to England and didn’t return to France until the right wing French administration fell.  Almost a decade later, Zola was finally pardoned of all charges and became the hero standing up against corruption he rightfully deserved.

Who is our Emile Zola today in mainstream media?  Who is it that holds the facts to accuse those who falsify truth for their own profit, gain, influence and power, who speaks on behalf of citizens against those with the means and control to profit from them?

Before we continue our myth that 99 percent of Americans sleep on the side of angels and the other 1 percent bask with devils, we need to ask ourselves why we constantly blame others for the choices we permit those who we select, listen to, admire in power, to make on our behalf.

What would happen if we stopped blaming the Clinton administration and Phil Graham for eviscerating the Glass-Steagall Act, altering the Commodity Futures Trading act and neutering the SEC to assure Wall Street that no one among the banking elite would be subject to scandals leading to legal actions? Nor should we therefore blame Wall Street for its holding 100 trillion in credit default swaps and derivatives to continue their casino gambling.  

So let us stop blaming the attorney generals from all states for penalizing hundreds of banks and thousands of individuals, who engaged in criminal behavior – such as liar loans and robo-signing – with miniscule fines.  

Let us not blame the Federal Reserve for dishing out $16 trillion of taxpayer guaranteed loans with toxic valued assets and collateral at 0.25 interest across 20,000 transactions to domestic and foreign banks, hedge funds, and major corporations

Let us stop blaming Barack Obama and his administration for hiring only former Washington insiders from both the Clinton and Bush administrations to continue the entrenchment of corporate power in our policy decision making.

We must also stop blaming credit card companies who receive government loans at 0.25 percent and are permitted to debit cardholders at 29 percent or more for mispayments.
Let us not blame Walmart and major corporations from important cheap, toxic products manufactured with slave labor.

Let us not blame the economic experts who to this day paint a distorted picture of our recovery and growing economy.

Let us not blame the love-fests of the global elite at DAVOS and the Business Roundtable who believe their power, wealth and class status permit them to devise and direct our domestic and international policies.

Let us not blame the president and congress failing to implement a moratorium on home foreclosures and providing small businesses that qualify with no-interest loans, which could provide employment to millions of Americans.  

Let us forgive corporate America’s celebration of financial profits from off shoring jobs while having closed down over 50,000 factories in the US during the past dozen years and at the same time importing HB-1 foreign workers to replace 8.4 million educated American workers for lesser pay.
Neither should we blame Barack Obama for exonerating all the crimes of Bush-Cheney and their accomplices for knowingly creating secret intelligence offices in the Vice President office, which bypassed our national security apparatus, in order to divine a rationale for going to war in the Middle East.
As a constitutional scholar, let us not blame Obama for undermining our constitutional liberties by supporting the Patriot act, the Homeland Security act, FISA and the new National Defense Authorization Act that consolidates more power over Americans within the White House.  

Let us not blame the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC for manipulating state legislators to support bills and policies that would overturn and alter existing laws for financial gain to the ruling elite and the political campaigns of those who support them.  

Let us not blame the lobbyists, private consultants and experts, many of whom are former members of Congress or government agencies, who draft legislation that benefits their industries at the cost of the public good.

Let us not blame the military industrial intelligence-gathering industry for its massive financial fraud and redundant operations amounting to approximately $1.3 trillion annually when only $250 billion is necessary to keep Americans safe.  

Let us not blame the Bush and Obama administrations for neglecting 12 million hungry American children, the over 50 million citizens in deep poverty and the other 50 million working poor. And in the meantime, lets forgive the government for intentionally manipulating unemployment figures for political gain.

Let us not blame the House , Senate and the White House for supporting off shore oil drilling and billions of dollars in subsidies for clean coal, nuclear and hydrofracking natural gas while ignoring the cleaner more efficient geothermal and wave energy technologies.

Let us not blame any of the last five administrations for encouraging the FDA and the USDA to denounce complementary approaches for the prevention and treatment of disease while aligning federal health policies with the greed of Big Pharma and private insurance carriers who virtually write our healthcare programs, including Medicare, and prevents government from purchasing inexpensive generic drugs in order to reap an additional $1 trillion in profits.

Let us not blame our Surgeon General and our Secretary of Health and Human Services failing to offer alternative healthcare choices nationwide.  Rather, we should forgive the FDA its attacks on the natural and supplement industries, even preventing those who grow cherries and walnuts from suggesting these foods can actually prevent certain illnesses.

And while we are at it, let us forgive the FDA for permitting known pharmaceutical drugs that have maimed and killed thousands of patients to continue to be advertized and prescribed to patients.
Let us not blame American medicine for being the number one cause of death in the US while ignoring any criticism about its methodologies, drug’s evidence for efficacy and safety, and the regulatory approval processes.

Let us not blame the psychiatric industry for creating non-existent mental disorders, such as Oppositional Defiance Disorder, in order to increase medication rates and drug sale profits.  
Let us not blame the mental health centers in our inner cities for spearheading community programs to diagnose upward to 80 percent of children and young adults through erroneous test batteries such as Teen Screen to increase positive medical diagnoses.  

Let us not blame mainstream media for offering products that promote disease such as obesity and diabetes in children and adults.

Let us not blame the five past administrations for pushing neoliberal free-market globalization practices in their for globalization. Nor should we blame the IMF for the consequences of its draconian rules and structural readjustments opening markets in poor nations for foreign economic colonization.

Let us not blame the FBI, CIA and Homeland Securities for the militarization of our domestic police forces and their intrusion into our lives without warrant or due-process, including their punishing the dissent of peaceful environmental and social protesters who find themselves on enemy terrorist FBI watch lists.  
And lets forgive the dismal failures behind our government’s sanctioned domestic wars – the war on drugs, the war on cancer, the war against poverty, the war on terrorism – that serve only the high and mighty who profit from their bankrupt agendas.

Let us stop blaming the immense profits to private corporations running our prisons and the hidden agendas to incarcerate more Americans for minor misdemeanors and increase class warfare and renew Jim Crow racism with new forms of segregation.

Let us stop blaming teachers for graduating illiterate students and their curriculums designed by private corporations that never challenge students to have the intellectual skills to be independent, creative thinking human beings.  

Let us not blame the American media for failing to look honestly at economic  bubbles – equity partnerships, hedge funds, subprime and commercial market - -and then warning citizens in advance.
Let us not blame the producers within the entertainment industry who inundate us with vulgar, mind-numbing, violent programs and movies carries American culture to the bottom of etiquette, manners, decency and the ethics.

We must also forgive the agro-industrial complex -- the Monsantos and Duponts of the world -- who seek the monopolization of the global food supply and manipulate its control through genetic engineering of seeds.  

We must forgive all corporations who contribute to the pollution and destruction of our environment.
Let us cease blaming the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans and their mouthpieces in the media promulgating rigid ideologies that only serve the interests of those in power and not the common people.

Let us stop blaming the US military for causing the permanent disability and death of countless elderly, parents and children in the Middle East and forgive our media’s refusal to acknowledge their suffering.
Finally let us forgive all the administrations from JFK forward who expanded the military industrial complex for a global imperial outreach, sugar coated in the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, while simultaneously supporting dictators and despots around the world.

Let us also not blame the Republicans for claiming to represent smaller, efficient government while supporting the largest social welfare system in history for large banks and major corporations in the form of grotesque bailouts and subsidies.

When we cease to blame government, banks, corporations, the media and influential policy makers and opinion leaders for the choices we have made, then we must ask what personal and collective responsibilities are there for the plight and crises the nation is in?  Since our current system of governance is beyond reform from within the system itself, are we then capable of dissociating ourselves from it?

And we should pay attention to those who accept the torch of Emile Zola’s courage to speak truth to power and accuse those who deny freedom and democracy throughout the nation.  We do have our Zola’s in the voices of Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Engelhardt, Alan Grayson, Chris Hedges, Michael Hudson, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Ralph Nader, Greg Palast, Dylan Ratigan, Robert Reich, Rebecca Solnit, David Swanson, and others.

At this present moment, individuals identifying themselves as progressives and independents represent 41 percent of the population. If you are among this group, you are in the majority exceeding official Democrats and Republicans.  Therefore it is for us to decide, individually and collectively, what standards of ethically based policies and democratic structures should be fought for as we move forward.

Otherwise, just continue to watch Fox and the major networks in order to perpetuate the Manichaean myth of 99 versus 1 so the blame-game can live on. 

On Today's Gary Null Show: Guest Dylan Ratigan

Watch it LIVE Right Here:

Dylan Jason Ratigan is host of MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show, the highest-rated, non-prime time show on the network, aimed at critiquing what Ratigansees as an unholy alliance between big business and government. Dylan is the former Global Managing Editor for Corporate Finance at Bloomberg L.P., and has developed and launched more than half a dozen broadcast and new media properties. These include CNBC’s Fast Money and Closing Bell, as well as DylanRatigan.com, which is home to his podcast, “Greedy Bastards Antidote.” In 2004 he received the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for his coverage of the Enron scandal. His first book, Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry, was just released

Marie Diamond - Every Sperm Is Sacred! Dem. Lawmaker Sneaks 'Life Begins at Ejaculation' Amendment into Vile 'Personhood' Bill

Despite being rebuffed by voters in Mississippi and Colorado, proponents of the “personhood” movement are still pushing to enact legislation in states like Ohio and Oklahoma that would give zygotes the same rights as American citizens. These bills would not only criminalize abortion in all circumstances, they would also outlaw common forms of contraception, as well as in vitro fertilization.

To poke fun at the absurdity of the measure, Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson (D), has tacked on a provision affirming — in the words of a famous Monty Python song — that every sperm is sacred:

State Senator Constance Johnson of Oklahoma City has served Oklahoma’s 48th Senate District since 2005, but it was yesterday’s introduction of Senate Bill 1433 that really pushed her over the edge. The bill sought to define human life as beginning at the moment of conception, before it’s even implanted in the womb, and offers full legal protection to those tiny multicelled lumps. In the words of the bill, “the unborn child at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Read More:

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/02/08/421018/oklahoma-democrat-adds-every-sperm-is-sacred-amendment-to-personhood-bill/?mobile=nc

Ruth Marcus - Obama and Romney Exhibit Striking Similarities

The general election is shaping up as a contest between two remarkably similar men.

Not ideologically. Despite the Newt Gingrich-peddled notion that “there really is no difference” between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the gulf in political philosophy is enormous.

Both men, left to their own devices, would occupy a centrist place within their own parties. But Obama envisions a far more muscular role for government in general and the federal government in particular. Romney’s faith is primarily — excessively, in my view — in the free market.

Still, assuming that Romney becomes the Republican nominee, the two candidates will share surprisingly similar temperaments and habits of mind. They are different from the standard-issue politician — both are more aloof than gregarious, more cerebral than impassioned.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-and-romney-exhibit-striking-similarities-1328804179

William T. Hathaway - Are Wars Inevitable?

These assumptions have become axioms of our culture. They generate despair but also a certain comfort because they relieve us of the responsibility to change.

Some politicians and pundits declare that human nature makes peace impossible, that war is built into our genes. They point to research by evolutionary biologists that indicates our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, make war. Therefore war must be part of our heredity. It's true that in certain situations chimpanzees do raid neighboring colonies and kill other chimps. Those studies on killer apes got enormous publicity because they implied that war is hardwired into human nature. Most scientists didn't draw those conclusions from the evidence, but the mass media kept reinforcing that message.

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/hathaway230112.htm

Mac Slavo - Soros Warns of Violent Riots In America, Financial Collapse, Government clampdown

From time to time we get a peek inside the mind of a true insider. George Soros knows a thing or two about destabilization and far from equilibrium situations. He’s been on the giving and receiving ends of both. From surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, to single handily crashing the currencies of entire nations, the experience he brings to the table should not be ignored.

With his deep connections in economic and political circles, if there’s anyone who knows what’s coming next, it’s Soros. In his book The Crash of 2008 and What It Means Soros warned that no matter what governments did, there was no way out of the trap in which the world – namely The United States – finds itself:

“So what does the end of an era really mean? I contend that it means the end of a long period of relative stability based on the United States as the dominant power and the dollar as the main international reserve currency. I foresee a period of political and financial instability, hopefully to be followed by the emergence of a new world order.”

Read More:

http://www.shtfplan.com/george-soros/soros-warns-of-violent-riots-in-america-financial-collapse-government-clampdown-survival-is-the-most-important-thing_01242012 

William Astore - Weapons ‘R’ Us

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175493/ 

Steven Thomma - Obama to Frame Re-Election Themes Tuesday in State of the Union Address

President Barack Obama delivers an election-year State of the Union address Tuesday night at a moment when the country is worried about the economy and his own prospects for re-election are mixed at best. Americans rank the economy their top concern, and domestic issues are at their highest level on their priority list in 15 years, according to one new poll Monday. At the same time, Obama continues to win the approval of less than half the country — lower than the last two presidents heading into their re-election years and similar to George H.W. Bush in 1992, the last incumbent to lose his bid for a second term. One big difference: Bush's numbers were heading down; Obama's are lackluster but stable.

Obama hopes the speech will help him frame the coming election on his terms rather than the themes heard daily from Republicans in Congress and those on the campaign trail competing for the party nomination to oppose him.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-frame-re-election-themes-tuesday-state-union-address-1327422339

David Rosen - The Mass Psychology of Newt Gingrich

Are hypocrites born or made? Is false consciousness a social disease? These are among the unasked questions haunting the 2012 Republican presidential race.

The four surviving candidates are hypocrites. Mitt Romney is the guy-next-door everyman with a quarter-billion-dollars in his pocket; Rick Santorum is the blue-collar everyman who has learned to work the corporate con for self-serving ends; Ron Paul is the white everyman standing before a giant Confederate flag proclaiming that the South was right seceding from the Union; and then there is Newt Gingrich, the shameless everyman who sheds his past like a snake loses its old skin.

Gingrich is the most hypocritical presidential candidate in modern history. But the significance of his hypocrisy can only be fully appreciated in terms of his surprising Jan. 21^st primary victory in South Carolina. Approximately 40 percent of registered Republicans willingly accepting his fiction. This is the politics of false consciousness.

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/27/the-mass-psychology-of-newt-gingrich/

David A Love - The US government's capital punishment prerogative

While much attention is paid to the 34 US states that still administer the death penalty, federal and military systems of executions also exist. The retention of the US federal death penalty undermines those states that have abolished capital punishment– and federal executions undermine Washington's claims of world leadership in human rights.

Historically, perhaps the most well-known federal executions were of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York. The Rosenbergs were convicted of Soviet espionage and electrocuted in 1953, at a time of anti-communist hysteria, amid charges of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct and a climate of antisemitism.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/27/us-government-capital-punishment

Peter Van Buren - Silent State – Washington’s Campaign Against Whistleblowers

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/

Steven Higgs - Rocky Anderson: “Overthrow the Dictatorship of Money”

Rocky Anderson is always deferential to Occupy Wall Street when asked about the movement, most recently in a Jan. 31 interview with the online environmental magazine Grist. Occupy has been a “very healthy thing in this country,” and there’s an “enormous convergence” between its concerns and his. But for inspiration, the Justice Party candidate points to Tahrir Square, not Zucotti Park.

“One of the great inspirations for us was what we saw in much of the Arab world, where people were intent on overthrowing their nations’ dictators,” he told Grist’s special projects editor Greg Hanscom during a wide-ranging Q&A. “… They put their lives on the line, utilizing democratized means of communication through social networking and engaging in classic grassroots organizing — and they succeeded.”

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/07/rocky-anderson-overthrow-the-dictatorship-of-money/

Nerve Gas To Be Used for Crowd Control in the UK?

A neuroscience research team has announced that the UK may be planning on implementing nerve gas and other chemical agents for domestic law enforcement. Scientists commissioned through Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences, says that the government commissioned them to research new developments in neuroscience that would 'be of use to the military'. The group of scientists has become aware that the government may be preparing to use incapacitating chemical agents for crowd control.

The Independent reports:

Leading neuroscientists believe that the UK Government may be about to sanction the development of nerve agents for British police that would be banned in warfare under an international treaty on chemical weapons.

Read More:

https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/07-4

Robert Reich - The American Middle Class Is Becoming Poor, and Mitt Romney Doesn’t Realize It

January’s increase in hiring is good news, but it masks a bigger and more disturbing story – the continuing downward mobility of the American middle class.

Most of the new jobs being created are in the lower-wage sectors of the economy – hospital orderlies and nursing aides, secretaries and temporary workers, retail and restaurant. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain working only because they’ve agreed to cuts in wages and benefits. Others are settling for jobs that pay less than the jobs they’ve lost. Entry-level manufacturing jobs are paying half what entry-level manufacturing jobs paid six years ago.

Other people are falling out of the middle class because they’ve lost their jobs, and many have also lost their homes. Almost one in three families with a mortgage is now underwater, holding their breath against imminent foreclosure.

Read More:

http://robertreich.org/post/17162027435

William Pfaff - Europe Decides Not to Play America’s Game

The annual Munich Security Conference is regularly the scene for the complaints of American official and semiofficial participants deploring Europe’s failure “to pull its weight” in defense, “free-riding” on American efforts, and failing to spend more money on trans-Atlantic arms purchases. Instead they spend money on their own-make arms and military aircraft, such as the French Rafale and EADS’ Eurofighter, which they sell to such overseas markets as India that might otherwise buy American.

Courtesy restrains the European participants from asking what the threat is, against which Europe is being defended by the United States. The complaint reasonable Americans usually make in this matter is that the U.S. is massively over-armed against any existing or plausible future threat to the United States itself.

Surely 11 nuclear carrier groups with accompanying support is not required to fight the remnants of al-Qaida, nor have they proven decisive against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/europe_decides_not_to_play_americas_game_20120207/

Tana Ganeva - 7 Privacy Threats the Constitution Can't Protect You Against

The week before last, the Roberts Supreme Court uncharacteristically handed down a decision that doesn't radically infringe on civil liberties. The justices unanimously ruled that police overshot their authority by planting a GPS device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones' car without a warrant, tracking his movements for over a month. For now, Americans can rest assured that police can't secretly tag them -- at least without a warrant.

At the same time, privacy advocates pointed out -- and some of the justices admitted -- that the court's majority opinion in US vs. Jones completely skirted more pressing privacy issues. The problem, the majority argued, was that police had trespassed on Jones' private property by planting a GPS device on his car. The majority opinion did not address whether or not it's okay for law enforcement to use a sophisticated surveillance technology to log someone's movements for a whole month without a warrant. 

In separate, concurring opinions Justices Alito and Sotomayor both warned of the multitude of surveillance technologies that do not require intrusion onto private property to trample privacy rights. Here's a (non-comprehensive) breakdown of existing or impending technologies that make our privacy protections wildly outdated. 

1. Everything you use, all the time.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153999/7_privacy_threats_the_constitution_can%27t_protect_you_against

Robert Hunziker - Third World Capitalism

How did this happen? America, the czar of capitalism, is becoming a third world country!

According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau report 46.2 million Americans are poor. Of course, the naysaying dissenters claim poor families, as defined in the U.S., include households with adequate food most of the time, a home, a TV, a telephone, and likely a DVD and/or a PC, and a car. Not so bad after all! This is likely very true; however, consider the poverty threshold, as defined by the Census Bureau, for a family with two children in 2010 at $22,113; dissenting naysayers say: So what, over three billion people live on less than $2.50 per day. So, what’s up with this claim that 46.2 million people in America are poor? Are they really poor?

A typical family of four in America spends $664.20 per month on food, assuming they eat on a low-cost plan, according to the USDA statistics; a liberal plan is $1013.80/mo. This means the family has $1,178.55/mo. remaining for everything else like health insurance of $414/mo., which is the nationwide average monthly premium. Thus, the family of four has 764.55 remaining for items like car payments, and the average car payment in America is $475, but since these are the poor, let’s assume it is half this amount for an inferior car or $237.50/mo., and average car insurance according to a national index is $137.91/mo. and median monthly housing costs run about $700 for renters. Adding and subtracting all above= a negative $310.86 per month. Thus, the average family of four has to cut out $310.86/mo. from food, health insurance, transportation, or housing costs in order to break even. No wonder so many Americans do not have health insurance because if they eliminate health insurance, they have $103.14, or $3.44 per day, left over for washing clothes, dental, movies, shopping for clothing or shoes, books, magazines, gasoline, car repairs, emergency expenses and whatever else one desires. They really are poor!

Read More:

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/02/03/THIRD-WORLD-CAPITALISM/

LT. COL. Daniel L. Davis - Truth, lies and Afghanistan

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

Read More:

http://armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030

S P Seth - Is US-China collision inevitable?

Even as Iran has come centre-stage of another likely military conflict in the Middle East with the US and its western allies determined to force it to forgo its nuclear programme, the Asia-Pacific region is emerging as another potential trouble spot pitting China against the US. With the US now disengaged from Iraq, and in the process of military withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, it has dawned on Washington that China has strengthened its role in the Asia-Pacific and is slowly, but steadily, working to push it out of the region. China regards the Asia-Pacific as its strategic space and the US as an external power. The US has decided to hit back by declaring that it is not going anywhere and, indeed, will beef up its military presence in the region. Straddling both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the US considers itself a legitimate Pacific country.

US-China relations have never been easy. They are likely to become even more complicated after the recent announcement of a US defence review that prioritises the Asia-Pacific region. Even though the review seeks to make sizeable cuts of about $500 billion in the US’s defence budget over the next 10 years, it would not be at the cost of its engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. Indeed, as President Obama told reporters, “We will be strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific...”

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29117