The Pentagon called it the "long war" in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), what past administrations waged every year without exception since the republic's birth, at home and abroad. Obama is just the latest of America's warrior presidents that included Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.

This article covers WW II and its aftermath history of imperial wars for unchallengeable global dominance throughout a period when America had and still has no enemies. Then why fight them? Read on.

Wars Without End

America glorifies wars in the name of peace, what historian Charles Beard (1874 - 1948) called "perpetual war for perpetual peace" in describing the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' foreign policies - what concerned the Federation of American Scientists when it catalogued about 200 post-1945 conflicts in which America was, and still is, the aggressor.

Historian Gore Vidal used Beard's phrase in titling his 2002 book, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" and saying:

"our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own."

In his 2002 book "Dreaming War," he compared GW Bush's imperial ambitions to WW II and the 1947 Truman Doctrine's pledge:

"To support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

It was to keep Greece and Turkey from going communist, but it applied globally and initiated America's National Security State strategy that included:

- NATO in 1949 for offense, not defense;

- NSC-68 against Soviet Russia in 1950 to "contain" what was called an enemy "unlike previous aspirants to hegemony....animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own (wishing to) impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world" at a time America was the only global superpower, the Soviet Union lay in ruins, threatened no one, and needed years to regain normality.

Then came:

- Truman's instigated June 25, 1950 war after the DPRK retaliated in force following months of ROK provocations, what Americans call the Korean War, South Koreans the 6-2-5 War (meaning June 25), and the North its "fatherland liberation war" that left it in ruins, the South occupied to this day, and it was only the mid-century beginning as succeeding administrations continued an agenda for what's now called "full spectrum dominance" for global US hegemony.

It worried historian Harry Elmer Barnes (1889 - 1968) in his 1953 collection of leading historical revisionists' essays titled, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It's Aftermath" in which he wrote in the preface:

"If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on 'the cultural traditions' of mankind."

He cited how America's "needless" entry into two world wars converted its pre-1914 dream "into a nightmare of fear, regimentation, destruction, insecurity, inflation, and ultimate insolvency." He debunked the cause and merits of WW I, "the folly of our entering it, and the disastrous results that followed." He cited "popular fictions" about WW II, the injustices to Germany and Austria that caused it, the war Roosevelt wanted early in the 1930s as captured Polish documents and the censored Forrestal Diaries confirmed.

Before it began, he wanted US neutrality legislation ended, then after September 1939, he dropped any pretense by supporting Britain and France and opposing peace efforts after Poland's defeat. His June 1940 "dagger in the back" address was a de facto act of war by beginning vast amounts of weapons and munitions shipments to Britain after Dunkirk, followed by the September 1940 (peacetime) Selective Service Act, the first in US history, in preparation for what close advisor Harry Hopkins told Churchill in January 1941 that:

"The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it," followed by Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark telling his fleet commanders that "The question of our entry into the war now seems to be when, and not whether."

Only a pretext was needed, first by trying and failing to provoke Germany, then deciding Japan would be attacked, whether or not it struck US ships, territory, or forces in the Pacific. In a July 4 radio broadcast, Roosevelt said:

"solemnly (understand) that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship." Then his July 25 Executive Order froze Japanese assets, stating it was:

"....To prevent the use of the financial facilities of the United States in trade between Japan and the United States in ways harmful to national defense and American interests, to prevent the liquidation in the United States of assets obtained by duress or conquest, and to curb subversive activities in the United States."

Britain followed suit the next day, and Roosevelt nationalized the Philippines' armed forces "as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" with dominion over its Asian colony.

As early as 1937, he planned a naval blockade, but dropped the idea after an adverse reaction. It resurfaced in 1938 because he knew strangling Japan economically assured war.

Throughout his administration, from 1933 through late 1941, he spurned Japanese peace overtures that would have protected all American interests in the Pacific. By November 25, the final die was cast. America chose war, and on that day, War Secretary Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that it depended only on how to maneuver Japan to attack with the lowest number of US casualties.

Tokyo had no other recourse, knowing it couldn't win, but hoping for a negotiated settlement to solidify whatever Asian control it could retain. It failed, lost the war, and remains an occupied US vassal state.

In the late 1930s, Roosevelt encouraged a Japanese attack by stationing the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor against the advice of two key admirals, James Richardson, Pacific Fleet commander and Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations until March 1942.

Selling arms to Japan's enemies and an embargo assured war, and US cable documentation confirmed it was coming. Breaking the Japanese code let Britain and Washington track its fleet from the Kurile Islands to its North Pacific refueling point en route to Pearl Harbor on or about December 7.

At a December 5 cabinet meeting, Navy Secretary Frank Knox said: "Well, you know Mr. President, we know where the Japanese fleet is?"

"Yes, I know," responded Roosevelt, saying "Well, you tell them what it is Frank," who explained where it was, where it was heading until Roosevelt interrupted adding that perfect information wasn't available in spite of navy reports confirming it in Pacific waters heading toward Hawaii. On December 6, officials awaited the attack until it came the next morning at 7:55AM Hawaii time.

It was a day of infamy and deceit, with Pearl Harbor's commander, Admiral HE Kimmel, denied crucial intelligence to let it proceed unimpeded, arouse public anger, and give FDR his war - one decoded Japanese messages showed they didn't want but Roosevelt gave them no choice.

Like other presidents, he lied the country into war against the wishes of 80% of the public, at a cost of millions of lives in both theaters, and a policy henceforth of perpetual wars for perpetual peace to achieve unchallengeable US dominance. In the modern era, FDR's foreign policy began it, leaving a bankrupted moral and political legacy active to this day.

Consider also what revisionist historians say about Lincoln - that he provoked the Fort Sumpter (in Charleston, SC harbor) attack and began the Civil War for economic reasons, not to end slavery.

Consider also that ordinary people and soldiers don't want war, just their leaders and commanders - to wit, Christmas 1914 during WW I when German and British troops stopped fighting, didn't know why they were doing it, then defied orders by fraternizing with each other for two weeks despite risking being court-martialed. Unable to stop them, their officers joined them in a celebratory pause that didn't stop another three years of carnage, millions of lost lives, and post-war policies that assured WW II.

The lesson is clear. All wars are immoral, unnecessary, and only happen when one side provokes the other for reasons unrelated to national security threats.

In his seminal book, "A Century of War," Gabriel Kolko called the 20th century:

"the bloodiest in all history. More than 170 million people were killed," 70% of whom in WW II were civilians, "mainly (from) the bombing of cities by Great Britain and America." There was nothing good about "the good war" nor any others.

In Kolko's later book "Another Century of War," he stressed how America contributes to much of the world's disorder through its interventions and as the world's largest arms producer and exporter. Post-WW II, the US became a global menace, today claiming "terrorism" as the main threat - a bogus fiction to justify militarism, perpetual wars heading the nation for moral, political and economic bankruptcy. According to Kolko:

"The way America's leaders are running the nation's foreign policy is not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions have been counterproductive."

In his newest book, "The World in Crisis," Kolko believes that America's decline "began after the Korean War, was continued in relation to Cuba, and was greatly accelerated in Vietnam - but (GW Bush did) much to exacerbate it further." He also thinks:

- US power is declining everywhere;

- "the world is no longer dependent on its economic might" because other nations like China and India are growing and may some day equal or surpass America;

- after the Soviet Union's collapse, "the absence of identifiable foes has been a disaster, leaving the US aimless - (so) it picks and chooses enemies: rag-tag Afghan tribesmen, Iraqis or all sorts, perhaps China, perhaps Russia....South American caudillos," whatever bogus ones can be invented for imperial wars, but the justification is wearing thin, and the burgeoning cost unsustainable.

The result is that America's "century of domination is now ending."

America's Permanent War Economy

It's how Seymour Melman (1917 - 2004) characterized it in his books and frequents writings on America's military-industrial complex. One of his last articles was titled "In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy (CounterPunch, March 15, 2003) in which he said:

"at the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life is being shaped by our Permanent War Economy." He then examined the horrific toll:

- a de-industrialized nation, the result of decades of shifting production abroad leaving unions and communities "decimated;"

- government financing and promoting "every kind of war industry and foreign investing by US firms;" war priorities take precedence over essential homeland needs;

- America's "Permanent War Economy....has endured since the end of World War II....Since then the US has been at war - somewhere - every year, in Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan - all this to the accompaniment of shorter military forays in Africa, Chile, Grenada, Panama," and increasingly at home against its own people;

- "how to make war" takes precedence over everything leaving no "public space....on how to improve the quality of our lives;"

- "Shortages of housing have caused a swelling of the homeless population in every major city (because) State and city governments across the country have become trained to bend to the needs of the military....;" the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) currently estimates over 21,000 are on city streets nightly, and during winter months it's dangerous;

- the result is a nation of growing millions of poor, disadvantaged, uneducated, and "disconnected from society's mainstream, restless and unhappy, frustrated, angry, and sad;"

"State Capitalism" characterizes America's government - business partnership running a war economy for greater power and wealth at the expense of a nation in decline, corrupted leadership, lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, and suffering millions on their own, uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten.

Melman stressed that:

"Further evasion is out of order. We must come to grips with America's State Capitalism and its Permanent War Economy." Re-industrialization is essential "to restore jobs and production competence - industry by industry."

"Failing that, there is no hope for any constructive exit," for the nation or its people.

Dwight Eisenhower's January 17, 1961 Address to the Nation

It was his farewell address delivered 30 years to the day before Operation Desert Storm began in which he warned about the "military-industrial complex," citing the "grave implications" of a "coalition of the military and industrialists who profit by manufacturing arms and selling them to the government."

He stated "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence....by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

He also said that:

"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed," the result of what some analysts call the "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon, and the defense industry that includes producers of sophisticated technology for digital age warfare of a kind Eisenhower never imagined.

In combination, they've addicted America to war, not for threats, but for the power and profits that result. In his book "The Political Economy of US Militarism," Professor Ismael Hossein-Zadeh refers to "parasitic military imperialism," consuming over 40% of the national tax revenue at the expense of unmet human needs.

Morality aside, it's not justified economically. It's wasteful, inefficient, comes at a great cost, and over time is ineffective and self-destructive.

"The control over huge amounts of national resources tends to lead to an undermining of democratic values, a perversion of republican principles and a reduction of civil freedoms, as well as to the political corruption at home and abroad." Moreover, "The constant need for international conflicts makes (America's) military imperialism....more dangerous than the imperial powers of the past."

It's made war-making a giant enterprise "not only for expansionism but, in fact, for the survival of this empire," yet consider the fallout Hossein-Zadeh examined in a July 10, 2007 article titled, "Parasitic Imperialism:"

- the redistribution of income and resources to the wealthy;

- the undermining of physical and human capital;

- the nation's increased vulnerability to natural disasters;

- economic and financial instability, the result of the growing national debt now totally out of control;

- less foreign market potential for non-military ventures;

- the undermining of civil liberties and democratic values; and

- "foster(ing) a dependence on or addiction to military spending, and, therefore....a spiraling vicious circle of (unsustainable) war and militarism" that's sucking the nation into decline.

America's Post-WW II Imperial Grand Strategy

Post-WW II, America emerged as the world's sole superpower - economically, politically and militarily, given the war's toll on East Asia, Europe and Soviet Russia. In his book, "The Cold War and the New Imperialism," Professor Henry Heller examined it with emphasis on the Cold War, America's containment policy, and its efforts against leftist forces in support of fascist elements on the right at both state and local levels.

The Soviet Union controlled Eastern and Central Europe while Mao's War of Liberation defeated Chiang Kai-Shek Nationalists. Cold War confrontation followed. It pitted US imperialism against an opposing ideology, the aim being which side would triumph or could both co-exist peacefully and avoid conflict.

War was never an option given each side's nuclear strength under a policy of "mutually assured destruction (MAD)". In addition, post-Stalinist Russia began reforms and expanded its sphere of influence. It wasn't to destroy the West, but to co-exist equally. America and Soviet Russia only competed for developing country allies to keep them from the opposing camp, so neither would be dominated by the other or more vulnerable to being isolated, marginalized, or shut out from world markets and influence.

US Imperialism Post-WW II

James Petras and others have said behind every imperial war is a great lie, the more often repeated the more likely to be believed because ordinary people want peace, not conflict, so it's vital to convince them.

In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration overthrew two popularly elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, and sought greater influence in Africa and Southeast Asia as anti-colonial movements gained strength.

On January 1, 1959 Fidel Castro's socialist revolution ousted the US-backed Batista dictatorship. He then survived America's failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, but faced decades of US hostility, including an embargo, destabilization, intimidation, and hundreds of attempts to kill him, unsuccessful so Cuba is still free from US dominance, but hardly safe from its northern hegemon.

In the 1950s, America also backed French Southeast Asian imperialism until defeat at Dien Bien Phu drove them out. A repressive South Vietnamese client regime was established at the same time, supported by US military advisors teaching war and repression tactics. Unifying North and South elections were blocked, and direct intervention began in 1961. In 1958, Washington also subverted Laotian democracy and incited civil war. Cambodia as well was targeted but remained free.

Early in his administration, Kennedy intervened, but a new James Douglass book titled "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" says without conviction because he opposed using force. After the Joint Chiefs demanded troops for Laos, he told his Geneva Conference representative, Averell Harriman:

"Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don't want to put troops in."

He wouldn't agree to using nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia and refused to bomb or invade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, saying afterwards that "I never had the slightest intention of doing so."

In June 1963 (a few months before his assassination), he called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, ending the Cold War, and moving forward for "general and complete disarmament." In October 1963, he signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 to withdraw 1,000 US forces from Vietnam by year end and all of them by 1965. He said he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." He wanted peace, not conflicts. It cost him his life, and future presidents got the message.

Johnson resumed Southeast Asian escalation to establish client regimes and military bases across East and South Asia, encircle China, and crush nationalist anti-imperial movements. The Indochinese war engulfed Cambodia and Laos as well under Johnson and Nixon. It killed three to four million, inflicted vast amounts of destruction, caused incalculable human suffering, got America to sign a peace treaty in January 1973, but war continued until its clients were defeated in April 1975.

Prior to Reagan's election, the "Vietnam syndrome" and easing Cold War tensions and disarmament efforts alarmed militarists to fear defense spending cuts detrimental to profits. A propaganda campaign exaggerated bogus threats, manipulated intelligence to heighten fear, and got the Reagan administration to approve large military spending increases to confront "Soviet expansionism" at a time it was transitioning from Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko to Gorbachev in 1985, followed by perestroika in 1986, glasnost in 1988, border openings and the Berlin Wall's collapse in 1989, then the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 - a new threat militarists feared would bring large, not to be tolerated, defense budgets cuts.

In the late 1980s, however, leading figures, including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Albert Wohlstetter alleged Third World conflicts threatened US interests in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Western Pacific, and recommended deterrence to stop them. Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney agreed. Others wanted large defense cuts for a peace dividend, including Johnson's DOD chief Robert McNamara who proposed reductions up to 50%.

Throughout the 1989 - 1999 period, mostly under Bill Clinton, US-instigated provocations, sanctions, and armed insurrections support involved America in 134 military operations according to the Federation of American Scientists. The most egregious was Clinton's bombing and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, an act playwright Harold Pinter called:

"barbaric" and despicable, "another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile" to consolidate "American domination of Europe." Worse was yet to come with the election of George Bush, America's worst president in a country that never had a good one and never will as it's now governed.

Long before 9/11, Middle East restructuring plans were based on bogus terrorist, rogue state, and "clash of civilizations" threats by hordes of Islamofascists, including the Palestinian resistance, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Saddam Hussein targeted in the 1990 - 91 Gulf War, followed by years of devastating sanctions, then ousted by GW Bush in 2003.

Iraq was destroyed, occupied and balkanized. Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran face similar threats, the common thread being dominating Eurasia through endless conflicts and increased military spending for war profiteering bounties. September 11 assured it, and got Michelle Ciarocca of the Arms Trade Resource Center, in September 2002 to say:

"The whole mind set of military spending changed on Sept. 11. The most fundamental thing about defense spending is that threats drive (it). It's now going to be easier to fund almost anything."

Hossein-Zadeh investigated the growing role of private contractors creating a "built-in propensity to war that makes the US military-industrial complex a menace to world peace and stability, a force of death and destruction," as virulent under Obama as George Bush.

The fallout includes a burgeoning national debt, loss of civil liberties and democratic freedoms, erosion of social services, collapse of the dollar, America already in decline, its coming loss of preeminence as a world power, its potential bankruptcy, perhaps demise in its present form. and the possibility of WW III.

America's Illegal Wars of Aggression - The "Supreme Crime"

All US post-WW II conflicts were premeditated wars of aggression against nations posing no threat to America - what Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg called:

the "supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Canadian Law Professor Michael Mandel explained America's guilt in his superb 2004 book, "How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity," his main theme being Jackson's Nuremberg "supreme crime" declaration, as relevant now as then.

Tragically, as Edward Herman observed in reviewing Mandel's book:

"The problem for the United States (and the world) has been that this country is now in the business of aggression and its commission of the "supreme crime" is standard policy, thereby bringing the "scourge of war" across the globe in direct violation of the UN charter."

Its Purposes and Principles state that:

"The Purposes of the United Nations are:

(1) To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace."

Conspiratorially with NATO and Israel, America willfully and repeatedly violates international and US laws, punishes its victims, absolves itself, and since WW II has directly or indirectly murdered millions of people globally, mostly civilian non-combatants.

Barack Obama - America's New Warrior President

America glorifies conflicts and the righteousness of waging them, packaged as liberating ones for democracy, freedom, justice, and the best of all possible worlds. Obama is just the latest in a long line of warrior leaders promising peace by waging war, justifying them by bogus threats, and calling pacifism unpatriotic to further an imperial agenda for greater wealth, power, and unchallengeable global dominance.

In opposition to his announced Afghanistan surge, peace activists gathered across from the White House on December 12 for an "Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally" organized by "End US Wars"- a new coalition of grassroots anti-war organizations.

Speakers included Kathy Kelly, David Swanson, Granny D (age 100 on January 24, 2010) former Senator Mike Gravel (1969 - 1981), and former Representative and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, among others.

This writer was asked to prepare a short commentary to be read to the crowd. Updated, it's reproduced below:

Obama's Permanent War Strategy

Disingenuously calling Afghanistan a "war of necessity, not choice," Obama ordered 30,000 more troops deployed over the next six months with perhaps many more to follow. In one of his most defining decisions, he's more than doubled the force count since taking office, angered a majority in the country, and continues his permanent war agenda while calling himself a man of peace.

Next target, Yemen, and its newest, occupied Haiti for plunder, exploitation, and very likely killing unwanted Haitians by neglect, starvation, disease, and face-to-face confrontations if they resist.

As a candidate, Obama campaigned against imperial militarism, promised limited escalation only, and pledged to remove all combat troops from Iraq by August 31, 2010. That was then. This is now, and consider what he has in mind - the permanent occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and more.

Besides the Afghan escalation, he's also destabilizing Pakistan to balkanize both countries, weakening them to control the Caspian Sea's oil and gas riches and their energy routes to secured ports for export. The strategy includes encircling Russia, China, and Iran, obstructing their solidarity and cohesion, defusing a feared geopolitical alliance, weakening the Iranian government, perhaps attacking its nuclear sites, eliminating Israel's main regional rival, and securing unchallenged Eurasian dominance over this resource rich part of the world that includes China, Russia, the Middle East, and Indian subcontinent.

Like George Bush, Obama plans permanent war and more military spending than all other nations combined at a time America has no enemies. He promised change and betrayed us. Grassroots activism must stop this madness and make America a nation again to be proud of. The alternative is too grim to imagine.

Over 50 years ago, Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) warned:

"Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war" and live in peace, because we have no other choice.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Most religions have within them the philosophical/moral basis for the establishment of a democracy.

Most would fit a social democracy or even true communal communism if beliefs accorded to family and community were respected and implemented. The discussions about the umma within Islam, the communalism within Christianity, and some of the Talmudic traditions within Judaism, all carry strong elements of democracy. Most importantly as will be discussed later, is the attention to the weak and the poor within society, as well as care for society in general and the environment - and at the opposite end, the kings and rulers were not above the law. Unfortunately many religions - and certain sects within all religions - become dogmatically structured around a patriarchal system, or become entangled in some political philosophy that denies the communal-democratic basis of the religion.

Volumes could be written arguing from this perspective on the ins and outs and validity of democracy versus church regulations versus theological interpretations but
there are two points I wish to make here. First is the concept of a Jewish and democratic state. Secondly, the semi-religious beliefs of Confucianism raise the idea of a meritocracy as a possible permutation of democracy.

A democratic and Jewish state?

Many problems occur around the idea of a state that determines its democracy on the basis of one particular religion. While Israel is not alone in this, it serves as an indicator of how far religious zealotry and dogma and political will based on that zealotry - through belief or simple utility - can deny democracy to its citizens and to citizens of areas that it controls.

It is obvious that there is nothing democratic about an occupation. Democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, both occupied countries, is essentially a farce. A government supported by foreign money, a country that has various war lords serving within its institutions, a government that would change dramatically if the occupiers withdrew cannot by any definition other than the lie of propaganda be considered a democracy. For Israel, its denial of Palestinian rights with the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself is a denial of democracy. It is a denial of democracy prejudiced upon a religious "holier than thou" belief system - in which the "thou" becomes homo sacer, the other, outside the law and thus subject to whatever treatment is accorded it without retort - and it is omnipresent in all areas of Israeli/Palestinian society.

The pure lie of democracy as a gift from the rulers, the elite, was fully demonstrated during the Palestinian elections in which Hamas emerged a surprise winner. This democratic victory was quickly denied by the U.S., Canada, and Israel, with the ongoing results being the continued subjugation of the Palestinian Authority to the Israeli political will and the demonization of Hamas and its enclave of Gaza, an enclave determined mainly by outside forces trying to entrap Hamas. Which is in effect what happened, again with results that demonstrate the full lack of democratic ideals of the Israeli government as it subjects the territory to ongoing containment - essentially a huge outdoor prison camp - and savage military attacks that are demonstrably against international law. Democracy has only been achieved by the people, the demos, standing up for their rights, fighting against the abuses of the elites and rulers - and that fight is at its most physical and savage in occupied territories such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and even more so in Palestine.

A democratic meritocracy?

With the rise of Chinese power through economic wealth, technological advancements, and increases in its military budget, most recent works on China as the rising power of the East contain arguments about the nature of Chinese society as influenced by its Confucian background.[3] While not truly a religion, its philosophical underpinnings and the manner in which it is used parallel in certain respects the philosophical structures of the other main religions. Part of the Confucian belief system is that of an ordered society, with a hierarchal structure, but it is not a completely rigid structure and is supported by the belief and application of the concept of merit as a means of advancement.

Historically the rulers and elites of Chinese society were supported by a bureaucracy that was determined theoretically by the merits of those doing the work. The merit was established by a series of examinations to determine the best candidates for the bureaucracy. The rulers themselves were perceived to be there on merit, and if they no longer deserved or earned the merit of the populace, they would be overthrown. These greatly simplified explanations give support to the concept of the intellectual rigor that the Chinese apply to their education. It can also in part help explain the demographic statistic indicating that the distribution of wealth within a meritocracy, in this case China, is not nearly as widespread as in the "democracies" - of which the U.S. has one of the largest spreads in the world. China's current economic growth is increasing the spread, but the idea of a meritocracy remains strongly within its societal structures.

It is hard to imagine a meritocracy in place in North America. Very few of our politicians would merit any of their positions or wealth if they had to pass tests in order to be in power. Many of our politicians are surprisingly ignorant of much of the world, its cultures and beliefs, its geography and life. Democracy in North America comes from the power of wealth and not from the power of common sense and merit. While a meritocracy is not necessarily democratic, it certainly has a level of appeal and would be a highly valid instrument to incorporate within a democracy. Perhaps China will become democratic after all, in a manner that most pundits observing China are not even capable of considering, a social democratic meritocracy.

Today's democracy

Another look at today's democracies and their achievement of wealth demonstrates that free enterprise had very little to do with that wealth creation. Rather, all countries that have harvested the world's wealth have done so by protecting their own industries and products at the expense of those from other countries. This applies to the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish empires, as well as to the American empire. It also applies to the current rise in the wealth of the Chinese. Protection can be afforded in many ways, from tariffs, to quotas, to tax laws, to rules and regulations imposed on imported goods. However it is achieved, most countries that have become wealthy have done so through some form of protectionism.

The authors of the books on China mentioned above relate how this is true of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all but the latter being considered democratic and held up as exemplars of free trade capitalism. Neither concept holds. They all operate as quasi democracies, having succeeded economically with strong government support and interventions, while the democratic aspect is arguably much more in line with the Confucian meritocracy of China. Certainly the people vote, but it is the underlying bureaucracy and rules and regulations of business and the economy that truly determine the power of the government, not the people, the 'demos'.

Examined in that light, many other countries become nominal democracies as well, with that paragon of self -defined enlightenment and freedom, the United States, presenting many aspects of its political culture that deny democracy to its people. The U.S. along with many other western countries are more correctly a plutocracy or an oligarchy, where the wealthy control the power structures of the country.

An aspect of democracy that is singularly lacking in the western powers is that of the openness and transparency that they all call upon others to demonstrate. Corporations, as seen above are decidedly non-transparent, as are their military liaisons and their governmental cohorts. Corporate secrets, government secrets, are subject to tests under the Freedom of Information Laws extent in most democracies, yet it is increasingly more and more difficult to access full information without denial through classification or redaction.

It can be argued that the reasons for this secrecy have very little to do with intellectual property rights, or that the information is "too sensitive" to be dealt with by the public, or that the security of the country will be compromised. Governments and businesses keep secrets not for the protection of the business, the government and the state in face of dangers from abroad - except that, ironically that is exactly what it is for, because in a true democracy, if the people had all the information that they wanted through truly free requests, the revelations of government incompetence, culpability in various crimes (national and international), obeisance to various lobbying groups (think AIPAC), and disregard for people, their cultures, and the environments they live in would be glaringly obvious. Secrecy is not to protect the country, but to protect the people in power from the wrath of the citizens that they are manipulating.

So what becomes democracy?

The democratic ideal is difficult to achieve. Anything that is remotely related to a social democracy comes under the gun - literally - of the U.S. military. Most of South and Central America have experienced the interventions of the U.S. military in one form or another, either direct invasion, or covert operations, or not so covert support of the right wing business elites of the countries. From the "banana republics" of Central America - so called because of the dominance of United Fruit and its offspring, Chiquita, and Standard Fruit and its offspring Dole in co-opting much of the agricultural landscape - through to the southern state of Chile and the overthrow of the Allende government to be replaced by the militaristic Pinochet dictatorship, the Americas have suffered under the non-democratic and internationally criminal actions of the United States.

Further away, in Iran - with the overthrow of the Mossadegh social democracy, through to the invasion and massacre of millions of south-east Asians in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to similar massacres of so-called communists in the Philippines and Indonesia - the U.S. record is consistently the denial of democracy when it comes in the form of a social democracy, wherein the people actually have or want to have some say in the government and its application of rules and regulations.

A associated directly with all this are the multinational corporations that harvest the wealth of the countries on the receiving end of these military adjustments. Combined, the two are, in spite of all their wonderful rhetoric of democracy and freedom, only interested in wealth accumulation with no interest in the people or the environment.

A social democracy attempts to protect its resources and use them for the well being of its own people, through carefully managing sales and extraction, by protecting the environment, protecting the health and well being of the people, by supporting health, welfare, and educational systems for the betterment of all, and finally to protect the environment and culture of the cultural and geographical systems of the country.

Would not most people of the world, given the chance to vote on it, tell their governments to provide health, education and welfare for all, to protect the environment, to provide for the aged, sick, and disabled? Would they not vote for clean water - the right to water which has been denied them in national and international rights? Would they not vote for local agriculture supplemented by fair trade for other agricultural products, at the same time maintaining the integrity and sustainability of the agricultural landscape by avoiding monocrop genetically modified agriculture supported by a few big businesses? Would they not vote to tell occupying forces, or any military foreign forces to go home and leave them in peace? Would they not vote to constrain the rights of corporations, to keep them responsible for environmental as well as personal damages and apply responsibilities and liabilities to the owners and managers?

Unless heavily inculcated with the dogma and rhetoric of military glory and economic survival through debt riddled consumerism, an educated public (remember the meritocracy argument?) would more than likely make choices that protect the cultural community as well as the agricultural and geographical resources. An informed public, informed through a critical media, informed by truly free access to government and corporate information, would certainly rule the nations differently than our current crop of secretive elites.

Sum

All these arguments are of course short versions of what could become chapters, books, on the various topics quickly over viewed. A true democracy would be ideal, but that ideal will not be realized until the armies of the world are constrained, until the corporations of the world are put back under control of the nations, until the nations are allowed to choose their own destinies through unhindered noninterfered-with truly free elections. True democracy, true people power, is a long way off in much of the world. It is to realize that and to understand all its permutations that will help bring it about as a reality, through the long slow process of education, protestation, agitation, and resistance.

Notes　

[1] These quotes are widely cited in a variety of sources active against the deservedly deceased MAI. Also quoted in Chomsky, Noam. "Hordes of Vigilantes", Profit Over People - Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, N.Y. 1999. p. 163.

[2] Ramzy Baroud. "The Hypocrisy of Al-Demoqratia," December 12, 2009. Palestine Chronicle. http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15605

[3] three useful recent works:
Eamon Fingleton. In the Jaws of the Dragon. Thomas Dunne Books, New York. 2008.
- a readily accessible read, a more 'dramatic' read than the others, but allies with Jacques' book.

Martin Jacques. When China Rules the World. Allen Lane (Penguin), London. 2009.
- a more academic read, a bit more difficult to follow, but supports the ideas presented in Fingleton. Very good at interpreting the Chinese representations of themselves.

Bill Emmott. Rivals. Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) , Boston. 2009.
- Emmott is an economist and thus argues grandly using many monetary statistics and is much more a western interpretation, based on some typical western stereotypes and interpretations of Chinese character.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

I differentiate between democracy and freedoms. Having power for the people indicates that the people have an actual say in what the government is doing, and that the government, being of the people, by the people, for the people, responds to the wishes - and hopefully educated wishes - of the populace. Freedom, as present in our current society, represents the wide range from any kind of licentious but licit behaviour through the practical freedoms of the press and media up to the philosophical freedoms of religion and thought. It seldom represents responsibility towards society and its various parameters of poverty and the environment, or towards other less fortunate members of society. It does represent choice, choice to one form of behaviour or another, for the environment or against the environment, for the people, or for the corporation. Democracy and freedom are highly compatible but not necessarily the same thing.

The vote

Democracy as envisioned by most is encapsulated into the act of voting. Our grandfathers died for it in the First World War, "sacrificing" themselves for the empire in order to achieve it (either that or be shot as a traitor or deserter or for treason). The same mantra is brought forth every Remembrance Day, of our soldiers dying so that we have the freedom to vote. Consider that Soviet Russia had votes, Mugabe had votes, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan had votes, occupied Palestine had a vote, Cairo, Islamabad, Honduras, and Russia all had votes, yet the effect of those votes ranged from no democracy to only nominal democracy, or a nominal democracy invigorated with great helpings of violence.

In modern democracies, the psychological spin doctoring is so intense that a vote becomes a popularity contest, decked out in mudslinging, fear of the other, and so many outlandish promises (some call them lies) that votes are essentially bought on the rhetoric of uneducated platitudes to try and soothe the seething angst of the voter. The billions of dollars promised during an election, the great calls for more openness, clarity, and better communication, for more citizen participation are all forgotten once the election has been confirmed one way or another. The 'representatives' then head off to the seat of power to learn what they need to do in order to stay in power and to stay within the confines of the party they are nominally elected under and to not get kicked out of caucus. Foolishly the majority of citizens believe that what was talked about will be delivered (Did we want NAFTA? No, got it anyway.)

The real power, without the people, begins its work in the hallways and private rooms of the institutions that represent our democracy. The interplay between corporations, big business, government lobbyists, bureaucrats, and the military, is what truly runs our democracy. It is in these elite corridors of power that businessmen and women collude in private for a new world order, where decisions made will later be justified to the people under some manner of fear mongering or some well inculcated belief system ever present from the very first time a child watches television or runs a computer game.

Globalization and a not so flat world

The cry of globalization is frequently incorporated within the context of democracy, an almost supra-democracy wherein global communications, the internet, cell-phones and the laptop computer are making the world a level playing field. It encompasses the business world of Thomas Friedman's work of the same verbiage, to the exhortations of politicians and soft imperialists towards the coloured revolutions around the world. Certainly it has had its impact, but it is only technology, and one might as well describe the ubiquitous kalashnikov as a more effective leveller in the world of globalization.

The world remains bumpy and lumpy as the various contenders to power, or those trying to tame them, rise and fall within the technological capabilities of their most recent state of the art purchase. Whether it is big business, or big government, ranging through to subversive elements or insurrections against occupation, the technology has enabled the various players to continue making the world as uneven as possible, trying to tilt it entirely within their own favour. The ultimate bump that denies the level playing field are the computer nerds somewhere in the middle of U.S. playing their war games in real time as they control missile firing drones over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan blasting mostly civilians to shreds. No kalashnikov will ever be near them - and they call the insurgents cowards....

But globalization is much more the Friedman's technological wonders of communication. It is much more about the World Trade Organization (WTO) which is
"the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups," those pressure groups being environmental, labour, health, and other social organizations. Renato Ruggerio, former director of the WTO said, "We are writing the constitution of a single global economy."[1] Ironically, the credit goes to the internet for the destruction in 1998 of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) to which this quote refers. Globalization as envisioned by the WTO and the other members of the Washington consensus - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund who have carried forward the effective work of the WTO and its MAI intentions - is completely non-democratic.

Its non-democracy comes from several factors. First and most obvious is that representatives to any of these institutions are not by election, not by representation, but through invitation. The representatives are appointed from international corporations, from banks, from lobbyists and other government institutions. Secondarily, the institutions from where these people are chosen - the business corporations and unelected members of government bureaucracies - are decidedly non-democratic as well. Thirdly, the "free trade" demanded under the WTO banner is anything but free.

The free trade espoused by these people and institutions is only free for the manipulation of wealth. Workers are not free to travel to wherever the pay and working conditions are better, but are constrained to their own geographical regions. The environment is not free although its resources are taken for free without too much concern about the long term negative results from pollution caused by extraction, transportation, consumption, and elimination through burning or waste dumping. And rather than being free trade, trade and commerce is bound up in multiple layers of rules and regulations that tend to over-ride national rules and regulations, especially pertaining to health, safety, education, and workers rights, entrapping the weaker governments into a cycle of democratic social welfare destruction. The overall result is wealth and resources rising to the dominant financial countries (ignoring momentarily the elites and their cronies within the weaker countries) while the weaker countries remain perpetually indebted to the member states of the Washington consensus.

Corporations and capitalism.

Corporations are probably the least democratic institution in the world, designed and purpose built to gather wealth, to avoid paying taxes, and more particularly to avoid the managers and shareholders from having any responsibility for institutional damages, either on the personal level or the global level. The corporation becomes a person under law, an invisible person, as the real people hide behind the legal barriers set up by corporate lawyers and accountants and MBAs and governments to protect their harnessing of wealth.

They have been around for a while, set up as a mechanism to harvest the wealth of the East Indies, of North America, and to transport that wealth back home. They have continued to receive government largesse in the form of favourable rules and regulations to the extent that they now are part and parcel of government and all too frequently are powerful enough to over-ride government constraints - until when things become really shaky because of their own manipulations, government steps in and bails them out - their own form of social welfare without the democracy aspect.

Corporations are decidedly non-democratic and their paramount place within the so called "capitalist" system (by whichever definition or permutation or purity of idealism it is defined to actually be) renders the capitalist system non-democratic as well. Economists rank about the lowest in my judgement of the range of careers available to anyone, working within a world of abstract perfection with mathematical models that are invented and created out of thin air without a connection to reality (all math should represent physical reality in some way as it does with chemistry and physics). Those economists who define themselves as supporters of capitalism are arguing for a world with its base mired in poverty and its peak in the giddy heights where the few control by far the most wealth of the world.

The underlying basis of capitalism necessitates unemployment in order to keep labour cheap and mobile (at least within a region or country). It necessitates poverty, if not for a motivator then for the same cheap labour. It requires consumption at all levels which because of the need for poverty and unemployment, also requires a complacent middle class to be the consumers of the world. Without a truly decent wage, with both parents working, with unending propaganda/advertising beating it into the consumers brain that they simply are not cool, sexy, articulate, or beautiful if a certain product is not purchased, the theoretical middle class drives itself - sometimes literally as our culture is based on the automobile - into ever increasing levels of debt. That debt is wealth to the corporations, as the consumer is trapped into an ever larger cycle of purchasing and debt creation.

The peaks of capitalism thrive on market control, elitism, cronyism and the ever revolving door between big business, government, and the military. It returns us to the world of globalization and the WTO and Washington consensus discussed above. Its reality is a world in which ten per cent of the population control over half of the global wealth, while half the global population controls only one per cent of the wealth - and really probably do not 'control' even that. From these vertiginous heights of wealth the world perspective is perhaps flat, the bottom layers being so dim and distant in view that we are all of equal powerlessness to the elites.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

The intellectual cowardice of some should not blind the majority to the fact that the war in Afghanistan is morally indefensible and militarily unwinnable.

The decision of the US to continue with its brutal military adventurism in Afghanistan can only be understood in terms of its limited and highly selfish political logic.

Let us start by ruling out some of the ridiculous assumptions that have permeated this war since it began in 2001. First, we were told that the war was aimed at eliminating al-Qaida. However, a retied CIA Station Chief who has served in the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff, has claimed that, "al-Qaida is finished in Afghanistan." He further argued that, "the Obama administration, like its predecessor, claims we are fighting terrorism there. That is simply not true. It is a pure counterinsurgency issue."

Indeed, even the most ardent war hawks are exerting little effort to delineate the link between Taliban and al-Qaida. If the link is infused, it is readily unleashed to demonstrate al-Qaida's links to Pakistan's tribal areas, thus urging 'action' in that part of the country, and not in Afghanistan.

Thanks to the random military 'strategy' of the US and its allies, al-Qaida has spread in all sorts of directions and branched off to many al-Qaida offshoots in various parts of the world. Without a centralized leadership in the military sense, al-Qaida inspired groups and individuals now are now working for localized sets of objectives and respond to different stimuli.

So if it's not al-Qaida that is inspiring the awesome, although largely futile firepower and military surges in Afghanistan, then what is? This is where the idealists come in. They talk of nation-building, Western-style democracy, regional security and so on. Some of them genuinely mean what they say, and some don't believe the present military surges and Gen. Stanley McChrystal's rural area fight to the death will yield its intended results. Still, they contribute to the illusion that good intentions - starting with the initial hype about saving Afghani women, then 'liberation' from foreign terrorists, then democracy and nation-building, and so on - had anything to do with this bloody war. With their insistence on using such positive terminology, they continue to provide Washington's political elites - and Kabul's as well - with the benefit of the doubt that while we may disagree with their methods, we still trust their overall intentions.

It behooves those democracy-inspired, nation-building enthusiasts to remember that Washington has done much to stifle genuine democracy movements around the world since its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Palestine and Lebanon remain the most obvious examples. As for nation-building, compare the astronomical amounts invested in financing the destructive war in Afghanistan and to prop up the corrupt puppet regime in Kabul, to the miniscule sums devoted to enhancing the country's stone-aged economic infrastructure. The US military budget for this year is set to exceed $693 billion, not counting the $42 billion set aside for Homeland Security. According to CostofWar.com, the financial cost of war in Afghanistan alone has exceeded the $256 billion; both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are approaching the $1 trillion threshold.

The war in Afghanistan cannot possibly be defended on any moral grounds. The official death count of Afghani civilians in 2009 is estimated at 2,412. The actual death toll is probably far, far higher, as polls do not account for the many more who perished in distance villages across the south and east, areas that are not accessible to outsiders. The death of these innocent people alone should silence the few who still speak of ethics and morality in relation to the disastrous war.

But not everyone is so overtly misguided in their assessment of the war. Some fully understand that the war in Afghanistan is a self-seeking, political and strategic venture. Still, they giddily welcome it, including one Con Coughlin whose recent article in The Telegraph was tellingly entitled, 'India and Pakistan must bury the hatchet for the Taliban to be crushed.'

The India-Pakistan rapprochement is seen as beneficial only insofar as its potential to 'crush' someone else. And considering that that someone else is not a band of aimless terrorists, but a well-grounded, grass-roots, popular insurgency, the price of that "crushing" is likely to be tens of thousands of innocent people. Coughlin uses the same haughty and generalized language of "militant Islamist groups" to be crushed, failing to understand or appreciate the distinctiveness of each and every situation, whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else. Instead, Coughlin nonchalantly expresses concern about the danger these militants pose to "the survival of the ruling classes" in Islamabad. What a compelling reason to get Richard Holbrooke, Washington's special envoy to the region all fired up over the need to preserve the survival of the ruling classes, not just in Islamabad, but in Kabul and Delhi as well.

The war in Afghanistan has turned into find-an-objective-as-you-go military march to nowhere. It is proving futile and indefensible on every ground, be it political or military or moral. Moreover, as Haviland Smith concluded in his grim assessment, "it doesn't really matter that we think of ourselves as benevolent liberators, it only matters that Afghans think of us as foreigners occupiers." When will we all face up to this reality?

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

Enter the newest fiasco, that sweetly named diabetes drug Avandia, so heavenly sounding, yet now revealed to be just another in a long history of drugs that get government approval but turn out to be lethal. According to Bloomberg News: "Safety reviewers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged the agency to take GlaxoSmithKline Plc's diabetes drug Avandia off the market in 2008 because they said it was causing 500 additional heart attacks per month." A month! The drug was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009, which implies many thousands of deaths to date.

Consider these depressing developments. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have committed acts that forced them to pay the largest criminal fines in American history. In cases involving Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and four other drug companies, these fines and penalties have totaled over $7 billion since May 2004. That is an amazing number, but in comparison to drug industry profits, merely a pittance.

In particular, Pfizer has been fined multiple times in the past 6 years for illegal off-label promotion of their drugs. In its latest plea agreement, which took place last September, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in fines and penalties for off-label promotion of Bextra. This settlement was the largest criminal fine in US history. Clearly, this kind of corporate behavior requires diligent oversight by the Food and Drug Administration to protect Americans and to ensure the safety of American medicine. Yet this newest Avandia outrage proves, yet again, that the federal government is failing people.

The Senate Finance Committee has just released a report and a letter to the FDA. They have revealed that the FDA itself estimated that the drug caused approximately 83,000 excess heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. "Americans have a right to know there are serious health risks associated with Avandia and GlaxoSmithKline had a responsibility to tell them. Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust," said Senator Max Baucus.

The Senate committee started their investigation after the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in May 2007 warning of the possible cardiovascular risk of Avandia. Avandia entered the market in 1999 and reached annual revenue of $3 billion by 2006, including sales of a combination drug that includes Avandia. Sales plummeted to $1.2 billion in 2009, two years after that study was published which linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack. Before that the drug was the company's second best selling drug, and they did everything to protect sales, rather than users of the drug.

The Senate report provides incredible details on how the drug company pursued countless awful tactics to thwart many efforts to reveal to the public and the medical community just how unsafe Avandia is. The report notes: "The totality of evidence suggests that GSK was aware of the possible cardiac risks associated with Avandia years before such evidence became public.... Based on this knowledge, GSK had a duty to sufficiently warn patients and the FDA of its concerns in a timely manner. Instead, GSK executives intimidated independent physicians, focused on strategies to minimize findings that Avandia may increase cardiovascular risk, and sought ways to downplay findings that the rival drug ACTOS (pioglitazone) might reduce cardiovascular risk."

The company continues to fight to keep its drug in the market. You can imagine the army of lobbyists being used to safeguard the interests of drug companies. Other industries exhibit the same behavior, giving us widespread corporate pillage.

I and millions of other owners of Toyota vehicles cringe because, like so many other companies, it lost the capacity for telling the truth and protecting their consumers, and the federal government failed its oversight function. With 31 lobbyists in Washington last year, Toyota has spent nearly $25 million on federal regulatory and legislative lobbying matters in the last five years, much more than any other foreign automaker. Toyota's registered lobbyists include at least eight former officials from Congress and the executive branch and it employs former engineers and officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the regulatory agency that failed to detect a pattern of safety problems at Toyota.

Put aside the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement. The critical need is not for less government but for better government that really works in the public interest, especially protecting consumers from dastardly corporate powers. Until that happens it is not surprising that the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied or angry about the federal government. Nearly 75 percent of independents feel this way. If you think that electing either Democrats or Republicans will fix broken government, think again. Both major parties are corrupted by corporate interests.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

The advertisement below, is pushing GE's Medical Division.

(Link to GE ad)

Now the words to the song that the GE pitchmen are AHahAHahing in the ad is Joyful, Joyful. Here are the lyrics"

1. Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flow'rs before Thee,
Op'ning to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
Drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
Fill us with the light of day!
2. All Thy works with joy surround Thee,
Earth and heav'n reflect Thy rays,
Stars and angels sing around Thee,
Center of unbroken praise.
Field and forest, vale and mountain,
Flow'ry meadow, flashing sea,
Singing bird and flowing fountain
Call us to rejoice in Thee.
3. Thou art giving and forgiving,
Ever blessing, ever blest,
Wellspring of the joy of living,
Ocean depth of happy rest!
Thou our Father, Christ our Brother,
All who live in love are Thine;
Teach us how to love each other,
Lift us to the joy divine.
4. Mortals, join the happy chorus,
Which the morning stars began;
Father love is reigning o'er us,
Brother love binds man to man.
Ever singing, march we onward,
Victors in the midst of strife,
Joyful music leads us Sunward
In the triumph song of life.

So is GE just trying to evoke a positive connection? Are they saying they are the ordained of God? Are they saying they are in effect "God" and we should be singing gratefully to them? Take your pick.

I am not a Christian, but I have to wonder where the Christian, Religious Right, Activist Conservative Christian, outrage is on this sacrilege. As far as I can tell, there is total silence on the issue.

In fact, trial balloons have already been sent out bearing supposedly unrehearsed comments by former Israeli Army general and current Minister Yossi Peled, suggesting that another war is on its way. More recently, Israel's ultra-right and unabashedly racist Foreign Minister Avigador Lieberman threatened to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in case of a war.

And so it begins.

Historically, Israel has, with one understandable exception, determined the time and place of all of its wars with the Arabs. The only time Israeli forces were attacked in 1973 involved an Arab attempt to regain territories that were captured by Israel in 1967.

When Lieberman uttered his "message that should go out to the ruler of Syria from Israel" to an audience at Bar Ilan University, he was effectively saying that Israel will topple the Syrian government when it decides the time was ripe for war. And considering Peled's earlier statement that war was imminent, the only possible conclusion would be that a "regime change" in Syria is high on the Israeli agenda. It also perhaps represents the last chance of fulfilling the US neoconservative vision - that of "A New Strategy for Securing the Realm".

This inference should have been evident and thus sent shockwaves throughout the world, and especially through the US media which now know fully the price of the Israeli-neocon folly.

So why do Western mainstream media, especially in the US, continue to guard Israel's image so protectively, at times even devotedly, when the country's belligerence is so blatant? And if some in the media are indeed well intentioned in their coverage, why do they continually miss the many clear signs pointing to Israeli criminality and aggression?

A growing reference that is once again floating among political and media analysts is that Israel has greater mastery than the Arabs over fighting media wars. Often cited, for example, is the National Information Directorate, an Israeli propaganda center that was established a few months prior to the devastating war on Gaza last year. Ironically, the center was established after recommendations made by an Israeli inquiry into the equally bloody Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 - ironically because independent war inquiries often chastise the army for violation of human rights, as opposed to recommending the establishment of a "hasbara" - more like propaganda - body to justify the crimes committed against civilians.

Still, even such "hasbara" should have had little impact on the Western media's depiction of Israeli crimes and hostilities toward its neighbors.

One could possibly consider the claim that Israel's media success story is the brainchild of Israel's own media expertise under very specific circumstances: That Israeli spokespersons are icons of articulation and charm; that Palestinian retaliations to Israeli crimes in Gaza were vile and gruesome; that the Israeli media blackout was so successful that Western journalists had no other way of finding any credible, decipherable facts; that there are no Arab spokespersons who are well-informed and articulate enough to present even a semblance of a coherent narrative to challenge the one offered by Israel.

But none of these scenarios are convincing. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is as faltering in English as he is in his mother tongue. The Palestinian resistance merely killed 13 Israelis, 10 of whom were soldiers - and recently "regretted" the killing of the three civilians - while Israel killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and remains unmoved. The Israeli media blackout of Gaza during the war - which continues even now - hardly prevented footage and reports from beaming to all corners of the earth, thanks to the valiant efforts of Arab media and independent reporters, photographers and cameramen from all over the world, supplemented by the United Nations and other independent groups' findings. All of this made the scope of the tragedy known to all. And finally, the most eloquent and involved Palestinian and Arab academics, diplomats and activists can be found in every major Western city and reputable university or research institute.

Yet somehow it was Israel that "claim(ed) success in PR war", according to Anshel Pfeffer in the Jewish Chronicle, days after the initial Israel attack on Gaza. Pfeffer quoted Avi Pazner, Israel's former ambassador to Italy and France, and "one of the officials drafted in to present Israel's case to the world media," as claiming that "whenever Israel is bombing, it is hard to explain our position to the world ... but at least this time everything was ready and in place."

Utter nonsense. As someone who has been grilled and challenged in the media for making such outrageous statements as "Israel must learn to respect international human rights," I cannot take seriously the media's claims to "objectivity". If this were the norm, no Israeli hasbara campaign would have even dented public perceptions of the criminal war. No unfeeling Israeli Army spokesperson could possibly explain the logic of the wanton destruction of Gaza, as hungry civilians were chased in an open-air prison with nowhere to escape and no one to come to their rescue.

Israeli officials continue to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and must be preparing yet another marvelous hasbara campaign to justify the killings that are yet to follow. However, there are some things that are becoming increasingly obvious, at least to the rest of us. First, the secret of Israeli "success", if any, was not its own doing, but rather stemmed from the media's decision, made years ago, to protect Israel's image. Second, despite the fanfare and self-congratulating commentary, Israel has now largely lost the media war, and the tide since the Gaza war has been turning, thanks to the underfunded, but solid and increasingly determined efforts of independent media groups, intellectuals, citizen journalists, civil society activists, artists, poets, bloggers, ordinary people and those in the media who possess the courage to challenge Israeli hasbara and its devotees.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

• Ronald Reagan spent $4.1 trillion on the Defense Department (in 2010 dollars),
• G. W. Bush spent $4.65 trillion, and
• Barack Obama plans to spend more than $5 trillion.

• First, as Chart 3 illustrates, we are entering new territory with regard to the combined scale and duration of national
• debt.
• Second, the world is generally displeased with recent US economic leadership and some nations are actively seeking to diversify their holdings of foreign currency (although, at present, the options for "fleeing the dollar" are not inviting.)
• Third, the growth in debt and an eventual rebound in interest rates will mean that a greater portion of the federal budget will be consumed by servicing the debt. Between 2006 and 2017, the portion of federal outlays devoted to interest payments will grow from 8% to 14%. Moreover, the surplus income from social security is dwindling and will soon disappear as a source for paying other bills.

• The Korean conflict cost $393,000 per person/year invested;
• The Vietnam conflict cost $256,000; and
• The Iraq and Afghanistan commitments have cost $792,000 (through 2010).

• The United States has gone from accounting for only 28% of world spending during the Cold War to 41 % in 2006, and
• The Western group as a whole has gone from a 49% share to a 70% share, while,
• The group of potential adversary and competitor states has gone from claiming a 42 % share to just 16 % in 2006.

In the US, triple-digit losses on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were recouped in the final hour, resulting in small gains for the Dow and the other major indexes in volatile trading, following a sharp selloff on Thursday.

The Dow ended the day with a 10-point gain, following a 268-point plunge on Thursday. The index, which was below the 10,000 mark for most of the day, has lost 6.5 percent over the past two weeks.

All of the major European indexes closed down, with France's CAC-40 falling the most--3.4 percent, its biggest one-day drop since November 26. The Pan-European Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index was off 2.2 percent, its lowest close since November 3.

Japan's Nikkei fell 2.89 percent and the Shanghai Composite was off by 1.87 percent.

Stocks were down for the second day in Greece, Portugal and Spain, three heavily indebted eurozone countries whose ability to redeem bondholders--including major European and US banks--is increasingly in doubt. Prices of government bonds of all three countries continued to fall and interest rates rose further, as global investors increased pressure on the three governments to impose draconian austerity measures on their respective populations.

The cost of credit default swap (CDS) contracts on the debt of the three countries rose even more dramatically. Credit default swaps--now a multi-trillion-dollar market--are a form of unregulated derivatives in which CDS sellers guarantee the value of bonds held by CDS buyers. Rising CDS prices reflect eroding confidence in corporate or government bonds insured by the sellers of the CDS contracts.

The CDS market is a hotbed of speculation, since investors, including banks and hedge funds, can bet on the price of CDS contracts without holding the underlying bonds. The threat of sovereign default, most immediately by Greece, but also by Portugal and Spain, has provided an opportunity for speculators to drive up the price of insuring the countries' bonds by speculating on the likelihood of a default, thereby further undermining confidence in the countries' debt and increasing the prospects of such an outcome.

All three countries have pledged to impose sweeping cuts in public-sector jobs and wages and in social benefits, along with new consumption taxes, in line with demands from the European Union that they sharply reduce their budget deficits, currently 10 percent or more of their respective gross domestic products.

Greek President George Papandreou of the social-democratic PASOK party, who was elected last year on the basis of promises to reverse the right-wing policies of the preceding conservative government, this week announced plans for an across-the-board freeze on public sector wages along with a cut in allowances, which amounts to a wage cut of 4 percent. He also called for a pension "reform," which entails raising the retirement age, as well as higher fuel taxes.

The social-democratic Portuguese and Spanish governments have pledged to impose similar austerity measures.

Signs of mounting resistance by the working class in these countries are playing an enormous role in the tremors rippling through the global financial markets. There is a growing sense in governments and board rooms around the world that a major confrontation with the working class is coming, with potentially revolutionary implications.

The banks and the media are demanding that heads of state and parliaments demonstrate the "political will" and "political consensus" necessary to impose historic attacks on the working class. These phrases are euphemisms for a degree of ruthlessness that implies a readiness to employ state repression. However, the financial markets are at once skeptical over the willingness of political leaders to employ the required measures and anxious over the outcome of such a confrontation.

On Thursday, Greek workers launched the first in a series of strikes to protest the government's austerity package. Customs and tax officials began a 48-hour strike that shut ports and border crossings throughout the country. Strikes by other public and private-sector workers have been called for next week.

Greek farmers have been blockading highways in protest against government austerity proposals.

A major cause of the global stock selloff that began Thursday was the announcement by the Greek unions of a one-day general strike set for February 24. The unions had initially indicated their willingness to assist the PASOK government in carrying out its austerity plans, but have been forced by pressure from the working class to call the strike actions.

Union leaders hope to use the partial labor mobilizations to defuse popular anger and channel it behind nationalist slogans, while they maneuver to work out a deal with the government acceptable to the banks and the European Union. However, there are fears within ruling circles that the unions may not be able to contain the anger of workers and young people, who are already facing mass unemployment and declining living standards.

Portuguese and Spanish unions are also threatening to call strikes and protests.

Among other factors that precipitated the stock selloff was the failure of the Portuguese government to find buyers for the full amount of a government bond offering on Wednesday, and the defeat of its austerity package at the hands of opposition parties in parliament.

The debt crisis of the weaker countries in the 16-nation eurozone, including Ireland and Italy in addition to Greece, Portugal and Spain, is raising questions about the viability of the euro itself. There is increasing public speculation that the 11-year-old currency could collapse under the pressure of the economic and financial crisis.

In recent weeks, the euro has fallen precipitously against the US dollar and the yen. On Friday, it fell to $1.3620. It has declined 9 percent against the dollar since December.

This does not reflect any inherent strength of the US currency. On the contrary, looming above the debt crisis in Europe is the far greater crisis of the world's biggest debtor--the United States. It is no accident that the European crisis has erupted in the aftermath of last week's budget announcement by President Obama. The US budget plan revealed that the current deficit is $1.6 trillion, equivalent to 10.6 percent of the country's' gross domestic product, a record high since the end of World War II.

This approaches Greece's deficit ratio of 12.7 percent of GDP, is higher than that of Spain and twice the eurozone average. The US budget, moreover, projects trillion-dollar deficits for years to come.

As in every other industrialized country, the American state responded to the financial crash of 2008 by taking on the debts of its banks and essentially bankrupting its treasury in order to preserve the wealth of its financial elite. The Obama administration, no less than the governments of Europe, is demanding that the cost be borne by the general population in the form of sweeping cuts in basic social programs and a reduction in consumption--i.e., a permanent and dramatic decline in working class living standards.

Unlike in previous international financial crises, such as the Asian debt crisis of the 1990s, the United States cannot play the role of lender of last resort. The United States has irretrievably lost its previous position as the dominant world economic power, and its decline is reflected in growing challenges to the role of the dollar as the world reserve and trading currency.

At last month's World Economic Forum in Davos, French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his keynote speech said he would use his upcoming presidency of the Group of 20 nations to push for a new international monetary system in which the dollar would no longer be the primary reserve currency. And on Wednesday, Moody's Investors Service warned that the United States faces the loss of its triple-A sovereign credit rating unless Obama moves to slash the federal deficit by carrying out more draconian spending cuts than he has thus far announced.

It is the erosion of US economic power and solvency that lends to the sovereign debt crises in Greece, Portugal and other European countries such an explosive and universal character.

The recent rise in the dollar is the result of a "flight to safety" by investors who fear a collapse in world asset bubbles and consider US Treasury bonds, along with German government debt, to be a temporary haven. In important respects, the short-term reversal in the dollar's decline is an expression of a deepening of the crisis on world financial markets.

As a number of economists warned last year, the US policy of flooding financial markets with cheap credit on the basis of near-zero interest rates and the electronic equivalent of printing a trillion dollars--designed to prop up the major US banks and enable them to record bumper profits despite double-digit unemployment--fueled a huge wave of speculation on risky assets such as stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. These economists predicted that a major rise in the value of the dollar would pull the rug out from under this speculation, which was based on the assumption of a continued decline in the dollar, and force a rapid and destabilizing selloff of inflated assets.

It now appears that this collapse in asset bubbles has begun.

The author also recommends: Speculative recovery sows seeds of an even greater economic crash
[10 November 2009]

Deciphering the available clues regarding the nature of Israel's immediate military objectives is not always easy, but it is possible. One indicator that could serve as a foundation for any serious prediction of Israel's actions is Israel's historical tendency to seek a perpetual state of war. Peace, real peace, has never been a long-term policy.

"Unlike many others, I consider that peace is not a goal in itself but only a means to guarantee our existence," claimed Yossi Peled, a former army general and current Cabinet Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government.

Israeli official policy - military or otherwise - is governed by the same Zionist diktats that long preceded the establishment of the state of Israel. If anything has changed since early Zionists outlined their vision, it was the interpretation of those directives. The substance has remained intact.

For example, Zionist visionary, Vladimir Jabotinsky stated in 1923 that Zionist "colonization can...continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through." He was not then referring to an actual wall. While his vision took on various manifestations throughout the years, in 2002 it was translated into a real wall aimed at prejudicing any just solution with the Palestinians. Now, most unfortunately, Egypt has also started building its own steel wall along its border with the war-devastated and impoverished Gaza Strip.

One thing we all know by now is that Israel is a highly militarized country. Its definition of 'existence' can only be ensured by its uncontested military dominance at all fronts, thus the devastating link between Palestine and Lebanon. This link makes any analysis of Israel's military intents in Gaza, that excludes Lebanon - and in fact, Syria - seriously lacking.

Consider, for example, the unprecedented Israeli crackdown on the Second Palestinian Uprising which started in September 2000. How is that linked to Lebanon? Israel had been freshly defeated by the Lebanese resistance, led by Hizbullah, and was forced to end its occupation of most of South Lebanon in May 2000. Israel wanted to send an unmistakable message to Palestinians that this defeat was in fact not a defeat at all, and that any attempt at duplicating the Lebanese resistance model in Palestine would be ruthlessly suppressed. Israel's exaggeration in the use of its highly sophisticated military to stifle a largely popular revolution was extremely costly to Palestinians in terms of human toll.

Israel's 34-day war on Lebanon in July 2006 was an Israeli attempt at destroying Arab resistance, and restoring its metaphorical iron wall. It backfired, resulting in a real - not figurative - Israeli defeat. Israel, then, did what it does best. It used its superior air force, destroyed much of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The resistance, with humble means, killed more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers during combat.

Not only had Hizbullah penetrated the Israeli iron wall, it had also filled it with holes. It challenged, like never before, the Israeli army's notion of invincibility and illusion of security. Something went horribly wrong in Lebanon.

Since then, the Israeli army, intelligence, propagandists and politicians have been in constant preparation for another showdown. But before such pending battle, the nation needed to renew its faith in its army and government intelligence; thus the war in Gaza late December 2008.

As appalling as it was for Israeli families to gather en masse near the Israeli Gaza border, and watch giddily as Gaza and Gazans were blown to smithereens, the act was most rational. The victims of the war may have been Palestinians in Gaza, but the target audience was Israelis. The brutal and largely one-sided war united Israelis, including their self-proclaimed leftist parties in one rare moment of solidarity. Here was proof that the IDF still had enough strength to report military achievements.

Of course, Israel's military strategists knew well that their war crimes in Gaza were a clumsy attempt at regaining national confidence. The tightly lipped politicians and army generals wanted to give the impression that all was working according to plan. But the total media blackout, and the orchestrated footage of Israeli soldiers flashing military signs and waving flags on their way back to Israel were clear indications of an attempt to improve a problematic image.

Thus Yossi Peled's calculated comments on January 23: "In my estimation, understanding and knowledge it is almost clear to me that it is a matter of time before there is a military clash in the north." Further, he claimed that "We are heading toward a new confrontation, but I don't know when it will happen, just as we did not know when the second Lebanon war would erupt."

Peled is of course right. There will be a new confrontation. New strategies will be employed. Israel will raise the stakes, and will try to draw Syria in, and push for a regional war. A Lebanon that defines itself based on the terms of resistance - following the failure to politically co-opt Hizbullah - is utterly unacceptable from the Israeli viewpoint. That said, Peled might be creating a measured distraction from efforts aimed at igniting yet another war - against the besieged resistance in Gaza, or something entirely different. (Hamas' recent announcement that its senior military leader Mahmoud al- Mabhouh was killed late January in Dubai at the hands of Israeli intelligence is also an indication of the involved efforts of Israel that goes much further than specific boundaries.)

Will it be Gaza or Lebanon first? Israel is sending mixed messages, and deliberately so. Hamas, Hizbullah and their supporters understand well the Israeli tactic and must be preparing for the various possibilities. They know Israel cannot live without its iron walls, and are determined to prevent any more from being built at their expense.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

In a recent article entitled "Israel Must Get Used to the New Turkey," Suat Kiniklioğlu, Deputy Chairman of External Affairs for Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wrote, "Israel appears to be yearning for the golden 1990s, which were the product of a very specific situation in the region. Those days are over and are unlikely to come back even if the Justice and Development Party (AKP) ends up no longer being in government."

This assessment seems more consistent with reality.

One would agree with Avnery's optimistic reading of events if the recent row was caused by just a couple of isolated incidents, for example, the gutsy public exchange over Gaza between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Israel's President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in late January 2009, or the recent premeditated humiliation of Oguz Celikkol, Turkish Ambassador to Israel, by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

However, these incidents are anything but isolated. They reflect a clear and probably irreversible shift in Turkish foreign policy towards Israel, the US and the Middle East as a whole.

For decades Turkey was torn between its historical ties to Muslim and Arab countries on the one hand, and the unstoppable drive towards Westernization on the other. The latter seemed much more influential in forming the new Turkish identity in its individual, collective, and thus foreign policy manifestation and outlook.

But even during the push and pull, Turkey grew in import as a political and economic player. It also grew into a nation with a decisive sense of sovereignty, a growing sense of pride and a daring capacity for asserting itself as a regional power.

In the 1970s, when 'political Islam' was on the rise throughout the region, Turkey was experiencing its own rethink, and various politicians and groups began grappling with the idea of taking political Islam to a whole new level.

In fact, it was Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister of Turkey between 1996 and 1997 who began pushing against the conventional notion of Turkey as a second-class NATO member desperate to identify with everything Western.

In the late 1980s Erbakan's Rafah Party (the Welfare Party) took Turkey by storm. The party was hardly apologetic about its Islamic roots and attitude. Its rise to power as a result of the 1995 general elections raised alarm, as the securely 'pro-Western' Turkey was deviating from the very the rigid script that wrote off the country's regional role as that of a "lackey of NATO." According to Salama A Salama, who coined the phrase in a recent article in Al-Ahram Weekly, Turkey is no longer this 'lackey'. And according to Kiniklioğlu, that's something "Israel must get used to".

The days of Erbakan might be long gone. But the man's legacy registered something that never departed Turkish national consciousness. He pushed the boundary, dared to champion pro-Palestinian policies, defied Western dictates and even pressed for economic repositioning of his country with the creation of the Developing Eight (D-8), uniting the most politically significant Arab and Muslim countries. When Erbakan was forced to step down in a 'postmodernist' military coup, it was understood as the end of short-lived political experiment which ended up proving that even a benign form of political Islam was not to be tolerated in Turkey. The army emerged, once again, all powerful.

But things have changed drastically since then. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected to power in 2002. The AK Party leadership was composed of savvy, yet principled politicians who aimed for change and even a geopolitical shift in their country's regional political outlook.

The AK Party began to lead a self-assertive Turkey which was neither pleading for European acceptance nor American validation. By rejecting the use of Turkish territories as a launchpad of a US strike against Iraq in 2003, Turkey was acquiring a voice, and a strong one at that - with wide democratic representation and growing popular support.

The trend continued, and in recent years Turkey dared translate its political power and prowess into action, without immediately severing the political and military balances that took years to build. So, for example, while it continued to honor past military deals with Israel, it also made many successful overtures to Syria and Iran. And, in being willing to be seen as a unifier in the age of Muslim and Arab disunity, it refused to take part in the conveniently set up camps of 'moderates' and 'extremists'. Instead it maintained good ties with all its neighbors, and its Arab allies.

Starting in 2007, the US began seeing the emergence of the "New Turkey". US President Barack Obama's visit to the country soon after his inauguration was one of many signs that the West was taking notice of Turkey's 'special' status. Turkey is not to be bullied, threatened, or intimidated. Even Israel, which has for long defied the norms of diplomacy, is now becoming more aware of its limits, thanks to Turkish President Abdullah Gül. Following Israel's belligerent insult of the Turkish Ambassador, he said, "Unless there is a formal apology from Israel, we're going to put Celikkol on the first plane back to Ankara." Israel, of course, apologized, and humbly so.

It took Turkey many years to reach this level of confidence and the country is hardly eager to be anyone's 'lackey' now. More, Turkey's united and constant stance in support of Gaza, and its outspokenness against the threats against Lebanon, Iran and Syria show clearly that the old days of "warmth" are well behind us.

Turkey, of course, will find a very receptive audience among Arabs and Muslims all over the world who are desperate for a powerful and sensible leadership to defend and champion their causes. Needless to say, for the besieged Palestinians in Gaza, Erdogan is becoming a household name, a folk hero, a new Nasser in fact. The same sentiment is shared throughout the region.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

The conference offered nothing concrete in terms of new assistance, instead scheduling a donors meeting at the United Nations in March. Much of the rhetoric coming out of the gathering seemed to bear little relationship to the situation on the ground in Haiti, where 150,000 people have been confirmed dead, hundreds of thousands more are wounded and over 1.5 million are homeless.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, representing what remains of the Haitian government, together with foreign ministers from Europe and the Americas spoke of respect for Haitian sovereignty, subordination of foreign military forces to humanitarian efforts, and allowing Haitians to determine and lead their own reconstruction efforts.

Some leading officials, including International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have gone so far as to speak in terms of a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti.

In reality, Haiti is now being run by the US military, which has deployed over 13,000 troops and unilaterally taken control of the country's airport and port facilities. The Pentagon has dominated the provision of relief, which it has subordinated to the number one priority of deploying combat-equipped US soldiers and Marines, much to the detriment of injured and hungry Haitians waiting for life-saving medical supplies and food.

The US newsweekly Time gave expression to the real situation, referring to the top US military commander in the country, US Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, as "the de facto king of Haiti." Meanwhile, the Haitian people have seen or heard nothing of Haitian President René Préval.

Behind the talk of Haitians determining their own future and the country's government leading the way, what is being discussed is a plan worked out in the months before the earthquake that is dictated by the profit interests of US banks and corporations, together with those of Haiti's wealthy elite.

Speaking to reporters en route from Washington to Montreal, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to this plan, while praising the work of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in seeking to implement it in his position as United Nations envoy to Haiti.

"He had just had a conference with 500 businesspeople," she said. "They were signing contracts, they were making investments."

She continued: "So we have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United Nations. And I don't want to start from scratch, but we have to recognize the changed challenges we are now confronting."

The plan, worked up at the behest of the UN last year, is aimed at expanding the Haitian economy through the development of free trade zones based on garment sweatshops in which Haitian workers would be paid near-starvation wages.

The initiative was based on a report prepared for the UN last year by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier. The report perversely cast Haiti's poverty--the deepest in the Western Hemisphere--as its number one asset in the global capitalist economy.

"Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark," Collier wrote.

This "asset" is something that both Washington and Haiti's parasitical ruling elite have jealously guarded. Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown twice--in 1991 and 2004--in bloody coups orchestrated by the CIA in conjunction with Haitian factory owners, in large measure for proposing to raise the country's minimum wage.

After his election for a second term in 2000, Aristide doubled the minimum wage and banned piece work in the garment factories, provoking fierce opposition from the owners of these enterprises. Andy Apaid, the Haitian-American owner of the largest sweatshops in Haiti and one of the Clintons' key allies in the new "development" plan, was a key figure in the 2004 coup, which saw Aristide abducted and bundled out of the country by US troops and thousands of Haitians massacred by right-wing death squads.

Last year, following mass demonstrations by students and workers in which several people were killed and wounded, President Préval was forced to accept an increase in the minimum wage that had been passed by the Haitian legislature. However, he enacted a sub-minimum wage for the garment assembly industry of $2.98 a day--approximately one-twentieth of the minimum wage in the US.

While such a system will make super-profits for garment manufacturers and further enrich Haiti's native oligarchy, it will do nothing to alleviate the country's grinding poverty and will only deepen its pervasive social inequality, the worst in the hemisphere. Garment assembly involves importing pieces of clothing that are put together in free trade zones and then exported out again, with virtually no impact on the local economy.

While Secretary Clinton indicated that this slave labor blueprint is the one Washington is still working off of in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, she allowed that the catastrophe would require making some modifications.

Clinton praised Bellerive for talking about "decentralizing" the Haitian economy. "As part of our multilateral efforts to assist Haiti, we should look at how we decentralize economic opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement, which they are doing on their own as people leave Port-au-Prince and return to the countryside from which most of them came," she said.

The Haitian authorities, backed by Washington and the UN, have begun implementing a plan to move hundreds of thousands of predominantly poor people out of Port-au-Prince and into resettlement camps. Ground has been cleared for one of these at Croix-des-Bouquets, eight miles from the capital, which would house 10,000 people. Other sites are being chosen, with the idea that those evacuated from the capital will be permanently housed there.

In a society in which social divisions are so stark, the so-called reconstruction plan for Haiti is inevitably developing along class lines. It may well emerge that the new resettlement camps will serve as captive labor for free trade zones erected in close proximity.

Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince will be reconstructed as a smaller city, geared to the interests of the country's wealthy. This was hinted at in a statement by the Haiti's ambassador to Washington, Raymond Joseph. Speaking on a C-SPAN television broadcast about the tragedy that has been inflicted upon the Haitian people, he said, "There is a silver lining. What was not politically possible was done by the earthquake. We will rebuild differently."

Such social re-engineering in the interests of a native ruling class and foreign capital, and at the expense of the broad masses of Haitian workers and poor, will inevitably provoke social upheavals and resistance. This is why Washington has placed getting "boots on the ground" ahead of saving the lives of the earthquake's victims.

Then along came Mr. Wonderful with his irresistible smile and infectious inspiration. He wooed you with his charm, that smile, and his engaging discourse-so articulate by comparison with the unintelligible babbling you had put up with for eight years. He cared about you and your children. No longer were you alone; like Martin Luther King, he had a dream-a dream congruent with yours, and the passion you both shared for the dream was hypnotic and felt deeply spiritual. You actually thought that he was a messenger sent from another world to rescue you and take you out of the nightmare. He used transcendent terms like "hope", "change", "yes we can." And not only were you totally surrendered to his embrace, but you begged everyone else to do the same. He's our only hope, you told them and yourself. You could scarcely contain your ecstasy when they all chose him in the last hours of the eight years you had all excruciatingly endured.

It was a new day, one year ago at this time. Your sighs of relief could not have been longer or deeper. You and your children were now safe at last.

But today, you ponder reflectively the past year, and what you have now come to understand is that the hero you married is a prisoner. You believed him when he told you he was free and at liberty to make the changes he proclaimed. You trusted him, committed yourself to him, and fought for him. And now you discover that he's betrayed you and that his actions really aren't that divergent from his predecessor's. In fact, he is a prisoner of the same forces that terrorized you for the previous eight years. Fooled again. Betrayed. You sink into despair and depression. You talk to your friends-the others who also believed in him. You feel those old and familiar emotions you felt from 2001-2008 that you thought you'd never have to feel again. "What can we do?" you ask. "What are our options?"

The affair is over, and you don't know whether to cry, rage, get drunk, stay stoned, or rethink leaving the country. You've married a prisoner; you've made another bad choice. You feel bitter and perhaps a little self-loathing. In fact, you want to take a shower because you feel dirty all over.

OK, I could be talking about a real love affair here between two people-one a professional con artist and the other, an enabler. Or I could be talking about a nation of hopeful citizens who wanted to believe so desperately that their new hero would reverse the course set forth by the sociopaths of the previous administration and lead them forward to a better, more humane life, a more bonded community, a saner world for themselves and their children.

What we all must ask ourselves at the end of a relationship that turned out badly-a relationship at the end of which we felt betrayed and disappointed is quite simply: What is my part? Why did I make this choice? What did I not wish to see? What were the red flags I chose to ignore?

This week, Michael Moore was interviewed by Democracy Now and confessed his sense of betrayal and disappointment with Obama's first year. What I heard from him and hear from almost every progressive liberal who expresses similar sentiments is a jaw-dropping naïveté regarding the nomination of candidate Obama and the system he represents. It is the epitome of the definition of insanity: repeating a behavior proven erroneous without exception, time after time, yet expecting that the next time, the result will be different.

Yet both sadly and fortunately, as is true whenever the betrayer shows his true colors, this is a teaching moment for the enablers. And this particular teaching moment is more important, more momentous than any in our national history. Why? Because of what is at stake in terms of the future of the planet, and that future is inextricably connected with a paradigm to which we have been "married" as a people since the birth of our nation.

Last week's Supreme Court ruling lifting limits on campaign financing by corporations was truly the last nail in the coffin of democracy and sealed the fundamental definition of fascism attributed to Mussolini which was simply, "the corporate state." Abramoff rules, and politicians no longer have any reason to function other than corporate whores. As a friend suggested to me a few days ago, members of Congress should now dress themselves in NASCAR uniforms indicating which corporations own them so that we don't need to bother researching the facts but can see them wearing the information on their bodies.

During the 2007-2008 hyperventilating euphoria of progressives regarding the candidacy of Obama, my website, Speaking Truth to Power, was exposing Obama's corporate connections and forecasting that little if anything would significantly change with his election. I was labeled Debbie Downer from Doom and Gloomville and called a conspiracy nut. And so here we are: Revelations from Matt Taibbi and others regarding Goldman Sachs as the largest contributor to Obama's election campaign, an escalation of war in Afghanistan above and beyond the proportions of Bush's war in Iraq, Obama's sanctioning of Bush's policies on torture, Obama's prone position in relation to Wall St. and his choice to surround himself with economic advisors who were directly responsible for creating economic collapse-I could continue ad nauseum. The similitude between the policies of Bush II and Obama are so glaring that last week, progressive journalist, Danny Schechter, asked, "Has Obama Become Bush II?" (I am particularly fond of the Photoshopped image attending the article-a picture worth more than a thousand words.)

In this teaching moment, those disappointed and despairing of their tryst with Obama have a golden opportunity to ask themselves what his betrayal of them reveals regarding the political and economic systems of America and the reality that no politician can even be nominated for the Presidency by the two-party monstrosity, let alone elected, unless that candidate is permanently dressed in his or her NASCAR uniform. If you do not ask this question, you will continue living out the definition of insanity with every national election because you refuse to look deeply at the fundamentals of how the corporate state functions. You will cover its rotting stench with come cloying cologne of "hope" and thereby not only enable your betrayers but waste precious time by not attending to life and death issues.

My 2006 book, U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, endeavored first and foremost to leave the reader with an understanding of who owns and operates the American political system. Others have offered their brilliant analyses-Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine, Mike Ruppert in Crossing The Rubicon, and Kevin Phillips in Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Your failed love affair with Obama is now your teaching moment-a critical opportunity to research these four books above and buy out of the putrid, perfidious American political system and buy into making your local community resilient and self-sufficient.

I have long since rejected the American political system and have not voted in any national election since 2000, nor will I again in my lifetime. To do so is to buy into a system that has created what for years I have termed the Toxic Triangle of energy depletion, economic meltdown, and environmental devastation. Every drop of human energy I invest in that system is energy divested from working with my community, my neighborhood, and my loved ones to respond to the current and coming horrors that have been wrought by the three "E's": catastrophic climate chaos, multitudes of environmental refugees, impending global food shortages, the depletion of safe and clean drinking water worldwide, widespread droughts and environmental disasters, unprecedented energy depletion, environmental illnesses and pandemics, and global economic cataclysm.

Visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller, E.F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly have demonstrated that global challenges are most effectively addressed on the local level, where pragmatic responses and options can be created as an alternative to investment in the fantasy of global solutions. That is to say that in the 21^st century, "global" is synonymous with "corporate" and therefore guaranteed to exacerbate rather than grapple with the daunting issues confronting the earth community.

Some individuals argue that focusing on re-localization forces us to ignore the global corporatism of an international ruling elite. My response is to ask why we must do one or the other. It is crucial in my opinion to be aware of the powers that be and their machinations, but I must also ask, what realistically, any of us can do to alter or avert their agenda? The answer is nothing; however, there is much we can do to protect ourselves and our communities from it by becoming self-sufficient and resilient.

On Inauguration Day, 2009, I was intrigued as I watched the swearing in of Obama, by the presence of one man standing behind and to the right of Obama--none other than Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. I doubt that the positioning was intentional, but for me, it was symbolic. It forces me to ask, which interests, which ruling elite families are "standing behind and to the right" of Obama? To what extent is he their creation and theirs alone? For that reason, I chose a photo of that symbolic moment to accompany this article. Take a closer look and think about it deeply. On Inauguration Day, I scoured the internet to find a photo of Rockefeller standing behind Obama during the Oath of Office because I knew its symbolism would later be appreciated by many more Americans than just me. This moment is the moment I had in mind.

Some enablers are capable of changing their behavior and making saner choices. For example, those that have a magnetic attraction to prisoners might find themselves losing interest because they have discovered the deeper meaning of freedom-the ability to create with the support of others, authentic, meaningful responses that do not seduce one into the prison system itself.

This particular affair is over. The "hopium" has worn off. It's time to choose whether you will pursue another affair with another prisoner or walk away from all forms of incarceration, theirs and yours. This is your teaching moment.

The main reason is that Democrats in Congress and President Obama have shown nothing but disdain for the overwhelming national desire for an end to the self-serving corruption that is revealed through never-ending sweetheart deals for corporate interests, even as a large fraction of Americans suffer in this Great Recession caused by corporate greed, incompetence and criminality that go unpunnished.

One of the very few truths coming from Obama's lips was that the forces that swept Brown to victory were the same as those that propelled Obama into the presidency. What so-very-smart Obama apparently did not fully appreciate when he acknowledged this was that the truth of that statement was evidence of Obama's failures as president. Obama sold himself as an independent-minded, trustworthy Democrat committed to change and better government, and that same approach was used by Republican Brown. If the scam worked for Obama, why not make it work for a Republican? Obviously it worked.

So two days after Brown's victory Obama announces a new Wall Street and banking reform effort. Coincidentally, 53 percent of Democrats that voted for Brown said they would vote for Democrats if they would actually fix Wall Street.

In other words, the national desire for true change and reform that convinced so many independents and others to vote for Obama has been made a mockery by a White House and Congress that has continued to behave as conventional, corrupt and lying politicians. How else to punish Democrats then to make someone like Brown a winner that could derail health care reform and other legislation in the Senate?

I say bravo! Nice work. Thanks for all the Obama voters who either did not vote or voted for Brown. Nice message.

All that Obama and the congressional Democrats have shown is that Americans can never believe that politicians who work their way up through the two-party plutocracy can ever be trusted as true change agents. In a system where money dictates public policy corporate and other special interests will continue to win over true public interests.

As long as third parties do not stand any chance of competing against the two-party plutocracy because the system has been so rigged against them, what else can voters do other than to punish one corrupt political party at critical times by shifting power to the other corrupt political party? So much for American electoral democracy.

Obama was a little known state senator who had accomplished very little before becoming a US senator. Ditto for Brown. If Obama could become president with good looks and a winning personality, why not Brown? Now we should all root for Brown becoming the Republican's best bet for preventing Obama from winning a second term. At least that's what I hope Obama obsesses about and loses sleep over. Maybe then he will stop showing such disdain for democracy, stop making deals with corporate interests and start producing the changes in the political and government system that Americans want and need. And, most of all, get rid of many of your top advisors that are nothing more than status quo establishment figures with terrible political and economic ideas. And also get your Justice Department to prosecute a large number of criminals in the financial sector that created the Great Recession.

Do these things or millions of angry Americans will surely vote out Democrats in the coming mid-term congressional elections and keep you from getting a second term. Not that Republicans, of course, will ever perform any better. But in our delusional democracy about the best voters can do is shift power between the two useless major political parties. Populist anger demands more than empty populist rhetoric from lying politicians of both major parties.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com]

I used to ponder at that admonition every morning back in 1962, and its message did sink in, as I think it did in the minds of every student in the class who wasn't just falling asleep in the back of the room, or idly daydreaming. Students in that class went on to become brain surgeons, genetic engineers, writers, computer scientists, horticulturalists and lawyers. I don't think too many of us are conspiracy theorists.

Malone encouraged me and my classmates to pursue a science track. He selected a fellow student and me for an experiment, shifting us midway through the fall term to an 11th grade advanced physics class, where we learned to calculate vectors, understand wave behavior and the peculiar nature of light, and where we experimented with electricity (I learned its power when, during a boring lecture, I absent-mindedly stuck two straight pins into the electric outlet on my science desk and crossed them, causing a flash and pop, burning the outlet cover and my fingers, and casting the whole classroom into darkness). Sometimes I was lost, but most of the time, I was simply captivated, learning about the inner workings of the atom and the universe.

The public school I attended was excellent, featuring a number of iconoclastic teachers, who taught us to question, not just to memorize.

Sadly, I have learned that this is not the norm in American education, which many explain why the country is so prone to conspiracy theories.

What can we expect when polls show that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution (no surprise since fewer than 33% even know about DNA and its role in heredity)? What can we expect when one in five Americans, or about 20% of us, think that the sun revolves around the earth, or that 55% believe that they are protected by a "guardian angel"?

Conspiracy theories abound where people are fearful and ignorant. There is the conspiracy theory that Americans never really landed on the moon, the conspiracy theory that Jews run the world, the contradictory conspiracy theory that the Freemasons or Opus Dei run the world, the conspiracy theory that President Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya. The list goes on and on.

I'm not saying there are not good reasons for considering 1some conspiracy theories. Certainly the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was more complicated than the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. Too many things had to work perfectly, and there are too many conflicting pieces of evidence, from the poorly adjusted sight on his gun to the Zapruder film and the alleged trajectory of one incredibly destructive "magic" bullet, for the official story to work. Ditto the assassination several years later of Martin Luther King.

Nor, or course, is the official story of the 9-11 attacks credible, and indeed even the participants in the 9-11 Commission are now refusing to stand by the commission's conclusions about what happened. There are too many gaping holes, from how planes hitting the tops of buildings and creating fires that were far below the melting point of steel could have caused those buildings to dissolve into dust from the bottom up to why another building, not hit by any plane, would collapse in exactly the same fashion for no reason.

But not accepting an official explanation is different from adhering to a full-blown conspiracy theory, and Americans seem amazingly inclined to do the latter.

The most stunning example of this is the popularity of the global warming conspiracy theory.

Despite all the terrifying evidence before our eyes-the rapid disappearance of the North Polar ice cap, the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the shrinking back of mountain glaciers all over the world, the frightening acidification of the upper layer of the global oceans, the measurable and accelerating rise in sea levels, and the thousands of years of data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere that can clearly be linked to temperature changes around the world, only half of Americans even believe that global climate is changing, and even fewer, just 36%, believe that the rising global temperature is caused even in part by human activity. Even more astounding is the fact that the number of Americans who believe the earth is heating up has fallen over the last few years from 77% to 51%.

Parallel to this is a growing support for an elaborate conspiracy theory that postulates that governments around the world, in collusion with virtually the entire scientific community, are working collectively to make up and promote a bogus story about global warming.

With other conspiracy theories, from the swine flu vaccination conspiracy to the lunar landing hoax, there is little need for concern. People have their belief system and go about their lives harmlessly. But with the climate change conspiracy, there is a terrible danger that it is leading to government inaction that could ultimately doom the human race, and indeed many of the earth's myriad life forms, to extinction.

Let's look at what the climate change conspiracy advocates are saying. They argue that the governments of Europe, of the US, of Canada, of China and India, and indeed of much of the rest of the world--governments that rarely agree on anything, I might point out--are acting in concert to promote a bogus claim that the earth is heating up because of man-made release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They claim that this conspiracy is being supported by the almost universal connivance of the world's scientists, who are collectively falsifying data and hiding countervailing data. And all this is happeningthey assert, despite the almost universal opposition of the world's corporations, most of which, we know, are resisting having governments take any serious action to combat climate change, and in many cases (look at the US Chamber of Commerce), are actively challenging the whole notion of climate change.

To believe in such a far-reaching conspiracy theory, one would have to first deny all the evidence before our eyes. But then one would also have to believe that the US, China, and Europe, as well as other countries, are in league. You would also have to assume that thousands of tenured scientists--a group with a disproportionate number of large egos and people with a penchant for disputation and controversy, I might add--are all working in concert to bury information and create a false theory. Finally, you would have to believe that all this effort is being made in order to pursue an economy-crippling strategy of making fossil fuels more expensive that is directly in opposition to the wishes of virtually the entire capitalist system.

When, I have to ask, has the US government ever acted deliberately against the interests of the major capitalist enterprises? When, except during revolutionary moments, have any nations acted against the wishes of the assembled commercial interests within their borders? The short answer is: never.

Unless you think the Jews, or alternatively the Freemasons or Opus Dei or the Federalist Society, or maybe all these disparate groups together, are behind this vast conspiracy, and have successfully terrorized and bribed the tens of thousands of scientists and government officials into complicity, the idea of a conspiracy so huge and far-reaching is simply laughable.

And yet with almost half of Americans ready to believe it, the corporate media, eager for ratings, are playing along, giving equal billing to the global warming deniers. Just last night, ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson offered a story on climate change that featured competitor Fox TV's ardent climate change denier and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck as a suppsedly credible advocate for the argument that global warming is an elaborate hoax.

We might as well be watching news stories about how we've all been duped into believing that the earth revolves around the sun, or that, god help us, the damned thing is round.

The truth is, if there is a conspiracy regarding climate change, it is a conspiracy by our government to minimize the threat (we saw that concretely with the attempt by the Bush administration to muzzle climate scientists like NASA's James Hansen), avoid taking serious action, and pretend that the actions being proposed, like "cap and trade," will solve the problem.

As I sit here in southeastern Pennsylvania on December 10, looking out at the green grass on my lawn, which has yet to feel a hard frost just two weeks before Christmas, I'm reminded of Mr. Malone's old banner: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist." The corollary is clearly: "If you can measure it, it does exist."

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The United States has just finished construction of a $60 million facility at Bagram. Interestingly, the new facility is sometimes referred to as an extension of the existing facility (modified aircraft hanger).

Bagram is a former Soviet air base which is now used by the United States and NATO as a primary airfield and shipping point (Al Jazeera 11/16/2009):

The air field part of the complex is already handling 400 tonnes of cargo and 1,000 passengers daily, according to Air Force spokesman Captain David Faggard.

It is continuing to grow to keep up with the requirements of an escalating war and troop increases.

Plans are under way to build a new, $22m passenger terminal and a cargo yard costing $9m. To increase cargo capacity, a parking ramp supporting the world's largest aircraft is to be completed in early 2010.

So here is (apparently) the situation. The U.S. spends $60 million to build a prison (extension) in the middle of a what is (currently) a U.S. airbase (with apparent plans to make it a commercial flight center). The prisoners in the modified hanger (including at least 30 non-Afghan detainees) have, or will, be moved to the new facility. This facility will be transferred to Afghan control. Yes an Afghan prison (supposedly) in the middle of a U.S. airbase.

Now, who might get the contract to train Afghan police? Xe/Blackwater of course. I realize that prison guards are not police, but there is no mention of who will be training the guards for the prison after transfer. One assumes that it will be a contractor since the U.S. seems to be outsourcing much of military, intelligence, and transition efforts.

There are more questions than answers. Is the U.S. building what will eventually become a commercial international airport at Bagram? If so, is it a good idea to have a major prison in the middle of such an endeavor? Or will the United States maintain Bagram as long term military base with an Afghan-run prison in the middle of it? Is there an agreement between the Afghans and the United States that the facility continue to house what the U.S. considers "high value detainees"?

News reports really shouldn't leave one with so many questions.

Other Information
Bagram Airbase Fact Sheet

How Camp Cunningham got its name. Camp Cunningham is where many of the troops for the Bagram airbase are housed.

A brief article published on the inside pages of the business section of the January 1 New York Times ("With Bigger Bonuses, An Upside for Banks") notes in passing that the three top Wall Street banks will pay out an estimated $49.5 billion in cash bonuses and stock awards.

Those banks--Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley--received a combined $45 billion in cash under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in October of 2008. Along with the rest of the banks, they have benefited from trillions of dollars in nearly interest-free loans, debt guarantees, securities purchases and other subsidies from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

The government has further underwritten bank profits and surging bonuses by keeping interest rates at near-zero and pumping trillions of dollars of cheap credit into the financial markets, while placing no restrictions on the ability of the banks to resume the speculative practices that precipitated the financial crash of 2008.

Meanwhile, the American people have lost $11 trillion in wealth, primarily through the collapse of home values. For their part, the banks have sharply curtailed lending over the past 15 months, draining more than $3 trillion of credit from the economy.

In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration, with the support of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, sought to sell the bailout to the public on the grounds that it would enable the banks to resume lending. However, the TARP law imposed no strings on the bailed out banks, allowing them to do with the money what they wanted, without even requiring that they tell the government how they were using their cash windfalls.

The curtailment of lending by the banks has played a major role in deepening and prolonging the recession. Instead of increasing credit to businesses and consumers, the banks have made large--in some cases, record--profits through speculative trading in stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

The same article in the Times cites Robert Willens, an accounting and tax analyst in New York, who estimates that US banks will hand out $200 billion in total compensation, a figure that does not take into account the hedge fund industry.

To place this sum in perspective, it is roughly equal to the annual median salary of 4 million American workers.

All of the major banks have been allowed by the Obama administration to repay their TARP cash injections, thereby freeing them from minor restrictions on executive pay imposed on banks that continue to hold TARP money.

According to Willens, the banks will reap $80 billion in tax savings from the $200 billion in compensation, since most employee compensation is a tax deductible expense under existing tax laws. The biggest tax break will go to Goldman Sachs, which expects to award its employees a record $23 billion in bonuses. Goldman will save about $9 billion in federal income taxes on the bonuses it pays out for 2009.

Altogether, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will gain nearly $20 billion in tax breaks from their employee compensation this year.

Indicative of the year-end bonanza for bankers, the Times reported in a separate article on January 1 that Wells Fargo, the fourth largest US bank by assets, which received $25 billion in TARP cash, plans to pay its top four executives a combined $25 million in bonuses. These are to be paid entirely in stock options, rather than cash.

In awarding the bonuses in stock rather than cash, Wells Fargo is following the example of other big banks, including Goldman Sachs. Under prodding from the administration, banks are paying a greater portion of executive compensation in deferred stock, supposedly to tie pay awards to long-term growth rather than short-term gains. However, as the Times points out, "If banks... continue to rebound from the financial crisis, their shares--and the executive payouts--could surge."

Since the government has made clear that it will impose no genuine reforms or restrictions on the banking industry, and will spend unlimited sums to protect the wealth of the Wall Street elite, the bankers have every reason to believe that stock bonuses will prove more lucrative than cash.

The government's undiminished commitment to rescuing Wall Street was underscored on Christmas eve, when the Treasury announced that it was removing a $400 billion cap on government aid to the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and approving cash pay packages of $6 million each to the CEOs of the government-controlled firms.

Surging bank profits and bonuses go hand in hand with a dizzying rally on the US stock market. In a year that saw the permanent destruction of millions of jobs, all three major US stock indexes recorded massive increases. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 2009 up 18.8 percent for the year. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 stock index surged 23.5 percent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq rose 43.9 percent.

From their lows in early March, the stock indexes recorded even more staggering gains in a "rally many investors had not seen in their lifetime," according to the January 1 Washington Post. The Dow rose 59 percent, the S&P 500 soared 65 percent and the Nasdaq was up 79 percent.

Financial stocks were up 15 percent for the year, including Bank of America, whose share price quadrupled from its March low. Ford stock increased 532 percent from its low point in March.

In all, the value of US stocks increased by $5.6 trillion from the market's nadir, the resulting windfall going disproportionately to the wealthiest investors.

A major factor in the stunning rebound in the financial markets was the refusal of the government to impose any serious reforms in the wake of the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a year-end review on January 4: "But more than a year after Lehman Brothers, American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Washington Mutual collapsed or were saved by the government and financial markets swooned, it is striking how little on Wall Street has changed."

The scale and character of the government bailout was summed up aptly by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, in a review of recent books on the financial crash. Writing in the December 27 Washington Post, Johnson said, "The Wall Street executives kept their jobs, their bonuses and their pensions; they benefited from unprecedented rule changes and unlimited monetary and fiscal support; and their firms became even bigger and more dangerous to the economic health of society...

"The executives of our largest banks ran their firms into the ground, taking excessive risks that even now they fail to understand fully. But, as these individuals saw it, unless they personally were saved on incredibly generous terms, the world's economy would grind to a halt."

The Obama administration and the Democrats, no less than Bush and the Republicans, agreed that their chief mission was to rescue the personal fortunes of these executives and the financial oligarchy they represent.

This morning I browse the Internet and find this article: "America The Traumatized: How 13 Events of The Decade Made Us The PTSD Nation." I highly recommend reading it because it is the most complete assessment of our trauma from the beginning of this century until the present moment. It's only fault is that it does not address the extent to which the European settlers who founded this nation and their descendants have traumatized this continent's indigenous population and the rest of the world from the moment they set foot on North American shores.

Shock Doctrine

If you have not yet read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, you do not yet fully understand the trauma of the last decade nor its permanent effects in America and in the world. Klein's incisive analysis clarifies the extent to which the world has been traumatized far beyond the events of September 11 and reveals an economic policy of the last half of the twentieth century that, like the events of that particular day, will perpetuate an indefinite climate of terror throughout the twenty-first century.

The "holy wars" engendered by 9/11 in turn produced countless men and women emotionally and spiritually eviscerated by them, returning to their homelands to become the next generation of murderers, spouse-batterers, and child abusers. And simultaneously, the close of the decade brought forth an economic bloodbath which left masses of dispossessed human beings homeless, bankrupt, unemployed, without healthcare or retirement, and in myriad instances, depressed and suicidal. Moreover, this financial carnage was not merely a vast series of incidents of economic trauma, but implemented the permanent dismantling of the middle class--a sea change of calculated, systematic impoverishment.

A December 15 MSNBC story reported that: "Joblessness has wreaked financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and trouble maintaining even basic necessities."

As Klein documents, some of this past decade's trauma was circumstantial; some, deliberate, but all has left an indelible, protracted mark on the human species which is likely to endure even beyond this century.

Hey, I'm Not Traumatized

Some readers may argue that this article, so far, is irrelevant to their circumstances. After all, you may argue, I haven't experienced any of the above-mentioned forms of adversity. Very well-yes, I really mean that. I'm happy that you have been fortunate enough to avoid them, but do not think, dear reader, that you have been able to avoid being traumatized. In fact, if you are alive on planet earth today, you are living and will live the rest of your life in a state of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While you may not have lived through a traumatic event, you cannot escape the effects of a plethora of traumatic events around you, and what is more, you will be reminded of those events on some level every day of your life.

Is it the foreclosure signs you see as you look out your front window? Is it the story about the Nigerian airline passenger this past weekend who allegedly intended to blow up a plane-a story that dominates airtime on cable news channels, internet sites, and newspapers? Maybe it's the homeless people you see on your city streets carrying signs begging for whatever change you can spare. Unless you're living in a hermetically sealed isolation tank, you know someone who has lost their house, job, healthcare, retirement benefits, a limb or a life in war. You're not an addict? Don't feel like self-medicating? Untold millions of people do. Why is that?

Perhaps you haven't had your "End of Suburbia" moment when you really get, down to your toenails what the end of cheap and abundant oil will mean for you and your loved ones. Maybe you can't wrap your mind around going to the grocery store only to find that there is no food there. Just can't grasp getting seriously injured and needing surgery, but no hospital, doctor, or nurse can be found-at least one with anesthesia? Oh, and did I mention that sometime this coming decade, it may become very difficult or impossible to find clean, safe drinking water? Now, do you feel traumatized?

You, yes you, are experiencing some form of PTSD, and that will become increasingly obvious to you as the collapse of the empire that engineered the pillage grows more insane, more desperate to survive, more threatened, and more willing to do whatever it takes to stay on life-support.

I haven't even mentioned here the reality of childhood trauma that many of us bring to the table in the traumatic decades of the twenty-first century. How this factors into the equation is unknown, but it does, and it will, and added to the reality that we live in a culture of competition, as opposed to cooperation, trauma-past and present, is an enormous contributor to our daunting difficulties in creating and maintaining supportive and harmonious living communities.

Wow, I'm Multi-Tasking!

For activists and those working for change, it is extremely important to understand the trauma of the people with whom and for whom you are working, as well as your own. It accounts for the inability of so many people to look at the realities of collapse and stop pretending that a "return to normal" is imminent. And even when folks are able to look, our multitudinous forms of PTSD may keep us from realizing how little time we have to prepare and stop us from allowing ourselves to be deeply penetrated by what is truly at stake.

In an article "In Terror's Grip: Healing The Ravages of Trauma", by Harvard Medical School's Bessel van der Kolk, he emphasizes that the difference between a normally stressful event and a trauma is the degree of helplessness one experiences in the face of it. Numbness, confusion, shock, withdrawal, denial, addictions, and many other behaviors are attempts to avoid the feeling of helplessness and the reliving, consciously or unconsciously, of the trauma. The result is often an attempt to avoid feelings that might evoke memories of the trauma or use the distractions of work, family, or other responsibilities to keep emotions and memories at bay. Thus the obsession with "staying happy" or "keeping things light" or "having a positive attitude."

I notice, for example, that it is much easier for activists to "lose themselves" in causes and projects than actually feel the feelings associated with these endeavors. This accounts for the ubiquitous question "What should we do?" that arises as people begin to awaken to the dire issues of Peak Oil (and every other resource), climate change, global economic catastrophe, species extinction, and population overshoot-to name only a few. If I'm busy "doing" and "solving", then I don't have to feel my feelings about something that may or may not have a solution. If I don't feel my feelings, however, I am likely to misdirect my energy and while being quite task-oriented, fail to be the person I need to be, for myself and for others, as the external situation further deteriorates.

The moment we feel our feelings, we are no longer in the land of logistical preparation where we can operate from the neck up and pretend that there is no force greater than the personal human ego operating within in us or outside of us. Once we feel, we are in the territory of soul-a domain that is irrational, non-linear, unpredictable, and beyond our control.

As Van Der Kolk and others emphasize, a sense of helplessness is what keeps us from exploring our feelings in relation to collapse more fully. Yet what is unavoidably true is that on many levels, we are helpless or at least feel helpless in the face of monumental challenges like Peak Oil and climate change.

The Mother Of All Fears

If I feel, I enter the domain of the heart and soul, and if I do that, I will invariably, sooner or later, confront my fear of death. But isn't that just another trauma? Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. A number of wise men and women have researched death extensively including Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Stephen and Ondrea Levine, and the Dali Lama who claims to spend at least one hour a day contemplating his own death.

Isn't this just a lot of self-absorbed navel gazing? I think not. In fact, I believe it is very important in a culture that is based on invincible heroism, to contemplate our defeat and our demise regularly. Until we do so, death has unspeakable power over us-so much so that it prevents us from feeling our feelings and thus tapping into that "something greater" within us that can guide us to where we will be most useful to our loved ones and the rest of the community of life.

In fact, Van Der Kolk, the Harvard Medical School researcher, highly recommends feeling our feelings: "...effective treatment of PTSD", he writes, "must involve promoting awareness, rather than avoidance, of internal somatic states." He uses the term "mindfulness", a word often used by practitioners of meditation, stating that, "Mindfulness, awareness of one's inner experience, is necessary for a person to respond according to what is happening and is needed in the present, rather than reacting to certain somatic sensations as a return of the traumatic past. Such awareness will free people to introduce new options to solve problems and not merely to react reflexively."

What Does Your GPS Say?

Finally, says Van der Kolk, "Imagining new possibilities, not merely repetitively retelling the tragic past, is the essence of post-traumatic therapy." In this I hear the both-and that we must embrace as we navigate another decade of trauma and traumatic residue from the previous one. That is, we must be willing to feel our feelings and listen to their reverberations in the body, and at the same time, envision and imagine life lived in a new paradigm of cooperation, enoughness, service, respect, and deep listening and truth-speaking. In the coming decade of transition trauma, we must listen deeply not only to others but to the "something greater" within us-the internal GPS (not Global Positioning System but Greater Positioning System) that can center and ground us when all manner of terror confronts us and tempts us to resort to numbness, avoidance, panic, cynicism, or frenetic busy-ness.

I don't know how the next decade will end, but it is beginning with an insipid mediocrity that I find more ominous than blatant upheaval. Thus I cannot help but wonder to what extent a dramatic "event(s)" will be necessary to awaken more of our species or the level of catastrophe required for the awakening to occur. In other words, a significant portion of the human race may be incapable of mindfulness without the experience of more trauma of a more calamitous nature. I would very much like to be wrong about that, but we're out of time, and most of humanity is obsessed with a "return to normal."

This week's issue of Newsweek features an article on "Survivalism Lite" which highlights families around the nation who are preparing for the worst. Of course, it's all about amassing vast quantities of food, medical supplies, and ammunition. Nowhere in the piece is there one mention of how these people intend to cope emotionally and spiritually when all the cans of Chef Boyardee run out. What this movement portends is quite simply, a bunch of traumatized people preparing to inflict more trauma on themselves and others.

There is absolutely no place in the decade ahead for arrogance based on how much we know about collapse and how prepared we think we may be for it. Like veterans returning from combat, we are all the walking wounded, and our work is to hold onto each other and feel our own and the other's feelings, then join hands and transform our communities. The work to be done is daunting in quantity and scope; it is the work not only of preparation but also of healing-the work of looking inside ourselves and asking, "Who is preparing? Who is healing? Who do I want to be-who must I be in the 20-tens?"

This morning I also received this stunning poem by David Whyte which I invite us to take with us into the new decade:

MAMEEN (Conamara, Ireland)

Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path as if seeing
your past and then south over the hazy blue
coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

- David Whyte

Carolyn Baker is available for Transition coaching/counseling and spiritual direction. Please contact her at Carolyn@carolynbaker.net

This despite the fact that leading military commanders and politicians are clearly intent on using the massacre to circumvent the restrictions imposed on the German military as a consequence of the crimes it committed in the Second World War.

It is now regarded as certain that a German colonel, Georg Klein, gave the order for an air strike on two hijacked tankers in the early hours of September 4, with the intention of killing the people who had gathered near the vehicles.

There was no immediate danger to German soldiers or the German field camp located seven kilometers away. Apparently, the colonel hoped to strike down the leaders of local militias who were opposing the international occupation force. In a note to his superiors written one day after the attack, Klein acknowledged that he intended to "annihilate insurgents through the use of air strikes."

In its edition of last week, Der Spiegel names some of the targets: "Mullah Shamsuddin, an experienced commander of the Pashtun," as well as the "four Taliban leaders Mullah Abdul Rahman, Maulawi Naim, Mullah Siah and Mullah Nasruddin." The latter were "local leaders, who each commanded around 15 fighters and controlled small areas around Kunduz," the magazine reports.

They had been tracked down and pursued over the preceding days by members of the top-secret KSK unit. Klein consulted with at least one KSK soldier before he gave the command to attack. This indicates that he clearly hoped to "annihilate" one or several of the local leaders.

In so doing--even though he may not have spoken directly with his superiors--Klein "had good reason to believe that his superiors and the German government would approve of his robust actions," notes Der Spiegel on the basis of its investigation.

Two state secretaries, August Hanning (Interior Ministry) and Peter Wichert (Defense Ministry), traveled to Kabul on October 21, 2008 in order to confront the government of Hamid Karzai, following an escalation of attacks on German soldiers. On their return to Berlin, they had confidential discussions with representatives from the Chancellery and the Interior, Defense and Foreign ministries over how to proceed. Der Spiegel comments on the discussions: "Hanning is for a harder course, he wants to hunt down those backing the Taliban. Hunt down or be hunted, that is the alternative according to Hanning."

Since this initial meeting there have been further discussions by this group aimed at organizing a behind-the-scenes transformation of the role of the German army. In May 2009, KSK units began hunting down alleged Taliban for the first time.

In April, the Defense Ministry had deleted an exception from the NATO operations plan which prohibited German troops from practicing "the use of deadly force" except in cases of self-defense. During the summer, the deployment rules were changed accordingly.

The so-called "pocket cards" carried by every German soldier were reworded to allow soldiers to respond with deadly force "against individuals who are planning, preparing or supporting attacks, or who exhibit other forms of hostile behaviour."

The term "other forms of hostile behavior" is so broad that it allows German soldiers to retaliate against practically anyone opposed to the presence of the German military. Colonel Klein therefore could quite rightly feel he had the backing of his superiors when he gave his order to attack and "annihilate" insurgents on September 4.

In adopting a policy of deliberate liquidation, the German army is reverting to methods which are characteristic of modern colonial warfare and stand in flagrant violation of elementary principles of law. "Targeted killing" has become an established military term. Entire books and numerous legal papers have been devoted to the topic. A search for "targeted killing" on Google generates over one million hits.

A contribution on the web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, the most important foreign policy think tank in the US, defines the term as follows: "Targeted killings are used by governments to eliminate individuals they view as a threat. Generally speaking, a nation's intelligence, security or military forces identify the individual in question and carry out an operation intended to kill him or her. Though questionable, the practice has been used by defense and intelligence operations by governments around the world and has been viewed with increased legitimacy since the start of the so-called war on terror."

In other words, "targeted killing" is aimed at the execution of political opponents without accusation or judgment. Denunciation by a secret service is sufficient to arrive at and carry out a death sentence. The weapons used--precision bombs as in Kunduz, remote-controlled missiles or remote-controlled explosive devices--are such that the victims (and those around them) have no chance to defend themselves.

Such methods are not new. But for a long time they were regarded as the reserve of the secret services of totalitarian regimes. The Soviet secret service GPU, for example, regularly hunted down and killed political opponents of Stalin abroad. During the Cold War, the CIA also carried out assassinations of selected politicians, but was later required--at least officially--to abandon such practices. In 1981, an executive order of the president declared: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination."

In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, however, these guidelines were increasingly abandoned. In 1986, US President Ronald Reagan ordered a missile attack on the house of the Libyan head of state, Muammar Al Gaddafi, in Tripoli, and in 1998, president Bill Clinton ordered missile attacks on an alleged terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan. The justification for the attack on Gaddafi was the bombing of a disco in Berlin frequented by US soldiers, while the strikes ordered by Clinton were prompted by attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

A pioneer of the policy of "targeted killing" is the Israeli government. Already in the 1970s, the Israeli secret service Mossad had hunted down and murdered alleged terrorists. It directed its operations, in particular, against the political leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Several leaders of Yasser Arafat's Fatah were murdered by Israeli commandos. Following Fatah's arrangement with Israel in the 1993 Oslo Agreement, the leaders of Hamas, as well as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Amal, were targeted by Mossad.

According to a report in the Middle East Quarterly, in the first twelve months of the Intifada rebellion that began in the occupied areas in September 2000, Israel carried out "at least forty cases of assassinations of middle- and high-level Palestinian activists." The Israeli armed forces proceeded with the utmost brutally, bombing cars on public roads in densely populated areas or destroying houses, killing entire families of the targeted victims. Due to their flagrant illegality, the Israeli murders were a source of international criticism, but behind the scenes the Israeli government could rely on official backing, particularly from the US.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were used by the Bush administration to drop any official reservations standing in the way of targeted killings. Since then, the cold-blooded liquidation of political opponents, purported to be "terrorists" or "Taliban," has become common practice of the American forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. This policy has been extended into Pakistan, where opponents of the US or the Pakistani government have become the targets of remote-controlled US drones.

Bush's successor Barack Obama has not only continued this policy, he has intensified it. "It is a slight exaggeration to say that Barack Obama is the first president in American history to have run in part on a political platform of targeted killings--but not much of one," writes law professor Kenneth Anderson in a contribution for the Brookings Institution. He adds in praise: "Obama was right as a candidate and is correct as president to insist on the propriety of targeted killings--that is, the targeting of a specific individual to be killed, increasingly often by means of high technology, remote-controlled Predator drone aircraft wielding missiles from a stand-off position. The strategic logic that presses toward targeted stand-off killing as a necessary, available and technologically advancing part of counterterrorism is overpowering."

Although there is no shortage of pundits prepared to justify this practice, it is patently illegal. Not only does it violate the abolition of the death penalty in numerous civilized countries, it also contravenes the basic and internationally recognized legal principle that nobody may be executed without a valid trial.

There is no limit once targeted killings have been recognized as legitimate. Where is the dividing line between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? How is one to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate resistance? In which countries are targeted killings permissible--they have been deemed acceptable by imperialist governments in relation to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq Sudan and recently Yemen--and in which countries are they not? It is the arbitrary decisions and geo-strategic interests of aggressor governments that determine how the lines are drawn.

Under such conditions, the turn of the German army to a policy of targeted killings must ring the alarm bell. The German army was responsible for the most abominable crimes on its Eastern front during the Second World War. It murdered huge numbers of civilian hostages in retaliation for fallen German soldiers, carried out the summary execution of partisans and prisoners of war, and participated in the annihilation of the Jews. Most of these crimes remained unpunished because they were allegedly not covered at the time by international law. After the war, however, numerous provisions were introduced into international law to prevent a recurrence of such atrocities. These provisions are now being systematically circumvented and undermined.

Wynne took part in meetings with the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2004 and 2005 about concerns with the links, but the consensus from the meetings was to field the UAVs as quickly as possible.

"I would say people were aware of it [the vulnerability], but it wasn't disturbing," Wynne said. "It wasn't yet dangerous; it certainly didn't disrupt an operation, so why make a huge deal of it?" (Michael Hoffman, John Reed and Joe Gould, "Fixes on the Way for Nonsecure UAV Links," Air Force Times, December 20, 2009)

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken. Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet--from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs. Thousands of ROVER terminals have been distributed to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But those early units were "fielded so fast that it was done with an unencrypted signal. It could be both intercepted (e.g. hacked into) and jammed," e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program. In a presentation last month before a conference of the Army Aviation Association of America, a military official noted that the current ROVER terminal "receives only unencrypted L, C, S, Ku [satellite] bands." (Noah Shachtman and Nathan Hodge, "Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes," Wired, December 17, 2009)

The first involves programmes designed to saturate such cities with myriads of networked surveillance systems. ...

This leads neatly to the second main area of defence research and development to help assert the dominance of US forces over global south cities: a shift towards robotic air and ground weapons. When linked to the persistent surveillance and target identification systems ... these weapons will be deployed to continually and automatically destroy purported targets in potentially endless streams of state killing. Here, crucially, fantasies of military omniscience and omnipotence, which blur seamlessly into wider sci-fi and cyberpunk imaginations of future military technoscience, become indistinguishable from major US military research and development programmes. The fantasies of linking sentient, automated and omnipotent surveillance--which bring God-like levels of 'situational awareness' to US forces attempting to control intrinsically devious global south megacities--to automated machines of killing, pervades the discourses of the urban turn in the RMA. (Stephen Graham, "Surveillance, urbanization, and the 'Revolution in Military Affairs'," in David Lyon (ed) Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, London: Willan, 2006, pp. 251, 254-255)

While millions are facing the loss of their jobs and their homes, corporate profits have reached their highest levels in five years.

The number of prime-rate mortgage borrowers in default doubled from a year earlier, according to figures released Monday by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The portion of such "prime" mortgages in serious delinquency reached 3.6 percent in the third quarter, up 19 percent from three months before.

The report surveyed the 34 million home loans made by banks under the purview of the OTS and OCC, which amount to about 65 percent of all mortgages issued in the US. Given that the figures only covered this share of US mortgages, the real number of foreclosures is undoubtedly well over 1 million.

The total percentage of "nonperforming" mortgage loans climbed for the sixth straight quarter, reaching 13 percent of all mortgages in the survey. The percentage of mortgages that are "seriously delinquent" reached 6.2 percent, while 3.2 percent of all mortgages were in foreclosure.

Extrapolating from the survey of all US mortgages, 6.8 million of US households were behind on their mortgage payments in the third quarter. These figures do not count those families who have already lost their homes. A loss rate of 3.2 percent on the $6 trillion in loans measured by the report would represent write-downs of some $192 billion.

Meanwhile, the study found that despite mortgage modification programs promoted by the US government, homeowners whose banks modified their mortgage terms continued to default at extremely high rates. Nearly half of all participants in such programs still went on to default on their mortgages.

This is partly due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of such modifications have been temporary. The Obama administration reported this month that while 700,000 three-month trial modifications were issued as part of its "Home Affordable Modification Program," only 31,382 had been made permanent as of November.

The report followed findings by First American CoreLogic, a real estate information firm, that the number of foreclosed homes about to go on the market has reached 1.7 million. The backlog of such homes has grown by 55 percent in the year to September, according to a report issued last week by the California-based company.

The flood of foreclosed homes has pushed down home prices, with the average selling price of a previously occupied home falling to $172,600 last month, a 4.3 percent decrease from a year ago, according to the CoreLogic report. In separate figures, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said its index of housing prices was down 10.8 percent from its peak in April 2007.

Plummeting home prices, together with extensive government tax incentives, helped push up the number of existing home sales by 7.4 percent last month, to a three-year high, according to a survey released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors. Lawrence Yun, the vessociation's chief economist, said that the jump was due to "a rush of first-time buyers" who wanted to take advantage of the Obama administration's tax credit before it was set to expire last month.

On November 7, the White House extended the program that provides new homebuyers with up to $8,000 in tax credits, to April of next year. Economists warn that home sales will likely plunge following the program's expiration.

Meanwhile, the employment situation, which has become the principal cause of the housing crisis, remains dire. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that in 25 states unemployment benefit programs have already run out of money due to record numbers of people losing their jobs. The state's unemployment insurance programs have had to borrow $24 billion from the federal government to continue functioning.

By 2011, according to government figures, 40 states will have exhausted their benefit pools and will need to borrow an additional $90 billion from the federal government to keep afloat.

The Obama administration has explicitly denied states' requests for further aid, forcing them to consider cuts to benefit payments that are already too low to cover essential needs. The shortfall has brought calls for cuts to unemployment benefits, with a state panel in Kentucky recommending last week that the state reduce its benefits for the jobless by about 9 percent.

Virginia has borrowed $89 million from the US government to cover benefit payments, and Maryland owes the government $85 million. South Carolina, which has a 12 percent unemployment rate, owes the federal government $649 million for unemployment payments.

Meanwhile, the rate of US economic growth in the third quarter was once again revised downward this week, to 2.2 percent. The figure was originally reported as 3.5 percent by the US Commerce Department, but was lowered to 2.8 percent last month. The US economy shrank at a rate of 0.7 percent in the second quarter.

Corporations, however, are reaping the benefits of the so-called recovery. In its latest report, the Commerce Department revised third-quarter corporate profits upward, from 10.6 percent to 10.8 percent, representing the largest gain in over five years.

Far from signaling any amelioration of the economic conditions confronting the broad mass of working people, the rise in profits has been driven by reduced labor costs stemming from layoffs and increased productivity. During the last quarter, labor costs fell at a rate of 2.5 percent, the steepest 12-month decline in seven years.

This decline is a function of stagnant and declining wages, along with the threat of unemployment being used to intensify the exploitation of those still on the job. Productivity has risen by 8.1 percent, the highest rate in six years.

Global stratification can be traced back as far as the 1750s when Great Britain and other countries in Western Europe began sailing around the world, conquering weaker countries and colonizing them. After invading the country, they would subdue the people and leave a "governing force" in place who would exploit the indigenous people and the resources for their own economic benefit.

This global stratification process is still going on today but the Western European countries have been replaced by multinational corporations. These corporations "sail" around the world and find the least expensive labor they can, set up shop (just as the colonists did), and begin exploiting the indigenous people and their resources. Third world countries are a particularly easy target because the people there live in extreme poverty. Any offer, no matter how meager, is usually better than what they currently have available to them.

Many people defend multinational corporations, and "globalization" saying they create jobs, transfer technology, and help a countries economic development. This can be true, but what we are finding today is that the main goal of the huge multinational corporations is to maximize profits, not to try and help the local population in their plight for a better life. These multinational corporations operate without any respect for the people, the environment, or even the government of the country in which they operate. They continuously break laws with no consequence. They exploit workers with no consequence. They pollute the land with no consequence. And they do all this to earn bigger profits for Wall Street.

Some of the biggest multinational corporations are oil companies. These corporations have had a long history of bad behavior in which they exploit the local population for their own economic gain. One example of this is ExxonMobil. This is an American company based in Irving, Texas. They were operating a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Lhokseumawe, Ache (A special territory of Indonesia located on the northern tip of Sumatra). MobilExxon paid the Indonesian government (a centralized, military-dominated government) 30% of its total oil and gas revenues in order to operate there; however, the local population did not receive any benefits from this arrangement. (Collingsworth) When the natural gas was discovered there in the 1970s the local villagers were immediately displaced and forced to move from their land without any compensation.

After beginning operations, ExxonMobil separated themselves from the local population by building their own "compounds" that were fenced off from the local villagers. These compounds included luxurious living quarters for their corporate staff. The ExxonMobil elite even had their own paved road (the only paved one in the area) which the locals were not allowed to drive on. The locals had to constantly put up with natural gas flair ups and chemical spills. These spills caused many health problems in the nearby villages. The industrial waste from the plant polluted rice paddies (their main source of food) and fishing ponds. The villagers who organized themselves and tried to speak out against MobilExxon were routinely raped, tortured, and even murdered by Indonesian Military soldiers who were hired by ExxonMobil Corporation to provide security for them. These atrocities were reported by human rights groups, international human rights organizations, and the U.S. Department of State, to no avail. Many of the people were tortured by the security forces inside the ExxonMobil compound itself. The facilities had special areas built inside the compound to accommodate the military forces needs, such as barracks and holding rooms. Additionally, ExxonMobil provided these security forces with heavy equipment to cover mass burials after a conflict with locals who were protesting against conditions there.

Even though ExxonMobil knew of these human rights violations, they kept providing the Indonesian military with money and resources. Clearly, ExxonMobil believed the people of Ache were a separate underclass that did not deserve to be treated the same as their corporate "elite" who were mostly American. The ExxonMobil officers and management did not care about the land, environment, or the people of Ache, they just wanted to extract natural gas and make very large profits even if it was at the expense of the locals and the environment.

Another multinational corporation who definitely stratifies the country they operate in and the local people is Coca-Cola. In the late 1990s, Coca-Cola (Nestle Corporation participated in this too) was accused of bringing in paramilitaries to intimidate, kidnap, torture and then ultimately murder union leaders who were trying to improve working conditions at the bottling plant in Columbia. Coca-Cola wanted to keep wages low and orchestrated these events to keep the unions from gaining power. In fact, the multinational corporations have so much power in Columbia, that more union leaders are murdered there than anywhere else in the word.

In India, Coca-Cola is accused of polluting groundwater and soil, causing water shortages and having high levels of pesticide in its soft drinks. Amit Srivastava, of the India Resource Centre stated, "We are profiling a series of community struggles against Coca-Cola in India, all of which point to a pattern in the company's operations. The communities are left thirsting as Coca-Cola draws water from the common water resources. . ."

Additionally, Coca-Cola has illegally occupied some private property that belonged to local villages and has not even paid for it. The villagers took Coca-Cola to court and the company was ordered to pay the villagers for the property, but they were never paid. When they protested the Coca-Cola plant hoping to get their money, they were met by 200 law enforcement officers who were sent to the plant to protect Coca-Cola. The demonstrators were then badly beaten by the police and sent away. (Srivastava, 2003) Furthermore, when Coca-Cola set up bottling plants in India, they agreed to divest a forty-nine percent stake in the company to Indian entities within five years of operation. Coca-Cola no longer wants to do this, and the government of India became worried that Coca-Cola may leave India, so they will accommodate Coca-Cola by accepting a new arrangement which includes some ownership without any voting rights.

I personally know several people who have worked for Coca-Cola in America. The workers there were treated like numbers, not people. The employees were never happy and had many quotas set on them. I can only imagine how the employees in other countries are treated without the protections that are afforded workers in the United States. It is evident that the Coca-Cola Corporation thinks they can do what they please to laborers in other countries. They feel the people in third world countries are beneath them and they will continue to exploit them in order to keep soft drinks cheap, and earn Coca Cola large profits.

Another example of multinational corporations exploiting a country and the people is Chiquita Brands. They are headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. They produce fresh fruits, vegetables and juices which are sold all over the world. Chiquita's exploitation of workers began in the 1950s when it used it political power to convince the U.S. government to overthrow the government of Guatemala. Over 100,000 people we killed or went missing as a result of this action. Additionally, they used a pesticide called Nemagon that is so toxic it had been banned in the United States since the 1970s. They would spray Nemagon on their crops without any type of protection for the field workers. Sometimes the workers were still in the fields picking bananas when the spraying occurred. Nemagon has been proven to cause many medical problems including migraines, vision loss, liver and kidney damage, infertility, cancer, miscarriage and birth defects. Additionally, Chiquita brands admitted in Federal Court that it had for years paid terrorists to protect its banana fields in Columbia. According to U.S. Officials familiar with the case, the terrorists that had been paid were involved in torture, kidnapping, rape, beatings, extortion, drug trafficking, and the killing of thousands of rural Columbians.

Lastly, is the Gap which is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The Gap has manufacturing facilities all over the world, including some that are in American territories. All the countries where the Gap operates have reported human rights abuses. In October 2007, Indian authorities raided manufacturing facilities in New Delhi and found children as young as 10 years old who had been sold to the factory by their parents working there as slaves - they were not even earning a salary. Another factory reported three deaths in 2007 because management refused to allow the employees to leave when they became seriously ill at work.

Just like the early European colonists, these corporations have no regard for the people, or the government of the country where they operate. They move in to these countries in order to exploit the people and get valuable resources to benefit only themselves. They do not build infrastructure, offer medical plans, or try to enhance the indigenous people's life in any way. They are arrogant, powerful, and many times can be more powerful than the governments where they operate. If multinational corporations are going to continue to expand around the world, perhaps we should consider a "world minimum wage" and world "working conditions" reforms that all the companies must abide by. The wages do not have to be as high as they are in the United States, but they should be high enough that the people can work a normal workday and live comfortably. If these multinational companies had these types of regulations put on them, they may even think twice about moving into another country and interfering with their culture and traditions. Maybe it will slow down the pace of their expansion around the world and their exploitation of the people, their resources, and governments to get what they want - corporate profits at the expense of everyone.
Works Cited:

1. Henslin, James M. 2009. Essentials of Sociology A down-to-Earth Approach. Allyn and Bacon: Boston MA

2. Collingsworth, Terry. "Using the Alien Tort Claims to Act to Introduce the Rule of Law to the Global Economy"
http://wwwlaborrights.org

3. Leech, Gay M. "Coca-Cola Accused of Using Death Squads to Target Union Leaders" 2001
http://www6.svsu.edu/~boles/index/coca-coladeath.htm

4. Srivastava, Amit "Communities Reject Coca-Cola in India" India Resource Center. 2003
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7508/

5. Krebs, A.V. "Chiquita, Dole, & Del Monte Sued for Poisoning Banana Workers in Costa Rica" The
http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/chiquita100804.cfm

6. Staff, "Chiquita pleads guilty in terrorism probe" The Associated Press 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17688439/

7. Staff, "Nicaragua: International Action Day in Support of Banana Workers!" Report from Nicaragua Network. 2003
http://www.labournet.net/world/0311/nicarag1.html

8. Cisneros, Noel "Gap Sweatshop Videos Cause Uproar" ABC7. 2007
http://www. abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=business&id=5732845

9. McVeigh, Karen "Third death in a year at Indian factory that supplies Gap" Guardian. 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2191399,00.html

A just and peaceful resolution is difficult to define, considering that the conception of justice varies both in definition and interpretation. In the case of this conflict, the long-held assumption is that a just resolution is one that would be consistent with international and humanitarian laws, and which would enjoy the largest possible consensus worldwide.

A consensus is indeed at hand and has been for decades; it is one that recognizes the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and immoral, that unconditionally acknowledges the illegality of all Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine and the illegal transfer of Israeli settlers to inhabit unlawfully acquired Palestinian land. Strangely enough, despite its very cautious phraseology, the US, especially under the current administration of President Barack Obama recognizes these very facts. But then why is the man who leads the world's only superpower proving not only incapable of achieving what should be a practicable feat, but also going so far as to hinder the efforts of other parties to simply recognize Palestinian rights or pinpoint Israeli injustices?

This is precisely what has just taken place, a repeat of the same infuriating episode for the thousandth time.

A recent proposal presented by Sweden -- the current holder of the rotating European Union presidency -- called on EU members to recognize an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The proposal was watered down to a mere communiqué, issued by EU foreign ministers on December 8, which calls for the division of Jerusalem to serve as "the future capital of the two states." Naturally, Israel, as the occupying power rejected the statement. But so did the United States. "We are aware of the EU statement, but our position on Jerusalem is clear. We believe that is a final-status issue," declared Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P.J. Crowley. He further declared that "this is best addressed inside a formal negotiation among the parties directly."

Crowley, like all of his bosses, Obama included, knows well that Israel is neither keen on 'direct' nor indirect negotiations, and is deliberately prejudicing any possible just solution with its continuing colonization of occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. Israel's rightwing extremist government is not bashful about its true intentions, and the smart and savvy Obama is not ignorant of the prospects of a 'direct' negotiation between those with the bulldozers, the tanks and big guns (based in Tel Aviv) and those with dismal press releases (based in Ramallah). But it's not just the rare initiatives of the EU that are being summarily dismissed by the US.

All initiatives, whether by individual states or regional groups, for example by the Arab League, or through international forums such as the United Nations are rejected, derided and at times suspected of anti-Semitism.

This is a continuation of a terrible legacy that goes back decades. The reason such a redundant policy is being highlighted now -- as it should be -- is because Obama promised change and pledged to lead a new decisive course, led by a gentler, kinder and more sensible America. In the Middle East, this is hardly being realized.

Why? Shouldn't the US, in desperately trying to maintain its role as a world leader, and to preserve its economic and strategic interests in the Middle East, embark on the frequently promised new course -- not for the sake of Palestine and the Arabs, but its own?

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz suggests an answer, one that many of us have already recognized long prior to Obama's presidency, or even his involvement in politics altogether. "In the case of Obama's government in particular, every criticism against Israel made by a potential government appointee has become a catalyst for debate about whether appointing 'another leftist' offers proof that Obama does not truly support Israel," wrote Natasha Mozgovaya on December 4.

Ha'aretz highlighted several cases in point, amongst them the intense war lead by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington against Chas Freeman, a widely respected US official nominated by the Obama administration months ago to chair the National Intelligence Council. He dared voice guarded critique of US foreign policy in the Middle East and became a victim of the worst possible vilification campaign, forcing him to concede the nomination.

Other examples include Robert Malley, a daring American political adviser who wished to believe that his country's national interests took priority over Israel's. He was let go even before the Obama presidency commenced.

More, a 'controversy' is currently 'raging' -- as in, the Israeli lobby is not happy -- over the appointment of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as an intelligence aide. According to Haaretz, "Republican Jews have...protested Hagel's appointment, citing an incident in 2004 when Hagel refused to sign a letter calling on then-president George Bush to speak about Iran's nuclear program at the G8 summit that year."

Stephen M. Walt, a Harvard University professor and co-author of the widely-read The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, recently wrote that "groups in the lobby target public servants like Freeman, Hagel...because they want to make sure that no one with even a mildly independent view on Middle East affairs gets appointed. By making an example of them, they seek to discourage independent-minded people from expressing their views openly, lest doing so derail their own career prospects later on."

Luckily, neither Walt nor numerous other independent-minded Americans like him are afraid to speak their mind, to safeguard the independence and integrity of their country. This should always be the case.

For the time being, don't be surprised when you hear that the US continues to block the path for peace in the Middle East. At least now you know why.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

The politics of social stratification with its relationship to race, culture, and social class are very much alive and ongoing in the United States today. Most Americans don't want to believe that any type of oppression is still happening here in the United States. They want to believe that we are a country in which there are opportunities for all, and moving up the social ladder, or social mobility, is something that is an inherit right and available to everybody. However, sociologists know this is not true. There are many different ways people in power use their positions to "seize greater rewards for themselves," while oppressing others. (Henslin 2009) What I will be discussing in this paper is the struggle of migrant and "guestworkers" in the United States, and how they are socially oppressed, exploited and abused. Additionally, I will describe how politicians and corporations have influenced American ideologies and have reinforced the belief that hiring guestworkers is good because they do jobs that Americans don't want to do.

Let us begin with the notion that unattractive jobs must be filled by foreign workers. Employers who state that Americans will not do certain jobs because they are beneath them imply that the foreign workers who take them are a separate underclass. Having our government back these employers by issuing policies that allow them to hire guestworkers internalizes this ideology in our society - that guestworkers are a separate underclass and deserve to be treated as such. This idea is in conflict with what we are outwardly taught that America is a society that believes in equality of opportunity and that we should avoid ethnic and racial discrimination of any kind.

This internalized ideology is prevalent among employers who seek to hire guestworkers for low wages. An example of just how prevalent this ideology is among employers comes from a company, Professional Grounds, Inc., which is a landscaping company located in Springfield, Virginia. In 2006, they ran a help wanted ad in the local newspaper for landscaper help. The company stated in their ad that the starting wage was $7.74 per hour - which is $8.32 in comparable 2009 wages. (In researching these figures, I found that one of the lowest paid positions in Springfield at the time was a car wash attendant who made $11.00 per hour in 2006 wages and $11.83 per hour in 2009 wages). The company always placed ads like this, and they hoped that nobody would respond, because if they did, Professional Grounds would by law, have to offer the jobs to United States citizens. Professional Grounds actually recruits its real labor force from Mexico and Central America through the United States Department of Labor's H-2A Program. This is a program that allows employers who cannot find enough American workers at the market's "prevailing wages" to hire foreign migrant workers on temporary work visas. By advertising for these jobs at such low wages, Professional Grounds is assured of being able to hire "guest workers" and pay them very low wages because they know that American citizens will not apply. The low wages offered for these jobs support the ideology that "Immigrants fill the jobs native workers won't do." The President of Professional Grounds buys into the ideology wholeheartedly. When he was asked if "native-born Americans" would apply if the wages were doubled he said, "I don't think it's a wage situation. It's the type of work and the nature of the work. It's hard, backbreaking work." (Jaynes, p. 6)

Additionally, the idea that the guestworker policy is good because it helps keep prices low and does not affect American jobs is not true. History has showed us time and again that guestworkers are exploited and abused. In fact, we should ask ourselves, "How can a program, which permanently isolates a class of workers and treats them as a separate and unequal social class, not lead to exploitation?" According to Henslin, conflict theorists believe that there are two main ways to keep laborers under control. "The first tactic is to keep workers insecure. Fear of unemployment works especially well," and the second tactic is "encouraging and exploiting racial - ethnic divisions" by pitting worker against worker". (Henslin 2009) One of the main problems guestworkers face is that fact that they cannot freely change jobs, because their H-2 contract stipulates that they can only work for the employer who hired them. Moreover, they do not complain if they are exploited or abused because they are afraid that they will be deported. Furthermore, they face many civil rights abuses. Some of these abuses are that they are cheated out of wages, held captive by employers who confiscate their documents, forced to live in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions, denied medical coverage if they are injured on the job, and many are forced to pay large sums of money for the privilege of coming to the United States to work. (Bauer 2007)

The first occurrence of guestworkers being exploited and socially oppressed began in 1942, when the United States negotiated with the Mexican government to import low-skilled labor, creating the Bracero Program. This program began as a way to help American farmers because there was a labor shortage as the United States had just entered World War II. The Bracero Program was supposed to bring in a few hundred experienced farm laborers to harvest sugar beets in California, but by the time the program was abolished in 1964, more than 4,500,000 Mexican laborers filled jobs of the Braceros. Although this program had many legal protections written in it, including contracts with workers, housing that would comply with minimum standards, wage guarantees, minimum of 30 days of work, and shared transportation costs, none of these protections stopped American employers from exploiting the Braceros.

As is the case today, due to deportation threats, the Braceros were afraid to complain; they were technically held captive because they did not work consistently and were unable to earn enough money to even pay their way back home. When they did work, they had to work long hours - sometimes 12 a day, and their earnings barely covered their expenses. They constantly had unauthorized deductions taken out of their pay, were given little or no food and they had to live in run-down, unsanitary and overcrowded housing. In addition, they encountered unsafe working conditions that sometimes led to disabling or fatal accidents, and they even tolerated physical abuse, as well as severe racial discrimination. In fact, the exploitation and mistreatment of the Braceros was so severe in Texas, that the Mexican government barred Texas from participating in the program from 1942 to 1947. This first guestworker program was so abused and the people were so badly exploited that the Labor Officer in charge of it, Lee G. Williams said that it was a system of "legalized slavery." (Bauer 2007) Conflict theorists term this type of treatment of one social class exploiting the other, "internal colonialism." Internal colonialism is similar to colonialism, but instead of an industrialized nation taking advantage of a less industrialized nation, a country's dominate group exploits minority groups for their economic advantage. They manipulate social and governmental institutions to control minorities and deny them full access to their society's benefits. (Henslin 2009)

Just like the employers of today, the farmers' main purpose in recruiting foreign workers was to be able to exercise control over who worked, dictate how much they earned, and to be able to control under what conditions they worked and lived. Like any other classification based on immigration status, guestworker programs segregate the workforce, which allows employers to exploit immigrant workers which in turn, drives all workers' wages down.

Stratification of the guestworkers become even more pervasive when, in addition to abuse in the work place, Braceros had to contend with discrimination in the communities where they worked. Many of the establishments in these communities posted "No Mexicans, White Trade Only" signs in an effort to keep Braceros away. Furthermore, many Braceros reported that they often received verbal abuses, false arrests, and physical attacks. (Hines 2006)

After the Bracero Program was terminated in 1964, another phase of exploitation began when foreign workers were imported for agricultural work under the H-2 sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This program was set up in 1943 because Florida's sugar cane industry requested and was given permission to hire Caribbean workers to cut sugar cane on temporary visas. This program too, was badly flawed, and the Caribbean laborers were often exploited, abused, and paid a lower rate than originally promised. Then, in 1986, a well-publicized labor dispute occurred where 300 sugar cane cutters refused to work unless they were paid their stated contract amount. The company involved called the police, and they used guns and dogs to gain control over the laborers, round them up, put them on busses and send them back to the Caribbean. This incident demonstrates the opportunity for extreme abuse in a guestworker program, because it permits the employers to have absolute control of the workers, which includes their right to remain in the United States. (Bauer 2007)

This H-2 program was revised in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which divided it into two sections, the H-2A agricultural program and the H-2B non-agricultural program. Both these programs have protections written in them, but these protections exist only on paper. As was stated earlier, one of the fundamental problems with these guestworker programs is that it gives the employer absolute control over their guestworkers, not just in their wages and working conditions, but also in their legal status. This creates a huge imbalance of power, which is dangerous and leads to extreme abuses.

The exploitation of guestworkers normally begins in their home countries when the agencies that represent the United States employers recruit the workers. Lured by these recruiters and promised jobs that pay high wages, they are required to pay large fees, sometimes thousands of dollars, to cover the cost of travel, fees, visas and profit for the recruiters. Most of the workers who want to come to the United States to work are doing so because they have little or no economic opportunities available to them, and they usually are living in poverty. To pay these huge fees, they borrow from friends, or may mortgage a family home. If they don't have anything to mortgage, or have friends to borrow from they must take out loans at very high interest rates, making it impossible for them to ever pay the loan off during the term of their contract.

For example, in her article "Close to Slavery, Mary Bauer of The Southern Poverty Law Center writes how Guatemalan guestworkers paid an average of $2,000 in travel, visa, and hiring fees to obtain forestry jobs in the United States. She states, "Guatemalans are recruited from Huehuetenango, an extremely poor region where many indigenous people live. . . They generally work as subsistence farmers and have virtually no opportunity to earn wages in rural Guatemala.

Thus, their only realistic option for raising the funds needed to secure H-2 jobs in the United States is to visit a loan shark, who will likely charge exorbitant interest rates. Many of these workers report having been charged 20 percent each month. Given that the pine tree planting season is three months long and workers often earn less than $1,000 per month, they have little hope of repaying the debt doing the work for which they were hired." In her report, she tells the story of Alvaro Hernandez-Lopez who came to the United States to work for Express Forestry Inc. He states, "What I earned planting trees in the States was hardly enough to pay my debt . . . it was really hard for us to fight to get to the States legally and then not earn any money. We were told we had to leave our deeds to get the job. On a blank paper, we had to sign our names and hand over our deeds. They said that if we didn't sign this paper they wouldn't bring us to the states to work." (Bauer 2007)

Then, there is the story of Nelson Ramirez. He signed up to work with Eller and Sons Trees Inc. The agency who recruited him required his wife to sign a paper agreeing to be responsible for his debt if he did not honor his contract. Again, as the conflict theorists believe, this is a tactic of keeping the workers insecure, and therefore, under control.

This type of extortion is not limited to Latin America. There are recruiters in Thailand who charged $5,000 - $10,000 or more for the privilege of being employed in short-term agricultural jobs that pay less than $10.00 per hour. In actually, the workers were not even paid that.

Additionally, in an effort to keep wages low, many employers will seek long visa periods, claiming to have many more months of work than they actually have. When the guestworkers have completed their contract, the employer "allows" them to go work somewhere else. The guestworkers call this period "tiempo libre," or their "free period." This is violation of the immigration laws, but the workers think this is legal because their employer gave them permission. By allowing this period of "tiempo libre", the employers are able to continue to attract a low paid workforce. (Bauer 2007) This policy of allowing a worker to "work off" their contract, then being released to work somewhere else closely resembles the definition of an indentured servant.

Another tactic of ensuring that the guestworkers remain insecure and vulnerable is that the employers "hold all the cards" relating to the employment of the guestworker. The worker basically has no rights because the employer can send them home for any reason whatsoever. A forestry worker from Guatemala reported that when a supervisor noticed that a guestworker was getting fed up because the pay was too low, the employer would take the workers papers away. The forestry worker said the employers would rip up their visas and threaten them with deportation. This has been one of the most common complaints from guestworkers - the seizure of their papers. Some employers say they are holding the documents for safekeeping, while there are others who will admit that they are taking the papers so the guestworkers will not leave in the middle of the contract. The employers believe that if the workers have their paperwork, they will leave. (Bauer 2007)

Discrimination is another form of stratification guestworkers must endure. Many of the workers who want to come and work in the United States are told by recruiters that they are too old. One guestworker was told that it was the policy of the North Carolina Growers Association that they don't accept employees over the age of 40. The United States claims they have no jurisdiction over this type discrimination because it does not happen on United States soil. Moreover, guestworkers often times receive different pay based on their national origin, and women are frequently put into H-2B jobs (non-agricultural) because they pay less than H-2A jobs. (Bauer 2007)

In addition to discrimination, women guestworkers report being continuously sexually harassed. After meeting with farm workers in Fresno, California, William R. Tamayo, a regional attorney for the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), stated that, "We were told that hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex by supervisors." Additionally, Tamayo was told that there is a field in California that the guestworkers refer to as "fil de calzon," or "field of panties," because so many women had been raped by there by their supervisors. (Bauer 2007)

Another requirement set by the H-2 guestworker program is that employees of the H-2A program (the agricultural workers) are to receive free housing that is in good condition for the period of the contract. The housing is often times inadequate, and some workers have reported that as many as 20 workers must share a "house" and many more report having to live in accommodations such as old school busses. Guestworkers who are hired on the H-2B program are not required to receive free housing, but many employers still offer it purely out of necessity - the workers are paid so little they cannot find housing on their own. The employers who offer housing to the H-2B workers are allowed to charge them rent which, of course they do. The rent, which is often excessive, is deducted from the workers' paycheck, and the workers end up earning much less than they expected; it often works out to be less than the minimum wage.

Moreover, employers often locate guestworker's housing in isolated rural areas. This causes the workers to be extremely dependent on their employer since they usually don't have cars and there is insufficient public transportation available to them in these rural areas. In addition to being exploited by their employers, the workers must also rely on them for transportation for trips to the grocery store and banks. Having the guestworkers so dependent on the employer gives the employer absolute power over their workers. Furthermore, many guestworkers report that the housing given to them lacks electricity, bathrooms, and even windows. For example, some of the guestworkers who were hired to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina actually had to live in the hotels that had been damaged by the hurricane. These hotels were dirty, moldy, and filled with garbage. The water was not safe to drink, but the workers had no choice but to use it to cook their food. (Bauer 2007)

Due to the fact there is so much illegal immigration in the United States, there is much debate in congress about what we should do with our H-2 guestworker program. President Bush implemented changes to it before he left office that President Obama and our new representatives do not agree with, so the debate continues. However, what congress really needs to consider is whether or not we can really fix a broken program that has had allowed such terrible abuses to migrant workers. Moreover, since these abuses have been ongoing since the 1940s, maybe we should consider a completely new approach to the guestworker dilemma. While researching what might work to fix the H-2 program I discovered what seems like a promising alternative to our current program. A Futurist and an International Affairs Student, named King Taj, suggests that a possible solution would be to allow the migrant workers to move freely from the United States to their home country. He calls this a "Circular Pattern." This would allow the migrant workers to maintain a relationship with their families, and maintain social ties with their home country. He states, "This can lead to eventual permanent repatriation for many reasons. First, it may help migrants maintain a sense of belonging to their original communities. It may also encourage migrants to develop business relationships and look for financial opportunities in their home countries. For immigrants in the United States, a circular pattern means being able to return home without the risk of being shut out when trying to return to the United States. Daniel Griswold argues that most Mexicans who come to the United States do not have plans to stay permanently, and that the goal is typically to return home and rejoin families and communities. The implication here is that migrant workers are afraid to return home for fear they will not be able to easily return to the United States." (Taj, 2007)

This seems like a promising idea since we have a history about this too. Before the introduction of the Border Patrol in 1924, and before the introduction Bracero Program in 1942, Mexican laborers were free to cross the border, work, and return home. Most laborers did not stay in the United States. They just wanted and needed to work and then would return home to their families, friends, and their own familiar culture. The United States created the problem of illegal immigrants by making it hard for the laborers to reenter the United States after they returned home. Perhaps our representatives in Washington D.C. should look at what has worked in the past before making decisions about what we should do in the future.

Clearly, the H-2 guestworker program contains many flaws in it that allow employers to exploit migrant workers who want to work in the United States. Although changes to the policy could offer more protections to the guestworkers, I do not believe this program should be expanded, or even used at all in the United States. Moreover, when immigrants come to America, they become part of our society and culture. Even the immigrants who are here illegally can become part of our society; if not them, their children who are born here can. Unless we can change the ideology that the politicians and the corporations have engrained into our culture, a guestworker and their family will have no opportunity to become part of our American society. They will be slotted into a "caste," with no real hope of ever rising above it. They will never be viewed by Americans as equals. They will never be immigrants or future Americans; they will merely be janitors, construction workers, and housekeepers. (The New Republic, 2006)

Works Cited

1. Henslin, James M. 2009. Essentials of Sociology A down-to-Earth Approach. Allyn and Bacon:
Boston MA

2. Hines, Sarah 2006. "America's Last Guest Worker Program: A System Designed for Maximum Exploitation"
http://www.counterpunch.org/hines04212006.htm

3. Bauer, Mary 2008. "Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States"
http://www.uncommonthought.net/global/SPLCguestworker.pdf

4. Coleman, David A. 2007. "To the Contrary" PBS TV show transcript
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageNavigator/facts/quotes_library/#coleman

5. Taj, King 2007 Guest Worker Programs: Establishing a Circular Pattern.
http://kingtaj.newsvine.com/_news/2007/04/30/694137-guest-worker-programs-establishing-a-circular-pattern

6. "That's Hospitality" 2006 The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/thats-hospitality

7. Jaynes, Gerald D. "Migration and Social Stratification: Bipluralism and the Western Democratic State"
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FDBR%2FDBR4_01%2FS1742058X07070026a.pdf&code=ec0f02a071a588220244640216120c97

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics--since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004. (Christopher Soghoian, "8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight," Slight Paranoia, December 1, 2009)

In between these two peculiar events, the targeting of Muslims in Western countries and the subjugation of entire Muslim nations all over the world has never ceased. Not for a day.

Moreover, the collective targeting of small or large Muslim communities in Western countries, and the deliberate abuse and degradation of Muslim individuals and Islamic symbols (from the Holy Koran to the Prophet Mohammed) has also never ceased.

Bizarrely, most of these actions have been done through "democratic" channels and justified in the name of democracy, on the basis of upholding the principles of secularism and Western values.

Many thoughts come to mind here; all unreservedly angry.

I remember when the word "democracy" used to resonate so loudly among Arabs and Muslims around the world. The more they were denied it, the more they yearned for it. University campuses in Cairo, Gaza and Karachi took their student union elections so very seriously. Innocent blood was spilled in clashes around campuses as students desperately tried to express their right to vote, to speak out and to assemble.

Those were the days, when al-demoqratia, Arabic for democracy, was the buzzword in the Middle East and beyond. Even Palestinian political prisoners held their elections, ever so faithfully, surrounded by highly fortified towers and under the deriding gaze of armed men in the unforgiving heat of the Naqab desert.

Arab and Muslim masses were keen on democracy to the extent that there was a near consensus that democracy, although a Western conception, could be distinguished from the many ills invited by Western interventions, imperialism and wars that scarred and continued to impair the collective Muslim psyche.

An entire school of Muslim thought was in fact established around the concept that democracy and Islam are very much compatible. Such a notion goes back to Egypt's Azharite scholar Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that the principles of European modernity were compatible with Islam.

"Al-Tahtawi's work influenced the philosopher Muhammad Abduh [1849-1905], another Azharite who is often described as the founder of Islamic modernism, which is captured in his statement that in Europe he found Islam without Muslims, while in Egypt he found Muslims without Islam," wrote German anthropologist, Frank Fanselow.

If one sets his prejudices aside to ponder this for a moment, one would realize the intellectual valor it takes to consider and even embrace commonalities with the very powers that have instilled so much harm and fear.

Even in their darkest, least proud moments, Muslim intellectuals and nations displayed impressive open-mindedness. They are hardly ever credited for that.

More recently, in Egypt, people tried hard to vote, in the face of beatings, public humiliation and imprisonment. In Palestine in 2006 the price was even higher - starvation. Gaza continues to endure under a medieval Israeli siege, ultimately because of an election.

Muslim communities in the West have long been considered the luckiest; after all, they live in the abodes of democracy. They drink from the fountain of rights and freedoms that never runs dry.

However, these idealized assumptions missed the fact that Western democracy was conditional. And unconditional democracy can only be a farce.

Much has been said to explain the West's faltering on its own commitment to democracy. No, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, is hardly the defining moment that created the growing chasm that made the West fearful of Islam. Despite all that has taken place since then - the constant spewing out of right-wing hatred, evangelical fanatic preaching and all the rest - America is still more tolerant than Europe. Nor was the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe a response in solidarity to America's woes.

Honestly, the French are not fond of Americans, nor are the Germans necessarily that passionate about the Swiss. But this didn't stop a German Christian Democratic state interior minister, Volker Bouffier, from making a "recommendation" to Muslim communities in his own country: "Naturally the Muslims in Germany have a right to build mosques. But they should make sure not to overwhelm the German population with them."

How do you overwhelm people with minarets? Is this a post-post-post-modernistic logic that we are yet to be informed of?

There are only four minarets in the entire country of Switzerland, a country with a population of approximately 7.6 million people. How overwhelming can that be? And aren't religious freedom and the freedom of collective and individual expression basic rights guaranteed by democratic values?

But this is hardly about a 4.8-meter tall minaret in the northern Swiss town of Langenthal. It's about the fact that the one who suggested the structure is a Muslim furniture salesman by the name of Mutalip Karaademi. He didn't know, of course, that his modest idea of adding a minaret to the community's mosque would generate a nationwide referendum, and an international "controversy".

Karaademi was not trying to "Islamificate" the Swiss. He just wanted his community to have a place for worship (as opposed to the unused paint factory it currently uses for prayer), to be able to express its collective identity without fear. Ironically enough, the Muslim community in Langenthal is mostly Albanians, refugees who fled Kosovo seeking escape and deliverance.

What a strange paradox: Muslims escaping to the West, physically and figuratively, only to find double standards, self-negation and, at times, pure hypocrisy.

For now, however, a new consensus is forming: democracy can be invoked and used against Muslims only, and not for Muslims. It can be manipulated to deny them their identity in Europe and their freedom in Palestine, to ensure their subjugation in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and to meddle in their internal affairs everywhere else.

Al-demoqratia, indeed.

The attack on the largely abandoned city of Now Zad comes in preparation for an assault on a larger and more populous city, Marja, which the US military says is a center of Taliban resistance in Helmand province. The commander of the operation in Now Zad, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, said the model for the coming attack on Marja will be the US destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in 2004, in which thousands of civilians were killed. It is not clear when such an attack might take place.

On Friday morning, hundreds of soldiers were flown from the north into the Now Zad valley in Helmand province, while a second force moved on foot from the south in an offensive dubbed "Cobra's Anger." British forces launched an ancillary attack from the east. About 150 Afghan soldiers were reportedly attached to the operation, which involved helicopters and MV-22 Osprey aircraft.

ABC News footage showed unopposed US forces flattening buildings with heavy artillery fire. The pro-US governor of the province, Daood Ahmadi, said on Friday that so far the bodies of four Taliban fighters have been found as a result of the operation. (The Pentagon and the Kabul government routinely describe all those killed by US military operations as Taliban.) There were no reports of NATO casualties.

Coming only three days after Obama announced his 30,000 soldier "surge" to Afghanistan--most of which will be sent to the south of the country--the attack in Helmand is a precursor to the sort of operations that will take place in the coming years' fighting in Afghanistan. Cobra's Anger shows that Obama's war strategy will be characterized by the use of overwhelming violence to terrorize and intimidate the Afghan population.

"There is no question that this is meant to be a signal to the Taliban in terms of what the Taliban can expect in upcoming days in terms of how this strategy will be implemented," said Steven Chao, Al Jazeera correspondent in Afghanistan.

The short-term tactical aim of the operation, military spokesmen claim, is to destroy Taliban "safe havens," to cut off north-south and east-west supply lines, and to root out "more than 100 hardline insurgents" from the Now Zad area.

The insurgents of Now Zad, though small in number, were able in the summer to entrench themselves in "positions so solid that a fixed frontline runs just a few hundred yards (meters) north of the Marines" in their Marines' Forward Operating Base, the Associated Press reports.

Neither the British, who were stationed in the area for years, nor the Americans have been able to hold Now Zad. "British troops who were once stationed there left graffiti dubbing the town 'Apocalypse Now-Zad,' a play on the title of the 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now," according to the AP. "The British base was nearly overrun on several occasions with insurgents coming within yards (meters) of the protection wall. The area was handed over in 2008 to the Marines, who have struggled to reclaim much of the valley."

Before the US invasion in 2001, there were 30,000 inhabitants in the city of Now Zad, a center of poppy cultivation for the opium trade. Now, it is a "ghost town," and "virtually empty," according to press accounts.

Taking the Now Zad area is preparation for an assault on Marja, a large town in the region where many Afghans fled in the wake of Marine attacks on their villages this summer--attacks that were made possible by Obama's ordered dispatch of 21,000 more soldiers after his inauguration.

The Marines, including Gen. Nicholson, "have made no secret that, together with the Afghan national army, they plan to rout the Taliban from Marja in a sweep akin to that of the November 2004 battle of Fallujah, Iraq," the Los Angeles Times reports.

"Marja is that last major san