Afghanistan and Pakistan will be Obama’s Iraq. Only a few days after his inauguration, drone attacks were launched in Pakistan, killing 22. This comes as a 30,000 U.S. troop surge/escalation is being prepared for Afghanistan. Additional warning of this came from Joe Biden himself who said things are going to escalate there on CBS’ “Face the Nation”. A Washington Times article said the following on the issue:
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Sunday that there will be an “uptick” in American casualties in Afghanistan as the U.S. military increases its presence in that country, which he characterized as “a real mess.”
The vice president’s prediction prompted outrage from liberal antiwar groups who characterized it as “cavalier,” although a leading scholar at a Washington neoconservative think tank called the Biden remarks an overdue recognition of reality.
Of course the new administration is just blaming everything on Bush (who does deserve a huge amount of blame). But the point is that they are going to continue the same policies Bush had, just with different rhetoric. There will be no real change (except for the worse) as the powers that be bench “W” and put in their new man Barack. So much for Obama being an anti-war peace candidate. More broken campaign promises are on the way–of that we can be sure.
“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”
“Stepping quickly into an abortion debate he largely avoided as a candidate, President Obama on Friday overturned a controversial ban on U.S. support to international aid groups that provide abortion services around the world…Obama also announced he would release federal funding for the United Nations Population Fund as soon as Congress makes it available, ensuring renewed U.S. support for the U.N. family planning agency.”
“…President Obama campaigned on finding ‘common ground’ on abortion policy. But his first presidential decision to roll back the common-sense Mexico City policy signals to American taxpayers that the abortion bailout has begun,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List.
On the House floor Ron Paul had the guts to point out that Israel helped to create Hamas. But he didn’t stop there — he mentioned the criminally under-reported fact that Osama Bin Laden was an ally of the U.S. in the 1980′s (so was Saddam Hussein) which also hints — to the perceptive — at the probable CIA involvement in the creation of Al-Qaeda.
Wow. For the sake of Dr. Paul’s safety it’s a good thing he did not become president.
The U.S. media can be very one-sided and deceptive. This is especially true when it comes to war and/or the Middle East. It is not unusual for the world to hear one thing while the controlled U.S. corporate “mainstream” media propaganda machine feeds us something else.
In the overall historical perspective (recent events aside) neither group in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is totally right or wrong in their behavior. But we only get one biased side of the issue in the U.S.. This is to be expected — the U.S. arms Israel and gives them huge amounts of money in foreign aid. Of course, the U.S. also leads the way in the so-called “War on Terror” and in pre-emptive war. Below are some resources to help fill in the information gaps.
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Ron Paul on the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians:
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Eric Margolis writes an excellent summary of the issue:
Israel’s ‘Fait Accompli’ in Gaza
There are two completely different versions of what is currently happening in Gaza.
In the Israeli and North American press version, Hamas – “Islamic terrorists” backed by Iran – have in an unprovoked attack fired deadly rockets on innocent Israel with the intent of destroying the Jewish state.
North American politicians and the media say Israel “has the right to defend itself.”
True enough. No Israeli government can tolerate rockets hitting its towns, even though the casualty totals have been less than the car crash fatalities registered during a single holiday weekend on Israel’s roads.
The firing of the feeble, homemade al-Qassam rockets by Palestinians is both useless and counterproductive.
It damages their image as an oppressed people and gives right-wing Israeli extremists a perfect reason to launch more attacks on the Arabs and refuse to discuss peace.
Israel’s supporters insist it has the absolute right to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on “Hamas targets” inside the 360 sq km Gaza Strip to “take out the terrorists.”
Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.
Actually, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel.
Omitting facts
As usual, this cartoon-like version of events omits a great deal of nuance and background.
While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
According to the UN, most of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.
Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want.
Gaza is one of the world’s most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch homemade rockets.Call it a prison riot, writ large.
The aerial bombings and the ongoing ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli ground forces must be analysed in a historical context. Operation “Cast Lead” is a carefully planned undertaking, which is part of a broader military-intelligence agenda first formulated by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001:
“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.”[Barak Ravid, Operation "Cast Lead": Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008]
It was Israel which broke the truce on the day of the US presidential elections, November 4:
“Israel used this distraction to break the ceasefire between itself and Hamas by bombing the Gaza strip. Israel claimed this violation of the ceasefire was to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels into Israeli territory.
The very next day, Israel launched a terrorizing siege of Gaza, cutting off food, fuel, medical supplies and other necessities in an attempt to “subdue” the Palestinians while at the same time engaging in armed incursions.
In response, Hamas and others in Gaza again resorted to firing crude, homemade, and mainly inaccurate rockets into Israel. During the past seven years, these rockets have been responsible for the deaths of 17 Israelis. Over the same time span, Israeli Blitzkrieg assaults have killed thousands of Palestinians, drawing worldwide protest but falling on deaf ears at the UN.” [Shamus Cooke, The Massacre in Palestine and the Threat of a Wider War, Global Research, December 2008]
Planned Humanitarian Disaster
On December 8, US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was in Tel Aviv for discussions with his Israeli counterparts including the director of Mossad, Meir Dagan.
“Operation Cast Lead” was initiated two days day after Christmas. It was coupled with a carefully designed international Public Relations campaign under the auspices of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Hamas’ military targets are not the main objective. Operation “Cast Lead” is intended, quite deliberately, to trigger civilian casualities.
What we are dealing with is a “planned humanitarian disaster” in Gaza in a densly populated urban area.
The longer term objective of this plan, as formulated by Israeli policy makers, is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestinian lands:
“Terrorize the civilian population, assuring maximal destruction of property and cultural resources… The daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered unbearable: They should be locked up in cities and towns, prevented from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces, schools and hospitals, This will encourage emigration and weaken the resistance to future expulsions” Ur Shlonsky, quoted by Ghali Hassan, Gaza: The World’s Largest Prison, Global Research, 2005)
Many of the “man-made” global warming crowd like to point out that Exxon has spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions to help fund groups who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming. While I’m no defender of Exxon, what these people fail to do is follow the money trail within their own ranks which could easily make Exxon’s few million dollars look like pocket change compared to what Al Gore and the carbon credit trading firms will make.
The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade
Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain?
…To resolve the “climate crisis,” Gore wants to put a cap on the production of greenhouse gases. He calls for an immediate freeze on U.S. emissions, a ban on new coal-fired power plants, tough new fuel-economy and energy-efficiency standards, renewable energy mandates, carbon taxes and mandatory targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Those emissions consist mostly of carbon dioxide (CO2), the byproduct of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas, which supply 85% of all U.S. energy. Gore’s blueprint to save the planet moves the United States towards a command economy in which government regulators hold sway over what kinds and amounts of energy will be made available to the private sector. His principal regulatory tool is what’s called carbon-credit trading.
Under a so-called “cap-and-trade” system, government places a ceiling or “cap” on private-sector emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases.” Each sector, industry or business is allocated a fixed quantity of carbon credits that allow it to emit specific quantities of greenhouse gases. As an example, one tradable carbon credit might permit the emission of one ton of CO2. If a business emits more tons of CO2 than its supply of credits allows, it has the option to buy surplus credits from other firms — or it will have to pay a fine in proportion to the amount of the excess emission. By contrast, businesses that emit less than their allocation can sell their excess credits.
This system, which may sound market-friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy. In a cap-and-trade system, buyers will purchase their offsets from a broker or through an electronic trading platform. In Europe, carbon trading is already a reality. Since 2005, carbon offsets have been traded electronically on the European Climate Exchange (ECX).
…Carbon offsets provide even more opportunities to cheat. For example, some aluminum companies claim they deserve credits just because they recycle aluminum for a living — recycling being less energy intensive and thus generally cheaper than making the stuff from scratch. The most popular activity for generating offsets is planting trees. But this method of storing carbon takes years and the long-term results are uncertain. If the trees die and decay, or are burned to clear land for agriculture, there is no net emission reduction. The net carbon reduction from tree planting may not materialize for decades, but the offsets are given out now.
To critics on both the free-market right and the environmentalist left, carbon offsets are no more than a marketing gimmick. Some describe the fanciful device as akin to medieval indulgences that were sold in a cleric-run market to regulate the remission of sin.
…Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management, purchases — but isn’t a provider of — carbon dioxide offsets,” said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.
GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.
…CCX also has “participant members” that develop the carbon-offset projects. They have names like Carbon Farmers and Eco-Nomics Incorporated. Still, other participant member groups facilitate, finance and market carbon-offset projects to “sequester, destroy or displace” greenhouse gases. CCX aspires to be the New York Stock Exchange of carbon-emissions trading.
Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well.
GIM’s “founding partners” are studded with officials from Goldman Sachs. They include David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM); Mark Ferguson, former co-head of GSAM pan-European research; and Peter Harris, who headed GSAM international operations. Another founding partner is Peter Knight, who is the designated president of GIM. He was Sen. Al Gore’s chief of staff from 1977-1989 and the campaign manager of the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign.
Like CCX, the ECX has about 80 member companies, including Barclays, BP, Calyon, Endesa, Fortis, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Shell, and ECX has contracted with the European Union to further develop a futures market in carbon trading. What’s in it for the companies? They will benefit either by investing in carbon credits or by receiving subsidies for doing so.
This video is a couple of weeks old (I’m still catching up after the holidays) but still as relevant as ever. As Ron Paul says here: the lost bail out money is “business as usual”.
Ah, yes. Homeland Security U.S.A. is the latest in mind-numbing “reality” television and it looks to be little more than propaganda for the state. Sit back, relax, and be acclimated to the incremental loss of your liberties in the comfort of your own home!
Just watch — all of these people in uniform are so nice and good and official looking! There is nothing to fear, we should give them more power to “do their jobs”. Pay no attention to the 20,000+ troops being stationed in America or the warrantlesscheckpoints because it’s all “for your safety” of course. Everything changed a few years ago (don’t you know?) — posse comitatus and the Bill of Rights are obsolete these days.
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“Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither…”
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