Political leanings

[Lefty]

(JaiDee @ Oct. 24 2009,20:42)      One thing I know for sure; if you are about to get captured by the Taliban or any renegade Afghani group, better to kill yourself first! The Russians learned that the hard way 30 years ago; they are not very kind to their captors.

I think you meant to say captives. The captors are the ones doing the capturing. In your example, the Taliban, etc, as I interpreted it. Unless you meant the Russians previous to being captured, which would be true too.

[Torurot]

War fever at the New York Times: a five-day log
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, October 20, 2009

When five days pour forth a lead story on the way €œa coordinated assault€ of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan has caused a grave risk to American interests; a lead about the serious counter-offensive mounted by Pakistan; a flash suitable for any date but run as a lead concerning the heroin trade of the Taliban (€Vast Network Reaps Millions from Drugs€); the launching of a serial memoir by a reporter €œHeld Captive by the Taliban,€ which will extend to five parts; a flattering stoic-soldier profile of General McChrystal in the Times Magazine; a Pakistan follow-up suggesting that Pakistan€™s army€™s now fights well but is €œmeeting strong resistance€ from the Taliban and cannot win without help; a sequence of three stories by different hands, tracing with approval the acquiescence of President Hamid Karzai in calls for a run-off (the very agreement the administration made a precondition for expanded American commitment); two op-eds over three days by military men not of the highest rank, urging escalation; and a reckless €œscoop,€ filled sparsely with random and often anonymous interviews regarding the supposed discontents within the armed forces at the length of the administration€™s pause €” when all this is the fruit of five days€™ harvest at the Times, the conclusion draws itself. The New York Times wants a large escalation in Afghanistan. The paper has been made nervous by signs that the president may not make the big push for a bigger war; and they are showing what the rest of his time in office will be like if he does not cooperate. [continued€¦]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-b....59.html

[Torurot]

Everything you have been told about Afghanistan is wrong: the three great falacies
By Johann Hari, Huffington Post, October 20, 2009

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders - but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren€™t hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus€™ counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa€™ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: €œThat€™s a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It€™s not moral.€ It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more €œbad guys€ you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus€™s strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan - where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It€™s not inconceivable - but I found that, in fact, the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection. [continued€¦]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-....14.html

[BlueBallz]

You mean they dont play by the vaunted and universally respected Geneva Convention, JD?? Egads!!!! Here i only thought that Gitmo was the worst hellhole on the face of the earth!!!!

As far as depending on our "allies" i.e Pakistan thats obama's big play. Lets have the "international community" help us out. he went to Europe and begged the french to send more troops and they basically spit in his eye. Oh well. If we rely on Pakistan for help I dont think we should expect much. Now what I want to know is whats the plan for when the corrupt Karzai regime crumbles and the savges return to power in Afghanistan?? What happens when or if Pakistan falls to a more militant Islamic regime?? I dont think there are any good answers. Why dont we (the USA) pull back our troops from basically all over the globe? It very well might be destablising (think of what would happen if we took all out troops out of the Korean Peninsula) but hey we would be taking a step back and not meddling anymore. The house of Saud survived for many years without us, I am all for seeing what happens when we dont have any troops over there. PERIOD!!! After all when the President was on the campaign trail he said he would take out ALL of the troops from Iraq in 16 months. TICK, TICK, TICK.......He also said that a nuclear Iran would be UNACCEPTABLE-TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK. Some things are a lot easier in theory than reality. Sometimes its a lot easier being the back up quarterback in stead of the starter. Not bad for a West Viginia hillbilly???

BEST CAREFUL OUT THERE!!!

[Tomcat]

Lets face it, the West will be in Afghanistan for the next 30 years in some form,be it Military or aid wise.

I think Karzai is a distraction, the main aim for the West seems to be to kill as many ALQ as possible. One supposes that at some stage the Taliban will figure in a future Govt at some point... that much is a given..

[Lefty]

Our Economy Was a Scam and Now We're Dead Broke

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted October 27, 2009.

America is broke. And the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was: a credit scam.

When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.

Then too, what else did we expect? His economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn't need jobs.  Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain't gonna sweat no mo' no mo' -- just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day.

Along with these economic hotwires came literally hundreds of K Street and Democratic lobbyists. Supposedly, every president is forced to hire these guys because no one else seems to have the connections or knows how to get a bill through Congress. Consequently, the current regime's definition of a recovery is more of the same as ever. A return of the mortgage market and credit to its former level -- the level that blew us out of the water in the first place. Ah, but we're gonna manage it better this time. There is no one-trick pony on earth equal to capitalism.  

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes.  News gathering in America is its own special hell, and reduces its practitioners to banality and elite sycophancy. But Big Money calls the shots.

With luck we will see at least some reverse of the Bush regime's assault on habeas corpus, due process, privacy. Changing such laws doesn't much affect that one percent whose income is equal to the combined bottom 50 percent of Americans.

Beyond that, the big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit. We can keep on pretending to be independent, free to keep on living in those houses on which we still owe $300,000. But they own and control the money that comes through our hands. And they plan to keep on owning it and charging us to use it.

On the positive side, there has probably been no more fertile opportunity to improve U.S. international relations since post World War II.  Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton were about as endearing as pederasts at a baby shower. And now that we have shot up half the planet, certainly there is no more globally attractive person to patch up the bullet holes than Barack Obama (yes, I know Bill Clinton's feelings are hurt by that). Awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize (again Bill Clinton's feeling are sorely wounded) was an invitation to rejoin the human race.

Of course, there are a significant number of Americans still who could not give a rat's ass about world opinion of the good ole USA. Nearly every damned one of my neighbors back in Virginia, in fact.

The sharks are still running the only game in town and they have never had it better. To be sure, with the economic collapse some of the financial lords won't pile quite up as many millions this year. Others will however have a record year. All are still squatting in the tall cotton.

Their grandfathers who so hated FDR's reforms must be chugging cognac in hell celebrating today's America. America's unions have been neutered and taught to beg. At long last we have established a permanent underclass and deindustrialized the country in favor of low wage service industries here and dirt cheap labor from abroad. We've managed to harden the education and income gap into something an American oligarch can take pride in. Hell, my bank card is issued by Prescott Bush's Union Bank and my most recent mortgage was held by J. P. Morgan's creation. My electricity is generated by Rockefeller's coal and energy holdings and my Exxon gasoline credit card is issued by a successor to Standard oil. The breakfast I eat comes from Archer Daniels Midland. So did my dog's breakfast. We are the very products and property of these people and their institutions.

With peak oil, population pressure, vanishing world resources and global warming, we can never again be what we once were -- a civilization occupying a relative material paradise through a danse macabre of planetarily unsustainable growth. But no presidential candidate is going to run on the promise that "If we do everything just right, pull in our belts and sacrifice, we can at best be a second world nation in fifty years, providing we don't mind the lack of oxygen and a few cancers here and there." Better to hawk the myth of profitable pollution through carbon credits. Which Obama is doing.

We burn the grain supplies of starving nations in our vehicles. Skilled American construction workers now unemployed drive their big trucks into town and knock at my door asking to rake my leaves for ten bucks. There is nothing ironic in this to their minds. "Middle class" people making $150,000 a year will get a new tax break (as if we were all earning 150K). Energy prices are predicted to stabilize because we intend to burn the state of West Virginia in our power plants. The corpses of our young people are still being unloaded from cargo planes at Dover Delaware, but from two fronts now. Mortgage foreclosures are expected to double before they slacken. I cannot imagine debtors not getting at least temporary relief, if not decent jobs or affordable health care. Surely we will see more "change."

But never under any conditions will we be allowed to touch the real money, or get anywhere near it, much less redistribute it. Because, as a bookie friend once told me, "You got your common man living on hope, lottery tickets, or the dogs or the ponies, and you got operators. People who can see the whole game in play. They set the rules. Because they hold the money. That ain't never gonna change."

On the other hand national opinion changes almost hourly. But if the starting gate bell rang right now for the next presidential race, I'd have to put ten bucks on Obama to place. We cannot assume the Republican party will remain stupid. Assumptions don't work at all.

Remember what happened when we assumed the Democrats were capable of courage and leadership?

[blonde_havoc]

This article brings up many interesting points about Barack Obama.

What if Bush had done that?
Featured Topics:

* Barack Obama

Josh Gerstein Josh Gerstein €“ Tue Oct 27, 6:02 am ET

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things €” and more.

What€™s remarkable is what hasn€™t happened. These episodes haven€™t become metaphors for Obama€™s personal and political character €” or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda.

It€™s a sign that the media€™s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news judgment, and an illustration that, in politics, context is everything.

Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask: Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?

And quickly add, with a hint of jealousy: How does Obama get away with it?

€œWe have a joke about it. We€™re going to start a website: IfBushHadDoneThat.com,€ former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie said. €œThe watchdogs are curled up around his feet, sleeping soundly. ... There are countless examples: some silly, some serious.€

Indeed, Bush got grief for secret meetings with the oil industry, politicizing the White House and spending too much time on his beloved bike. But it€™s not just Republicans who notice. Media observers note that the president often gets kid-glove treatment from the press, fellow Democrats and, particularly, interest groups on the left €” Bush€™s loudest critics, Obama€™s biggest backers.

But others say there€™s a larger phenomenon at work €” in the story line the media wrote about Obama€™s presidency. For Bush, the theme was that of a Big Business Republican who rode the family name to the White House, so stories about secret energy meetings and a certain laziness, intellectual and otherwise, fit neatly into the theme, to be replayed over and over again.

Obama€™s story line was more positive from the start: historic newcomer coming to shake up Washington. So the negatives that sprung up around Obama €” like a sense that he was more flash than substance €” track what negative coverage he€™s received, captured in a recent €œSaturday Night Live€ skit that made fun of his lack of accomplishments in office.

€œThere may well be almost an unconscious effort on the part of the media to give Obama a bit more slack because he is more likable, because he is the first African-American president. That plays into it,€ said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.

Democrats find the complaints of Obama €œgetting a pass€ hard to stomach in light of the way the press treated Bush €” particularly on the single biggest mistake of his presidency, relying on the faulty intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. Now, Obama€™s aides say, the positive coverage simply reflects the fact that their efforts are succeeding.

€œAs our administration makes progress on the agenda that Washington has ignored for too long, we expect we€™ll get some news coverage of that progress that we like and some tough coverage that we don€™t,€ White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. €œIt€™s not unlike the New Orleans Saints, who are getting lots of good coverage of their perfect record so far €” certainly better coverage than the [2-5] Redskins €” but it doesn€™t mean the Saints have liked every story that€™s been written about them since training camp. It goes with the territory.€

There are signs the friendly tone toward Obama is ebbing. Case in point: a front-page story in The New York Times noting that Obama€™s all-male basketball games drew fire from the head of the National Organization for Women, who called the games €œtroubling.€

But here are other stories in which Obama seems to have gotten a pass:

New Orleans

As a candidate, Obama railed against the Bush administration for abandoning and then neglecting the people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He made five campaign trips to the city.

But as president, Obama waited almost nine months before visiting the Big Easy, spent less than four hours on the ground there and then jetted to San Francisco for a $3 million Democratic fundraiser.

€œDon€™t judge anybody on the amount of time that they€™ve spent there. Judge only what this administration promised that they would do, what they€™ve done every day and what they€™re continuing to work on,€ press secretary Robert Gibbs said, pointing to positive reviews of the federal government€™s efforts under Obama.

For their part, Democrats can€™t see how Bush officials can muster much umbrage over anything related to New Orleans, given how the Republican administration handled the initial response to Katrina.

Managing the press

When the Obama administration moved in recent weeks to isolate and disparage Fox News as a wing of the Republican Party, there were few immediate howls of outrage €” even from Fox€™s fellow journalists in the media.

Press defenders and First Amendment advocates who jumped on the Bush administration for using military analysts to shape war coverage reacted with a yawn to the White House€™s announcement that it had deemed Fox to be not a €œlegitimate news organization.€

€œHad I said about MSNBC what the Obama White House said about Fox, the media uproar would still be going on,€ said Ari Fleischer, who served as Bush€™s press secretary until 2003. €œI instinctively would have known ... the media would have leapt to their feet to defend them. I€™m shocked it€™s not happening now.€

One press veteran agreed. €œIf George Bush had taken on MSNBC, what would have happened?€ said Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle. €œThat€™s one place you can point to a real difference in how I€™d imagine Bush would be treated.€

Politicizing the White House

Throughout the Bush administration, liberal critics warned that the hand of Bush political adviser Karl Rove was spreading politics into all corners of government. Reporters were on alert for any sign that politics was infecting the work of federal agencies. One top appointee got in hot water for allegedly asking agency officials to work to €œhelp our candidates€ across the country.

So some Bush aides went nearly apoplectic earlier this month when they spotted Gibbs and Obama€™s political guru, David Axelrod, in photos of a Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan policy.

€œOh, the howling and screaming that would have happened if Karl Rove was sitting in on even a deputies-level meeting where strategy was being hammered out. People would have just gone ballistic,€ said Peter Feaver, a former White House aide for both Bush and Bill Clinton.

Also, in about nine months, Obama has already attended more than two dozen fundraising events, while Bush did only six in his first year in office, according to a tally by CBS€™s Mark Knoller.

Gibbs said Obama had to do more to raise a similar amount of money, since the kinds of soft-money fundraisers Bush did early on were banned. €œThis president ... doesn€™t accept money from PACs or lobbyists and doesn€™t allow lobbyists to give at fundraisers that he€™s at, as well,€ Gibbs added.

Dealing with business, in secret

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney endured years of criticism and lawsuits that stretched all the way to the Supreme Court over secret meetings Cheney€™s Energy Task Force held with oil and gas companies. When the policy emerged, critics said Cheney was carrying water for the industry.

Obama pledged to hash out health care reform live on C-SPAN and excoriated Bush for kowtowing to the drug industry. But aides signed off on the drug industry€™s agreement to find $80 billion in savings to support reform. However, Obama aides didn€™t disclose that the agreement involved the White House promising that current health legislation wouldn€™t include further cuts or give the government the right to negotiate over drug prices.

Toning down human rights

During the campaign, Obama talked tough on China. While candidate Obama pushed Bush to take a hard line, President Obama hasn€™t. Hoping to win China€™s help on Iran and North Korea, Obama skipped a meeting with the Dalai Lama and said little when China undertook a violent crackdown in its largely Muslim Xinjiang region. The White House has pledged to meet with the Dalai Lama later.

And while candidate Obama warned Bush against a €œreckless and cynical initiative [that] would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments,€ President Obama€™s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, seemed to lay out a similar incentive-driven approach.

€œWe€™ve got to think about giving out cookies,€ said Gration. €œKids, countries €” they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.€ The White House backed away from Gration€™s characterization of the strategy but did recently lay out a strategy of engaging with the Sudanese regime.

Traveling and recreating

In his campaign and as president, Bush was mocked for a lack of interest in all things foreign €” seven minutes touring the Kremlin, 25 minutes at the Great Wall of China, before declaring, €œLet€™s go home.€

During a trip to Europe in June, Obama chastised German and French reporters for suggesting that he was snubbing those countries by making only brief stops in each. €œThere are only 24 hours in the day. And so there€™s nothing to any of that speculation beyond us just trying to fit in what we could do on such a short trip,€ he told reporters in Germany.

But after taking his wife out for an attention-grabbing date night, Obama promptly jetted back to Washington. Within about 90 minutes of arriving at the White House, the tightly scheduled president was on the move again €” headed to Andrews Air Force Base to play nine holes of golf.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/200...politico/28764

[Torurot]

The Financo-State
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
http://counterpunch.org/roberts10262009.html
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS October 26, 2009

Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.

One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.

Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.

Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, €œIncome Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/2/41528678.pdf>€ concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.

On October 21, 2009, Business Week highlighted a new report <http://yoursdp.org/index.php/news/3-...-rich-and-poor> from the United Nations Development Program concluded that the US ranked third among states with the worst income inequality. As number one and number two, Hong Kong and Singapore, are both essentially city states, not countries, the US actually has the shame of being the country with the most inequality in the distribution of income.

The stark increase in US income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of US jobs, which enriched executives with €œperformance bonuses€ while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated OTC derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis.

Frontline€™s October 21 broadcast, €œThe Warning,€ documents how Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt blocked Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from performing her statutory duties and regulating OTC derivatives.

After the worst crisis in US financial history struck, just as Brooksley Born said it would, a disgraced Alan Greenspan was summoned out of retirement to explain to Congress his unequivocal assurances that no regulation of derivatives was necessary. Greenspan had even told Congress that regulation of derivatives would be harmful. A pathetic Greenspan had to admit that the free market ideology on which he had relied turned out to have a flaw.

Greenspan may have bet our country on his free market ideology, but does anyone believe that Rubin and Summers were doing anything other than protecting the enormous fraud-based profits that derivatives were bringing Wall Street? As Brooksley Born stressed, OTC derivatives are a €œdark market.€ There is no transparency. Regulators have no information on them and neither do purchasers.

Even after Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be bailed out, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers stuck to their guns. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers, and a roped-in gullible Arthur Levitt who now regrets that he was the banksters€™ dupe, succeeded in manipulating a totally ignorant Congress into blocking the CFTC from doing its mandated job. Brooksley Born, prevented by the public€™s elected representatives from protecting the public, resigned. Wall Street money simply shoved facts and honest regulators aside, guaranteeing government inaction and the financial crisis that hit in 2008 and continues to plague our economy today.

The financial insiders running the Treasury, White House, and Federal Reserve shifted to taxpayers the cost of the catastrophe that they had created. When the crisis hit, Henry Paulson, appointed by President Bush as Rubin€™s replacement as the Goldman Sachs representative running the US Treasury, hyped fear to obtain from €œour€ representatives in Congress with no questions asked hundreds of billions of taxpayers€™ dollars (TARP money) to bail out Goldman Sachs and the other malefactors of unregulated derivatives.

When Goldman Sachs recently announced that it was paying massive six and seven figure bonuses to every employee, public outrage erupted. In defense of banksters, saved with the public€™s money, paying themselves bonuses in excess of most people€™s life-time earnings, Lord Griffiths, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, said that the public must learn to €œtolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.€

In other words, €œLet them eat cake.€

According to the UN report cited above, Great Britain has the 7th most unequal income distribution in the world. After the Goldman Sachs bonuses, the British will move up in distinction, perhaps rivaling Israel for the fourth spot in the hierarchy.

Despite the total insanity of unregulated derivatives, the high level of public anger, and Greenspan€™s confession to Congress, still nothing has been done to regulate derivatives. One of Rubin€™s Assistant Treasury Secretaries, Gary Gensler, has replaced Brooksley Born as head of the CFTC. Larry Summers is the head of President Obama€™s National Economic Council. Former Federal Reserve official Timothy Geithner, a Paulson protege, runs the Obama Treasury. A Goldman Sachs vice president, Adam Storch, has been appointed the chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Banksters are still in charge.

Is there another country in which in full public view so few so blatantly use government for the enrichment of private interests, with a coterie of €œfree market€ economists available to justify plunder on the grounds that €œthe market knows best€? A narco-state is bad enough. The US surpasses this horror with its financo-state.

As Brooksley Born says, if nothing is done €œit€™ll happen again.€

But nothing can be done. The crooks have the government.

/Note: The OECD report shows that despite the Reagan tax rate reduction, the rate of increase in US income inequality declined during the Reagan years. During the mid-1990s the Gini coefficient (the measure of income inequality) actually fell. Beginning in 2000 with the New Economy (essentially financial fraud and offshoring of US jobs), the Gini coefficient shot up sharply. /

*Paul Craig Roberts* was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...unterpunchmaga>He can be reached at: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>

[Torurot]

The UN's Misleading Report
Drugs and Afghanistan
http://counterpunch.org/mercille11062009.html
By JULIEN MERCILLE Weekend Edition November 6-8, 2009

As President Obama and his advisors debate future troop levels for Afghanistan, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) http://www.unodc.org/documen....web.pdf muddies the water on one of the most important issues in the debate €” the effects of Afghanistan's drug production.

The report, entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," gives the false impression that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan's skyrocketing drug production. It also implies that drugs are the main reason why the Taliban are gaining in strength, absolving the United States and NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency.

In fact, the United States and its Afghan allies bear a large share of responsibility for the drug industry's dramatic expansion since the invasion. Buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reduced levels of drug production would have little effect on the insurgency's vigor.

The following annotation rebuffs some of the report's main assertions, puts in perspective the Taliban's role in the opium economy, and highlights U.S./NATO responsibility for its expansion and potential reduction.

Taliban insurgents draw some US$ 125 million annually from drugs, which is more money than ten years ago, [and as a result] the perfect storm of drugs and terrorism, that has struck the Afghan/Pakistani border for years, may be heading towards Central Asia. A big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources.

These claims are supposed to make us shudder in the face of an impending narco-terrorist seizure of a large chunk of the world's energy resources. UNODC states that a decade ago the Taliban earned $85 million per year from drugs, but that since 2005 this figure has jumped to $125 million. Although this is pitched as a significant increase, the Taliban play a more minor role in the opium economy than UNODC would have us believe and drug money is probably a secondary source of funding for them. Indeed, the report estimates that only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from drugs and 85% comes from "nonopium sources."

The total revenue generated by opiates within Afghanistan is about $3.4 billion per year. Of this figure, according to UNODC, the Taliban get only 4% of the sum. Farmers, meanwhile, get 21%.

And the remaining 75%? Al-Qaeda? No: The report specifies that it "does not appear to have a direct role in the Afghan opiates trade," although it may participate in "low-level drugs and/or arms smuggling" along the Pakistani border.

Instead, the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers €” in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade.

The New York Times recently revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother, has long been on the CIA payroll, in addition to his probable shady dealings in drugs. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as U.S. and NATO forces have long supported warlords, commanders, and illegal militias with a record of human rights abuses and involvement in narcotics. A former CIA officer said that "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade." According to a New York University report, General Nazri Mahmad, a warlord who "control[s] a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry," has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team.

UNODC insists on making the Taliban-drugs connection front-page news while not chasing with the same intensity those supported by Washington. The agency seems to be acting as an enabler of U.S./NATO policies in Afghanistan.

When I asked the UNODC official who supervised the report what percentage of total drug income in Afghanistan was captured by government officials, the reply was quick: "We don't do that, I don't know."

Instead of pointing a finger directly at the U.S./NATO-backed government, the report gives the impression that the problem lies mostly with rotten apples who threaten an otherwise well-intentioned government.

But the roots of Afghanistan's upsurge in drug production since 2001 are directly related to U.S. policies and the government that was installed in the wake of the invasion. The United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, in alliance with anti-Taliban warlords and drug lords, showering them with millions of dollars and other forms of support. The empowerment and enrichment of the warlords with whom the U.S. allied itself enabled them to tax and protect opium traffickers, leading to the quick resumption of opium production after the hiatus of the 2000 Taliban ban.

To blame "corruption" and "criminals" for the state of affairs is to ignore the direct and predictable effects of U.S. policies, which have simply followed a historical pattern of toleration and empowerment of local drug lords in the pursuit of broader foreign policy objectives, as Alfred McCoy and others have documented in detail.

Impunity for drug lords and warlords continues: a U.S. Senate report noted in August that no major traffickers have been arrested in Afghanistan since 2006, and that successful prosecutions of significant traffickers are often overturned by a simple bribe or protection from above, revealing counternarcotics efforts to be deficient at best.

Identifying drugs as the main cause behind Taliban advances absolves the U.S./NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency: Their very presence in the country, as well as their destructive attacks on civilians account for a good deal of the recent increase in popular support for the Taliban.

In fact, buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reducing drug production would have only "minimal impact on the insurgency's strategic threat." The Taliban receive "significant funding from private donors all over the world," a contribution which "dwarfs" drug money. Although the report will be publicized by many as a vindication of calls to target the opium economy in order to weaken the Taliban, the authors themselves are not convinced of the validity of this argument.

Of the $65 billion turnover of the global market for opiates, only 5-10% ($3-5 billion) is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems. The rest is laundered through legal trade activities and the banking system.

This is an important claim that points to the enormous amounts of drug money swallowed by the world financial system, including Western banks.

The report says that over the last seven years (2002-2008), the transnational trade in Afghan opiates resulted in worldwide sales of $400-$500 billion (retail value). Only 5-10% of this is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems (such as hawala). The remainder is laundered through the legal economy, and importantly, through Western banks.

In fact, Antonio Maria Costa was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original).

Afghanistan has the world monopoly of opium cultivation (92%), the raw material for the world's deadliest drug €” heroin, [which is] causing up to 100,000 deaths per year.

Tobacco is the world's deadliest drug, not heroin. The former kills about 5 million people every year. According to the WHO, if present tobacco consumption patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by the year 2020. Some 70% of these will be in developing countries, which are the main target of the tobacco industry's marketing ploys. So why does the Taliban get more flak than tobacco companies?

The report estimates there are 16 million opiate users across the world, with the main consumer market being Europe, valued at $20 billion. Europeans are thus the main source of funding for the Afghan drug industry and their governments share a significant part of responsibility for failing to decrease demand and provide more treatment services within their own borders. Lowering drug use in Europe would contribute significantly to reducing the scale of the problem in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the report notes that NATO member Turkey is a "central hub" through which Afghan opiates reach Europe. Perhaps NATO should direct its efforts towards its own members before targeting the Taliban.

Some Taliban networks may be involved at the level of precursor procurement. These recent findings support the assertion that the Taliban network is more involved in drug trafficking than previously thought.

Yes, the Taliban surely take a cut out of the precursor trade (the chemicals needed to refine opium into products like heroin and morphine).

However, Western countries and some of their allies are also involved: The report identified "Europe, China, and the Russian Federation" as "major acetic anhydride sources for Afghanistan." For instance, 220 liters of acetic anhydride were intercepted this year at Kabul airport, apparently originating from France. In recent years, chemicals have also been shipped from or via the Republic of Korea and UNODC's 2008 Afghan Opium Survey pointed to Germany as a source of precursors.

It is unclear what the total value of the Afghan trade in chemical precursors is, but from the report's data it can be inferred that the retail value of just one precursor, acetic anhydride, was about $450 million this year. Part of that money goes back to Western chemical corporations in the form of profits. Tighter safeguards should be in place on these products.

Areas of opium poppy cultivation and insecurity correlate geographically. In 2008, 98% of opium poppy cultivation took place in southern and western Afghanistan, the least secure regions.

UNODC associates drugs with the Taliban by pointing to the fact that most poppy cultivation takes places in regions where the Taliban are concentrated. Maps show "poppy-free" provinces in the north and a concentration of cultivation in the southern provinces, linking the Taliban with drugs.

It is true that cultivation is concentrated in the south, but such maps obscure the fact that there is plenty of drug money in the north, a region over which the Afghan government has more control. For instance, Balkh province may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. Nangarhar was also poppy-free in 2008, although it still remains a province where a large amount of opiates is trafficked.

Some Western officials are now implying that political elites in northern Afghanistan are engaging in successful counternarcotics while the southern drug economy expands. But the fact is that although the commanders who control northern Afghanistan today may have eliminated cultivation, none have moved against trafficking. Most of them continue to profit from it, and some are believed to have become millionaires.

Julien Mercille is lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland and a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor http://www.fpif.org/ . He specializes in U.S. foreign policy and geopolitics. He can be reached at jmercille[at]gmail[dot]com.

[Torurot]

Why die for Karzai?
http://www.opednews.com/article....70.html
By Tom Hayden November 10, 2009 at 21:02:55

Fifty-nine Americans died in October fighting to protect the corrupt Afghan electoral process that resulted in a second five-year term for Hamid Karzai. Since July and the run-up to the August election, 195 Americans were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded, a higher casualty rate than during the 2007 military "surge" in Iraq. A principal purpose cited by President Obama for sending 17,000 more combat troops to Afghanistan earlier this year was to protect the election, which, according to most observers, Karzai stole.

Has it occurred to anyone in the White House national security circles or the pundit class that these recent American deaths were wasteful and immoral? That sending Americans to die for an unpopular regime of warlords, landlords, drug dealers and CIA assets (Karzai's brother) is impossible to justify? And that rather than admitting the mistake, the president and his advisors are preparing to compound it?

I suspect that part of the U.S. unhappiness with Karzai has nothing to do with his well-known incompetence and corruption. After all, with Afghanistan's economy almost entirely dependent on heroin, how could the government not resemble a mafia state? What worries the Pentagon even more is that Karzai, in response to Afghan public opinion, may want to negotiate with the Taliban before the Pentagon can turn the tide of war.

Semi-secret peace talks with the Taliban, supported by the Karzai government, were reported in May. During the campaign, peace talks were the top issue among voters, with Karzai depicted as "the most vocal candidate" calling for talks with the Taliban, according to the New York Times.

Perhaps his campaign promise of peace talks was only a ploy to win votes, but that also is a measure of Afghan public opinion.

There were signs that the Afghan Taliban leadership was interested in a peace process too. An April task force led by Washington insiders Thomas Pickering and Barnett Rubin noted that "the [Taliban] Quetta shura is showing signs of willingness to distance itself from Al Qaeda and seek a political settlement."

A back-channel, U.S.-blessed Saudi diplomatic initiative in December reported a negotiating proposal from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar demanding, among other things, a new power-sharing arrangement in Kabul, including Karzai; a timetable for U.S. withdrawal; replacing NATO forces with peacekeepers from Islamic countries; and a role for the insurgents in the reconstituted Afghan security forces.

On Sept. 19, Omar issued a statement of assurance that the Taliban, "as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others" -- words interpreted by a British intelligence officer as a willingness to separate itself from Al Qaeda.

U.S. officials haven't exactly leaped to pursue these feelers. The reason is pure power politics. The United States and NATO apparently want to negotiate only from a position of strength.

"Reconciliation is important, but not now," said one Western official in August. "It's not going to happen until the insurgency is weaker and the government is stronger."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed her readiness "to welcome anyone supporting the Taliban who renounces Al Qaeda, lays down their arms and is willing to participate in the free and open society that is enshrined in the Afghan Constitution."

She was calling for a surrender, not the opening of a conflict-resolution process. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, ratcheted up the war rhetoric last month by asserting that if the Pakistani army failed to eliminate Omar, the U.S. would.

It is plain to me that the United States seeks to gain the military upper hand with more troops, thus strengthening a negotiating position, while at the same time curbing Karzai's desire to enter talks with his Afghan adversaries. Portrayed as weak, Karzai in fact may be too much of a nationalist for the Pentagon's taste.

Negotiating with the Taliban would be distasteful, but how many more American soldiers will die while trying to achieve this upper hand? The Pentagon forecasts two years of harsh combat in Afghanistan alone, which at current rates could mean an additional 1,000 American dead and 8,000 wounded. For each American boot on the ground, there will be an equivalent increase in roadside bombs, according to a U.S. agency called the Pentagon Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is running taxpayers about $3.6 billion a month.

The Al Qaeda strategy of overextending our military and exhausting our economy seems to be on schedule. With Al Qaeda relocated to Pakistan, the Pentagon now is fighting Afghan insurgents -- who hate foreign invaders -- on the hypothetical grounds that Al Qaeda will someday return to Kandahar. Elsewhere, national security strategists such as Britain's Peter Neumann claim "broad agreement" that Europe is actually the nerve center for global jihad. One is tempted to respond that NATO should invade Europe instead of Afghanistan, but this is not a laughing matter.

Al Qaeda is a real threat, but the threat only worsens as Western powers rampage through Muslim countries. Defense against Al Qaeda is a legitimate mission, but not where the tactics being used feed a desire for indiscriminate revenge among millions of people with nothing to lose.

This is the "march of folly" once predicted by historian Barbara Tuchman. And it requires an exit strategy, not a deepening quagmire. In 1989, German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote of the need for a "new kind of hero," not one who spills blood to save a reputation but one brilliant at withdrawing from untenable situations of their own making.

"It was Clausewitz," wrote Enzensberger, "who showed that retreat is the most difficult of all operations. That applies in politics as well. . . . It goes without saying that the protagonist risks his life with every step he takes on this path."

This is the choice facing Obama: Whether to send more Americans to their graves in support of Hamid Karzai while at the same time blocking the emergent quest for peace negotiations in Afghanistan.


http://www.tomhayden.com
After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden still is a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation.

[smuttleydfs]

(blonde_havoc @ Oct. 27 2009,10:24) This article brings up many interesting points about Barack Obama.

What if Bush had done that?
Featured Topics:

   * Barack Obama

Josh Gerstein Josh Gerstein €“ Tue Oct 27, 6:02 am ET

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things €” and more.

What€™s remarkable is what hasn€™t happened. These episodes haven€™t become metaphors for Obama€™s personal and political character €” or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda.

It€™s a sign that the media€™s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news judgment, and an illustration that, in politics, context is everything.

Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask: Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?

And quickly add, with a hint of jealousy: How does Obama get away with it?

€œWe have a joke about it. We€™re going to start a website: IfBushHadDoneThat.com,€ former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie said. €œThe watchdogs are curled up around his feet, sleeping soundly. ... There are countless examples: some silly, some serious.€

Indeed, Bush got grief for secret meetings with the oil industry, politicizing the White House and spending too much time on his beloved bike. But it€™s not just Republicans who notice. Media observers note that the president often gets kid-glove treatment from the press, fellow Democrats and, particularly, interest groups on the left €” Bush€™s loudest critics, Obama€™s biggest backers.

But others say there€™s a larger phenomenon at work €” in the story line the media wrote about Obama€™s presidency. For Bush, the theme was that of a Big Business Republican who rode the family name to the White House, so stories about secret energy meetings and a certain laziness, intellectual and otherwise, fit neatly into the theme, to be replayed over and over again.

Obama€™s story line was more positive from the start: historic newcomer coming to shake up Washington. So the negatives that sprung up around Obama €” like a sense that he was more flash than substance €” track what negative coverage he€™s received, captured in a recent €œSaturday Night Live€ skit that made fun of his lack of accomplishments in office.

€œThere may well be almost an unconscious effort on the part of the media to give Obama a bit more slack because he is more likable, because he is the first African-American president. That plays into it,€ said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.

Democrats find the complaints of Obama €œgetting a pass€ hard to stomach in light of the way the press treated Bush €” particularly on the single biggest mistake of his presidency, relying on the faulty intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. Now, Obama€™s aides say, the positive coverage simply reflects the fact that their efforts are succeeding.

€œAs our administration makes progress on the agenda that Washington has ignored for too long, we expect we€™ll get some news coverage of that progress that we like and some tough coverage that we don€™t,€ White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. €œIt€™s not unlike the New Orleans Saints, who are getting lots of good coverage of their perfect record so far €” certainly better coverage than the [2-5] Redskins €” but it doesn€™t mean the Saints have liked every story that€™s been written about them since training camp.  It goes with the territory.€

There are signs the friendly tone toward Obama is ebbing. Case in point: a front-page story in The New York Times noting that Obama€™s all-male basketball games drew fire from the head of the National Organization for Women, who called the games €œtroubling.€

But here are other stories in which Obama seems to have gotten a pass:

New Orleans

As a candidate, Obama railed against the Bush administration for abandoning and then neglecting the people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He made five campaign trips to the city.

But as president, Obama waited almost nine months before visiting the Big Easy, spent less than four hours on the ground there and then jetted to San Francisco for a $3 million Democratic fundraiser.

€œDon€™t judge anybody on the amount of time that they€™ve spent there. Judge only what this administration promised that they would do, what they€™ve done every day and what they€™re continuing to work on,€ press secretary Robert Gibbs said, pointing to positive reviews of the federal government€™s efforts under Obama.

For their part, Democrats can€™t see how Bush officials can muster much umbrage over anything related to New Orleans, given how the Republican administration handled the initial response to Katrina.

Managing the press

When the Obama administration moved in recent weeks to isolate and disparage Fox News as a wing of the Republican Party, there were few immediate howls of outrage €” even from Fox€™s fellow journalists in the media.

Press defenders and First Amendment advocates who jumped on the Bush administration for using military analysts to shape war coverage reacted with a yawn to the White House€™s announcement that it had deemed Fox to be not a €œlegitimate news organization.€

€œHad I said about MSNBC what the Obama White House said about Fox, the media uproar would still be going on,€ said Ari Fleischer, who served as Bush€™s press secretary until 2003. €œI instinctively would have known ... the media would have leapt to their feet to defend them. I€™m shocked it€™s not happening now.€

One press veteran agreed. €œIf George Bush had taken on MSNBC, what would have happened?€ said Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle. €œThat€™s one place you can point to a real difference in how I€™d imagine Bush would be treated.€

Politicizing the White House

Throughout the Bush administration, liberal critics warned that the hand of Bush political adviser Karl Rove was spreading politics into all corners of government. Reporters were on alert for any sign that politics was infecting the work of federal agencies. One top appointee got in hot water for allegedly asking agency officials to work to €œhelp our candidates€ across the country.

So some Bush aides went nearly apoplectic earlier this month when they spotted Gibbs and Obama€™s political guru, David Axelrod, in photos of a Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan policy.

€œOh, the howling and screaming that would have happened if Karl Rove was sitting in on even a deputies-level meeting where strategy was being hammered out. People would have just gone ballistic,€ said Peter Feaver, a former White House aide for both Bush and Bill Clinton.

Also, in about nine months, Obama has already attended more than two dozen fundraising events, while Bush did only six in his first year in office, according to a tally by CBS€™s Mark Knoller.

Gibbs said Obama had to do more to raise a similar amount of money, since the kinds of soft-money fundraisers Bush did early on were banned. €œThis president ... doesn€™t accept money from PACs or lobbyists and doesn€™t allow lobbyists to give at fundraisers that he€™s at, as well,€ Gibbs added.

Dealing with business, in secret

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney endured years of criticism and lawsuits that stretched all the way to the Supreme Court over secret meetings Cheney€™s Energy Task Force held with oil and gas companies. When the policy emerged, critics said Cheney was carrying water for the industry.

Obama pledged to hash out health care reform live on C-SPAN and excoriated Bush for kowtowing to the drug industry. But aides signed off on the drug industry€™s agreement to find $80 billion in savings to support reform. However, Obama aides didn€™t disclose that the agreement involved the White House promising that current health legislation wouldn€™t include further cuts or give the government the right to negotiate over drug prices.

Toning down human rights

During the campaign, Obama talked tough on China. While candidate Obama pushed Bush to take a hard line, President Obama hasn€™t. Hoping to win China€™s help on Iran and North Korea, Obama skipped a meeting with the Dalai Lama and said little when China undertook a violent crackdown in its largely Muslim Xinjiang region. The White House has pledged to meet with the Dalai Lama later.

And while candidate Obama warned Bush against a €œreckless and cynical initiative [that] would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments,€ President Obama€™s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, seemed to lay out a similar incentive-driven approach.

€œWe€™ve got to think about giving out cookies,€ said Gration. €œKids, countries €” they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.€ The White House backed away from Gration€™s characterization of the strategy but did recently lay out a strategy of engaging with the Sudanese regime.

Traveling and recreating

In his campaign and as president, Bush was mocked for a lack of interest in all things foreign €” seven minutes touring the Kremlin, 25 minutes at the Great Wall of China, before declaring, €œLet€™s go home.€

During a trip to Europe in June, Obama chastised German and French reporters for suggesting that he was snubbing those countries by making only brief stops in each. €œThere are only 24 hours in the day. And so there€™s nothing to any of that speculation beyond us just trying to fit in what we could do on such a short trip,€ he told reporters in Germany.

But after taking his wife out for an attention-grabbing date night, Obama promptly jetted back to Washington. Within about 90 minutes of arriving at the White House, the tightly scheduled president was on the move again €” headed to Andrews Air Force Base to play nine holes of golf.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/200...politico/28764

all that being said blondie..........still better then you betcha!!!!!!

[Lefty]

Yup. GW Bush = worst president in US history.

[alan1chef]

Nope...Jimmy Carter is the worst President in US history...one term and done.

[blonde_havoc]

(alan1chef @ Nov. 23 2009,05:26) Nope...Jimmy Carter is the worst President in US history...one term and done.

I wouldn't call either Carter or Bush the worst. The worst president in US history was probably Harding or Buchanan. Of course it's just easier to see the down side in the Bush and Carter administrations because they happened more recently.

[smuttleydfs]

(alan1chef @ Nov. 22 2009,18:26) Nope...Jimmy Carter is the worst President in US history...one term and done.

Carter has and will do a 100% more for the country and the world then bush will ever do. Not to mention there is no respect for dumbass dubya anywhere outside the Crawford city limits