by Alan Hart

For many years I believed that Israel’s leaders have no equals in the business of saying one thing and doing another. But Mubarak has proved me wrong. He went on television to tell Egyptians that he would be staying on for some months because only he could restore stability and set the stage for it to continue after he stepped down. Hours later his thugs were leading a violent attack on the peaceful, pro-democracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahir square.

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by Stephen Lendman

The line from Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore relates well to what's going on in Egypt, perhaps elsewhere in the region as well, saying: "Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream."

Visceral street anger is real. What's orchestrating it, however, is suspect, especially its likely Washington impresario, implementing long-planned regime change for new faces continuing old policies, leaving deep-rooted hardships unaddressed. The script is familiar.

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By Kevin Zeese

Egypt is an alarm that highlights the urgent need for change in U.S. foreign policy. It provides President Obama an opportunity to transform a foreign policy that has often had the opposite effect that was sought and is undermining U.S. economic and national security.

The list of recent policy failures in the Middle East is quite astounding:

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By Michael Collins

The legitimate demands of the people everywhere have no color, nor do their revolutions. These are not the revolutions arising from staged events by the White House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other meddlers. We are witnessing what Mark Levine called human nationalism. The people of Tunisia, now Egypt, are, "taking control of their politics, economy and identity away from foreign interests and local elites alike in a manner that has not been seen in more than half a century." (Image)

Somehow, we are supposed to believe that the English speaking peoples have a corner on democracy. The rest of the world is still learning. When the oppressed of a nation, particularly of the third world, stage an uprising, it is neatly packaged and color coded. That way it's easier to follow. The Western leaders and press assume an avuncular pose and pass judgment on how the various colors pass along the path to self-determination -- not too fast, not too rowdy, and certainly not too disruptive to first world markets, especially oil.

These assumptions need to be thrown overboard immediately.

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Von Helman

Mexico has always considered the US dollar almost a secondary currency to their Peso as the fact that billions of US dollars spent their way through the Mexican economy in 2009 and 2010 which speaks for itself, but sometimes even the best of friendships come to an end.

The Mexican government in September 2010 enacted a new law which basically restricts the use of US Dollars for almost all purchases inside of Mexico.

In early 2010 travelers and visitors could shop at many of the large US corporations inside of Mexico such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot or even one of the hundreds of American food establishments such as McDonalds or Dominoes Pizza and pay for their meal using US Dollars but under the new law using US Dollars is no longer an option.

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By Silver Shield

I have had it with Wikileaks. I am fully convinced that Wikileaks is a Counter Intelligence Program and a Psychological Operation by either CIA, MI6 or Mossad.

The CIA/MI6/Mossad have trashed their reputation, which has caused their scare tactics to wear off. They have created a new “credible” source like Wikileaks to dump their same old tired lies through them. Seriously, how difficult would it have been for the CIA to grab some hacker and play good cop, bad cop with him. They could say, “we got you good and we are going to throw you in jail for the rest of your life. Or you can work with us and we will wipe away all of your charges.” It works with low level mafia thugs, why not on a global scale where the stakes are that much higher. Even in the Matrix had a scene just like this.

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by Stephen Lendman

Perhaps so in his January 31 Huffington Post.com article titled, "The Egyptian Revolution May Produce a Lebanon-Type Islamic Regime," saying:

"No one can confidently predict the outcome, both short and long term...." He then quoted Zhou Enlai once saying "It's too soon to say," when asked to assess the 1789 French Revolution.

Regime changes produce good, bad and in-between results, he said, ranging from his notion of post-Soviet societies to Hitler and other less ambitious despots. As for "liberated" Eastern European states, neoliberal tyranny proved much worse than harsh communist rule, but don't expect Dershowitz to explain or discuss decades of Washington/Israeli state terror and lawlessness. More on his article below.

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By Numerian posted by Michael Collins

What America really needs is a Commission of Truth, that would outline how Selfishness became triumphant, how it has devastated our country, and what we as a community and as a nation must do about this

What’s it like spending two years doing thankless work that, in the end, is going to be ignored by the very people who asked for your services? The members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have just found out. Their 662 page report is sinking rapidly into oblivion in official Washington, and is now destined to be of interest only to historians. This was fully predictable. The Commission was given a charter by Congress to tell us who, what, when, and where about the financial crisis, but they were not allowed to explain why. To understand why this crisis occurred would be stepping on way too many powerful toes in Washington, and for this reason the Commission was told not to make any policy recommendations to Congress that would help prevent such a crisis from occurring again.

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Alan Hart

If more and more Arabs breach the wall of fear that has prevented them for decades from demanding their rights, expressing their rage at the corruption and repression of their governments and at regime impotence in the face of Israel’s arrogance of power, there’s one question above all others America’s policy makers will have to ask themselves. Who do we need most if America’s own real interests are to be best protected - the Arabs or Israel? And that, of course, begs the mother and father of all questions for them: Is Israel our most valuable ally in the region or our biggest liability?

Eisenhower was the first and last president to contain Zionism’s territorial ambitions. Kennedy might have been the second if he had been allowed to live. But from Johnson to Obama, and whether they really believed it or not (I think most if not all of them didn’t), every American president has paid extravagant lip-service to the idea that Israel is the U.S.’s most valuable ally in the Middle East.

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Geraldine Perry

Cuba Gooding Jr. became an overnight sensation when his character, pro football player Rod Tidwell, pithily directed his high-minded but needy agent Jerry Macguire, played by Tom Cruise, to "Show me the money!" Tidwell's terse directive is as practical as it is memorable and luckily for Tidwell, Macguire delivers.

Whether out of extraordinary resolve or sheer desperation, a "show me the money" policy is exactly the course Fed Chair Ben Bernancke is pursuing at full throttle. Faced with the unenviable task of reflating a deflating and uncooperative economy, the Fed opted last fall to take the "easy money" quotient a notch higher by formally initiating a second round of quantitative easing, while tacitly acknowledging the possibility of QE3, QE4, and so on into the undefined future. With Fed Fund rates effectively at or very near zero and a trillion dollars already in reserves, the Fed is in other words doing all it can to get the "credit-as-money" spigot flowing.

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