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Liberian leader urges MPs to back action against vulture funds
By Heather Stewart and Greg Palast for The Guardian
An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, Thursday at 10:30pm GMT, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process.
BBC cameraman Rick Rowley in Liberia, reporting with Greg Palast from the village of Demeh, Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds from using British courts to prey on poor countries when it comes to a vote on Friday. Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last year against two so-called vultures. Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets. Sirleaf said: "We've been waiting for a parliament or an assembly to take this kind of hard decision. I hope the US Congress and maybe some others in Europe will pick up this gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain."
The Bank of the Fed is Closed…Forever
By Robert Singer
In an effort to explain our escalating financial crisis, an American Nightmare (an Environmental Dream), the pundits are focusing their angst on the 44th POTUS, who might very well go down as the single most inept president in all of American history. (How to Squander the Presidency in One Year, David Michael Green)
Barack Obama is not inept, greedy or stupid and he isn’t one of “us”. He rose from obscurity to power with his top economics adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the co-founder of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and he travels in the same circles as other members of the super-secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale University, who pretend to be running for president every four years.
Time for a Broad Based Anti-War Movement, Can the Right and Left Work Together to Oppose War and Empire?
By Kevin Zeese
There has to be a better way to stop wars and reduce military spending. Polls show U.S. voters at worst divided on current wars and more often show majority opposition to them. Yet, when Congress “debates” war the widespread view of Americans is muffled, not usually not heard.
For the last decade, with President Bush in office the peace movement has been politically left and Democratic leaning. The right wing has been kept off the stage as a result the anti-war movement does not reflect the breadth of American opposition to war. For too long the peace movement has been like a bird with only a left wing. It can barely fly and when it does it seems to go in circles. Perhaps a bird with two wings will fly better?
This past weekend Voters for Peace sponsored a meeting of 40 people from across the political spectrum who oppose war and Empire. The people attending see the U.S. military as too big and too expensive and recognize spending $1 million to keep a soldier in Afghanistan for one year is a symptom of mistaken militarism that weakens U.S. economic and national security.
Living Under Israel's Jewish Law The Status of Non-Jews Under the Halacha
By Khalid Amayreh
Journalist - Occupied Palestine
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement,
taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-
Jews - all of them in all different levels - is greater and deeper than the
difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." (Reuters)
Remarks by the Israeli Minister of Interior Yaakov Neeman suggesting that the Jewish religious law (Halacha) should be adopted as the "law of the land" in the Jewish state has drawn strong reactions from both Jews and non-Jews.
"Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halacha into the binding law of the nation," Neeman told Rabbis at a Jewish law convention in occupied Jerusalem in December 2009.
"We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel," he said. "The torah has the complete solution to all of the questions we are dealing with."
Pharmaceutical Pillage
Joel S. Hirschhorn
Business ethics has become an oxymoron. Wall Street bonuses were up 17 percent to over $20 billion in 2009, the year taxpayers bailed out the financial sector after its meltdown. So, everyone has many reasons to hate the banking and financial sectors that dumped our economy, and the general corruption of American politics by corporate interests. There are good reasons to detest the pharmaceutical industry. Besides raping people with onerous prices for prescription drugs, corporate greed coupled with ineffective government regulation and oversight is actually killing Americans through unsafe drugs.
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.
The Drive to Eliminate Social Security Accelerates
By Shamus Cooke
"Friedman calls for cutting Social Security"
In Washington each new day brings a fresh call to “reform entitlement programs” — Social Security, Medicare, etc., (in Congress, the word “reform” now means to eliminate, or drastically reduce). Tackling Social Security has been on the to-do list of the corporate elite for years, and they’re not waiting any longer. After years of promoting this cause, conservative think tanks have now garnered solid support from the political establishment as a whole, which includes the Republican and Democratic parties.
The Obama administration's policy toward Iraq largely continues the policies of the Bush years
By Bonnie Bricker and Adil E. Shamoo
Recent suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad have sent a message to Washington: Maintaining the Iraq policy of the past administration does not inspire hope.
Iraqi insurgents linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombing, which hit hotels frequented by Western journalists. The attacks followed the government’s banning of 511 parliamentary candidates for the upcoming election this March. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government banned a large number of independents, nationalists, secularists and current opponents of the government, including Sunni and Baathist politicians.
Lessons For America From The White Rose
By Gary G. Kohls
(The Heroic College Student Anti-War Anti-Fascist Resistance Movement in Nazi Germany)
Sixty-seven years ago, on February 18, 1943, three courageous, patriotic German college students from Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, were arrested by the Gestapo on charges of treason, a crime that was punishable by death. The three, 22 year-old medical student Christoph Probst, 24 year-old Hans Scholl, also a medical student, and Hans’ 21 year-old sister Sophie, were part of a small group of university students whose code name was The White Rose.
Marjah: ‘This is not Fallujah’
Eric Walberg
So says McChrystal as the US surge goes full steam ahead in Marjah — a new "gentler" war. Eric Walberg has heard this before
Apart for Abu Ghraib, Fallujah is perhaps the Iraq war’s defining moment. The hatred and resentment of the occupied people found a catalyst in the four Blackwater mercenaries, who were killed and strung up, and no doubt deserved their fate, certainly as symbols of a cynical, illegal invasion. The US soldiers -- who are just as mercenary, being a professional army invading a country sans provocation -- came and "destroyed the village to save it."
The "success" of the blitzkrieg war in Iraq has been difficult to duplicate in Afghanistan, "the heart of darkness", one British commander quipped to his troops as they went into battle, despite dropping far more bombs -- many of them radioactive. The unflagging resistance of the Afghans, their refusal to submit to the occupiers, is that because they realise the invaders are not there for their purported altruistic motives. The thousands of civilians and resistance fighters who have been killed by airstrikes -- none of them guilty of anything more egregious than defending their homeland -- is more than ample proof, as is the craven propping up of a US-imposed government, and the proliferation of US bases in the country. The unapologetically un-Islamic ways of the invaders, their lack of even the remotest understanding of the people they are occupying, is a constant insult to a proud and ancient people.
Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Ronald Reagan was already a 'grandfather' figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: 'Well....there ya' go again!' In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan's empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember --not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long 'depression' which left millions homeless, not the act of 'high treason' called Iran/Contra.
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