Pages: << 1 ... 842 843 844 845 846 847 848 849 850 851 852 ... 1326 >>
The True Cost of America's Wars
By Jack A. Smith
During his speech on Afghanistan June 22, President Obama revealed that "Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war." He knew this was a deceptive understatement, as did everyone who keeps close watch on the Bush-Obama wars all these years.
Few Americans , however, have closely followed Washington's 21st century wars of choice, so a trillion probably sounds right to them, but that amount in 10 years — when the annual cost of air conditioning alone for the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq amounts to $20.2 billion a year — is way off base.
(It's difficult to conceive of one trillion, so we'll repeat a method we've used before: Sixty seconds comprise a minute. One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years.)
The latest objective estimate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made public June 29, is between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion (140,800 years), according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.
July 4th -- From WHAT Did We Declare Our Independence? How's That Working Out?
By Jeff Gates
Dear Friends & Colleagues --
See below for links to a current 4-part series in Arab News continuing a theme touched on earlier in Mindset Warfare, The Enemy Within and in a 4-part video: The Hate Mongers Among Us.
It's difficult to imagine our nation and our national security becoming so endangered across so many fronts with all signs pointing to a common source -- yet nothing being done about it. Here is an analysis from July 2010 suggesting the source of the problem. And from July 4, 2010: From WHAT did we declare our independence?
What has this deceit cost us to date in blood and treasure? What costs are being imposed on the future? On other nations who now view us as delegitimized due to our continued support for this duplicitous source? What are the "but for" costs of not 'connecting the dots' and correcting this corruption at its internalized core?
‘Why should you die for a transfer?’
by Willie Ratcliff
This frame from a video shot by a bystander shows the teenager struggling to
lift himself out of a pool of his own blood as a San Francisco police officer,
one of several – aims his gun at the boy rather than trying to save his life.
– Video frame: TheOneNonly457
Having killed the boy at 4:44 p.m., according to the San Francisco Chronicle, in broad daylight at the main intersection – Third Street between Palou and Oakdale – in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco’s last largely Black neighborhood, the police seemed eager to terrorize the community. They waited and waited and waited as the teenager stopped moving but continued breathing before eventually setting him on a gurney and taking him to the hospital, where the Chronicle reports he died at 7:01 p.m.“Why should you die for a transfer?” asked a witness known as Tiptoe in the crowd of hundreds of residents that soon gathered in the plaza at the Oakdale/Palou light rail stop. “Justice will be brought!” hollered one man repeatedly in a booming voice as the crowd shouted at the long line of police in riot gear standing between them and the dying youngster. “I saw the riot squad fly by me on Palou yesterday – five trucks in all,” wrote Bayview resident Sherry Bryson on Facebook.
Nuclear Weapons and Hypocrites in High Places
by Eileen Fleming
“Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan,” is an unofficial biography about the Hollywood producer, longtime weapons dealer, Israeli intelligence agent and close friend of Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Milchan met with the authors, Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, answered their questions, corrected their mistakes and quoted Peres as stating, “I am the one who recruited him.”
In the 1970′s, Peres was Minister of Defense when he recruited Milchan as an agent for Lakam, a ‘secret’ unit in Israel’s defense ministry that purchased technological parts and materials for Israel’s WMD program.
“Since its founding in the mid-1950′s, the agency was headed by Benjamin Blumberg…Blumberg was Milchan’s friend, and used him (as well as other Israeli businessmen) to set up straw companies around the world, and to open secret bank accounts for financing the nuclear plant in Dimona and other Israeli security industries.
The Fix Is In: Washington's Planned Social Contract Destruction
by Stephen Lendman
The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan, united against working household interests. In fact, lawmakers yield on virtually everything big money wants, notably when banks and other corporate favorites are affected.
Last December, Obama capitulated to Republicans, rigging a deal for up to $1 trillion dollars in handouts, mostly to corporate giants and America's wealthy with working households almost entirely left out.
They still are, enduring a protracted Main Street depression, stiff-armed by Obama-led bipartisan crooks. In fact, he's more crime boss than president - stealing from the many for the few. More on his dirty scheme below.
As a result, America and other "(e)conomies are being turned into rentier ('tollbooths') to pay debts that ('real' ones) can't sustain," according to Michael Hudson. "It's a losing game," but goes on, criminally defrauding millions of people to assure creditors are paid, sucking massive amounts of wealth to their coffers, unreported by major media scoundrels, suppressing what people most need to know.
Michele Bachmann: Way Out There in the Blue
by Stephen Lendman
Frances Fitzgerald titled her 2000 book on Reagan's Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, "Way Out There in the Blue," leaving unsaid but letting readers conclude that America during his tenure was run by right wing extremists.
He and most others around him were ideologically hard right, their legacy including:
-- disdain for working Americans;
-- contempt for the rule of law, civil liberties, human rights, and democratic freedoms; and
-- support for concentrated wealth, power and budget-busting militarism.
They backed:
-- sweeping deregulation;
-- destructive "free trade;"
-- offshoring high-paying manufacturing, service, and other jobs;
America: Why Aren’t You Protesting?
by Andrew Smolski
As noted by Richard Heinberg on June 22nd, 2011, the media has lacked the ability to connect the economic situations in the Middle East and their uprisings to what is happening in Europe. I would avoid the word “Revolution” in the case of the Middle Eastern uprisings, seeing as no dramatic systemic changes have taken place, only the ousting of dictators. Same as I would avoid the words of social upheaval in the case of European protests, which have been quite calm and only demanding to maintain the social safety nets produced through years of labor struggle. Rather, the odd occurrence is the ostensibly quiet population of the United States who are in many cases having the same economic problems and austerity based government solutions. This is a place where the media does want to ask the public the question, “Why aren’t you protesting?”
Obama's Budget Betrayal - Questions and Answers
By Michael Collins
Question: Why did President Obama put Social Security and Medicare on the table in the budget negotiations when 80% of the people oppose cuts to these programs?
Answer: The president is not in office to represent those people. He was selected, funded and carried over the finish line by corporate America. Look at the appointment of Wall Streeter Timothy Geithner, the bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any of the crooks who caused the current recession. He's serving the people who put him in office. Those people don't need Social Security and Medicare.
There and Back Again: Sobering thoughts about the Nuclear Madness we all face
By Vincent L. Guarisco
“Things do not change; we change.” ~~Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden (1970)
When I go down the beaten path of memory lane and revisit all the hurdles my family went through in our life-long participation with the anti-nuclear movement, my breath become fast and quick. But when I think about the future in terms of where we’re headed today, I feel like I have no breath left in me. Big difference. The proliferation of today’s wide-open nuclear nuthatch is a godforsaken sore that never really healed for many of us who have fought the good battle. I’m not going to candy coat this, so listen up – the multiple reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Daiichi’s Nuclear Power Plant are a global killer, but it may not be the worst disaster we have to face. I am the offspring of an Atomic Veteran who’s been there and back again. I offer this essay as a sober testament of truth as an activist that will continue to fight the tyrannical nuclear industry tooth and nail, or until my last breath is drawn. But I might as well get the bad news out of the way first, I’m sorry to report that after all the hard effort; we may have only prolonged the inevitable...
Feltman visits brandishing the Dahiyeh Doctrine and Neocon “realities”
Franklin Lamb
Tripoli, Libya
The “Dahiyeh Doctrine”
Libyan civilians have learned a thing or two from three decades of Lebanon’s experience with Israel’s five wars against that Levant country. Indeed NATO is using the same bombing, media, political and diplomatic strategy in Libya that Israel employed most recently in Lebanon during its 33 day July 2006 war.
This includes bombing of the Libyan civilian infrastructure in order to cripple normal life here and hopefully crush the growing national Resistance among Libyans to NATO’s 15,300 sorties to date, while teaching the people an overdue lesson for supporting the central government in the context of predictable “birth pangs of the new Libya.”
<< 1 ... 842 843 844 845 846 847 848 849 850 851 852 ... 1326 >>
