1. What a perfect example of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine:
“Recent statements by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel admitting that they were going to use the economic crisis to get other things done is at least surprisingly honest. But it is also hypocritical. Remember when some of these same people criticized George W. Bush for using the 9/11 tragedy to invade the unrelated nation of Iraq?
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Liberals would also argue that using the economic crisis to pass new education, energy, and health initiatives, which they deem to be positive, is of a much different magnitude than using a horrendous terrorist attack to invade an unrelated country for no good reason and get even more people killed. Of course, many neoconservatives still tell us that all the chaos, mayhem, and death in Iraq were for a positive good. And even if the new education, energy, and health initiatives have a positive effect – a dubious proposition – the question is whether the deficit- and debt-ridden government can afford them during a severe economic meltdown. Different politicians, same chicanery.
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Hypocrisy in government is nothing new and is certainly not more prevalent in one party or the other. There just seems to be a lot of it around lately.”
http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=14397
2. “President Barack Obama declared today that the United States “will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world. And we will do whatever it takes to sustain our technological advantage and to invest in the capabilities that we need to protect our interests and to defeat and deter any conventional enemy.”
The news hardly comes as an enormous surprise, given the United States spends nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world put together, yet that the new president felt the need to make such a statement at all may be a telling sign that his foreign policy agenda is going to involve a lot of military dominance the world over.“
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/03/13/obama-vows-us-military-will-remain-worlds-strongest/
3. “Overall military spending — which includes the cost of “contingency operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan — would increase by $9 billion to $663.7 billion.
So where’s the “peace dividend”?
The Obama budget requests $130 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal 2010, which is less than the $186.1 billion level that it took for the “surge” in Iraq (plus Afghanistan) in fiscal 2008. But it’s also more than the amount the Congressional Research Service estimates would be needed for the draw-down Obama campaign promised. It’s even more than would be needed for the kind of drawdown he’s proposed.
Barack Obama’s budget seems to indicate that he will be increasing U.S. military involvement abroad, rather than the decrease he promised as a candidate. After all, if we’re reducing our deployments abroad, why would we need more people in the armed services? Clearly, the United States is not headed toward a draw-down of our commitments abroad.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/874
4. The US definitely needs to leave the Bolivian government alone:
“An American diplomat accused by the Bolivian government of conspiring with opposition factions left the country Thursday, one of several U.S. officials forced out of Andean nations in recent months and another sign of the deep discontent with U.S. policy that the Obama administration faces in Latin America.
The ejection of Francisco Martinez, the second secretary of the U.S. Embassy, for allegedly meeting with the political opposition and spies, follows Bolivia’s decision to throw out Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg in September, Venezuela’s expulsion of Ambassador Patrick Duddy the same month and Ecuador’s move against two American diplomats last month.
The departures do not include Bolivia’s decision to banish 38 Drug Enforcement Administration agents and support personnel, its request to remove U.S. Agency for International Development employees from the coca-growing region of the Chapare or the U.S. government’s decision to pull Peace Corps volunteers out of Bolivia.
“We are talking here about diplomats who are taking advantage of privileges and immunities, who use those privileges and immunities to perform intelligence tasks on behalf of a foreign power,” Bolivian Government Minister Alfredo Rada said this week at a news conference in La Paz, the capital. “No government in the world would accept that.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/12/AR2009031203524_pf.html
5. I don’t want to be watched from outer space:
“Pentagon plans ‘spy’ blimp
The Pentagon on Thursday said it intends to spend $400 million to develop a giant dirigible that will float 65,000 feet above the Earth for 10 years, providing intricate radar surveillance of the vehicles, planes and people below.
“It is absolutely revolutionary,” The LA Times quoted Werner JA Dahm, chief scientist for the air force, on the proposed unmanned airship — describing it as a cross between a satellite and a spy plane. The 450-foot-long craft would give the US military a better understanding of an adversary’s movements, habits and tactics, officials said. According to the report, the ability to constantly monitor small movements in a wide area, such as the Pak-Afghan border, would dramatically improve military intelligence. “It is constant surveillance, uninterrupted,” Dahm said.
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Nearly impossible: According to The LA Times, the US military has used less-sophisticated tethered blimps, aerostats, to conduct surveillance around military bases in Iraq. But flying at 65,000 feet, the giant airship would be nearly impossible to see, beyond the range of any handheld missile, and safe from most fighter planes. And its range would be such that it could operate at the distant edges of any military engagement.
The giant airship’s military value would come from its radar system, the report said, adding giant antenna would allow the military to see farther and with more detail. “Being able to observe threats [and] understand what is happening is really the game-changing piece here,” Dahm said.“
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=20093\14\story_14-3-2009_pg7_39
6. We are destabilizing Mexico ourselves – it ain’t the ‘drug lords’:
“Are Mexican drug cartels a threat to the United States? This is an easy conclusion to make after reading most mainstream U.S. newspapers. Hardly a day goes by without sensational stories about “broad daylight” gun battles, heart-wrenching interviews with weeping mothers, and praise for the Mexican army in its “war” against “narco-terrorists.”
Interestingly, Mexico has lately been compared to Pakistan as a country “on the verge” of becoming a “failed state,” with the Mexican drug cartels accused of playing the same “destabilizing” role as the Taliban/terrorists in Pakistan. Calling such a comparison a stretch would be a gross understatement, of course.
There is in fact a real connection between Mexico and Pakistan that’s worth discussing, though you’d never hear it mentioned in the mainstream media. Both countries have governments that are virtual pawns of the U.S. and, as such, are having a difficult time with their native populations as they attempt to please their real bosses — U.S. mega-corporations and rich investors.
And these bosses can be demanding. For example, in Pakistan the U.S. dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) is demanding that Pakistan privatize state-owned banks, railways, power plants, water, insurance, factories, etc. — so that U.S. corporations and investors can buy them at discount rates for private profit.
In Mexico, the same U.S. groups are lustfully eyeing Mexico’s number one source of national revenue: the state oil company (PEMEX). Mexican companies and natural resources had already been gobbled-up by U.S. corporate vultures long before NAFTA came into effect, though this trade agreement intensified the trend, making it a good place to begin if one is to have any understanding of the current political situation in Mexico.
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In 2008 the ante was upped in Mexico. The Merida Initiative was passed in the US congress — also known as Plan Mexico (based on the similar “plan” in Colombia). This agreement adds billions of dollars in U.S. military aide to Mexico, including “counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security.” Plan Mexico is in fact a mere extension of NAFTA’s “security and prosperity” agreement, but with a more blatant role for the U.S. military.
Recently Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, updated President Obama on the emerging security threat of Mexico, and the enhanced cooperation between the U.S. and Mexican militaries through Plan Mexico. This meeting happened after a week of U.S. media hysterics over “drug cartel violence spilling over into the U.S.”
Similar scare tactics were used to achieve public support for Plan Colombia, where billions of dollars of U.S. “aide” have helped militarize the country in the fight against “narco terrorists.” The results aren’t surprising: Colombia’s human rights record is the worst in the hemisphere while being the number one cocaine exporter in the world.
Colombia is a much-needed pawn of U.S. foreign policy in a region that despises past U.S. military and economic intervention. It should be noted that the only two openly right-wing governments in the region are Mexico and Colombia.
Ultimately, the accusation that a country has “failed” has been used as a pretext for U.S. military involvement. This is indeed the case for both Mexico and Pakistan, where corporations and investors work in tandem with puppet governments against the wishes of the population.
The possibility that such police state measures can be transferred to the United States is very real, especially because of the Bush-era destruction of civil liberties that Obama is unwilling to reconstruct, let alone talk about. If policies are not put into place that immediately help the newly-created millions of unemployed, un-insured, and recently homeless, social unrest will undoubtedly emerge, and the measures Bush created will be further used against the U.S. working class. In this case, the police and military may be used to “maintain order,” possibly under the guise of a “war on terror” or “war on drugs,” or another creative campaign. “
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12709
7. “The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal
In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs, a distinction which continues through to the present. Last year, working with the Cato Institute, I went to that country in order to research the effects of the decriminalization law (which applies to all substances, including cocaine and heroin) and to interview both Portuguese and EU drug policy officials and analysts (the central EU drug policy monitoring agency is, by coincidence, based in Lisbon). Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.
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There is clearly a growing recognition around the world and even in the U.S. that, strictly on empirical grounds, criminalization approaches to drug usage and, especially, the ”War on Drugs,” are abject failures, because they worsen the exact problems they are ostensibly intended to address. “Strictly on empirical grounds” means excluding from the assessment: (a) ideological questions regarding the legitimacy of imprisoning adults for consuming drugs they choose to consume; (b) the evisceration of Constitutional and civil liberties wrought by drug criminalization; and (c) the extraordinary sums of money devoted to the War on Drugs both domestically and internationally.
Very recent events demonstrating this evolving public debate over drug policy include the declaration of the Drug War’s failure from several former Latin American leaders; a new Economist Editorial calling for full-scale drug legalization; new polls showing substantial and growing numbers of Americans (and a majority of Canadians) supportive of marijuana legalization; the decision of the DEA to make good on Obama’s campaign pledge to cease raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states which have legalized its usage; and numerous efforts in the political mainstream to redress the harsh and disparate criminal penalties imposed for drug offenses, including Obama’s support for treatment rather than prison for first-time drug offenders.
Particularly in the U.S., there is still widespread support for criminalization approaches and even support for the most extreme and destructive aspects of the “War on Drugs,” but, for a variety of reasons, the debate over drug policy has become far more open than ever before. Portugal’s success with decriminalization is highly instructive, particularly since the impetus for it was their collective recognition in the 1990s that criminalization was failing to address — and was almost certainly exacerbating — their exploding, poverty-driven drug crisis. As a consensus in that country now recognizes, decriminalization is what enabled them to manage drug-related problems far more effectively than ever before, and the nightmare scenarios warned of by decriminalization opponents have, quite plainly, never materialized.
The counter-productive effects of drug criminalization are at least as evident now for the U.S. as they were for pre-decriminalization Portugal. Beyond one’s ideological beliefs regarding the legitimacy of criminalization, drug policy should be determined by objective, empirical assessments of what works and what does not work. It’s now been more than seven years since Portugal decriminalized all drugs, and dispassionately examining the effects of that decision provides a unique opportunity to assess questions of drug policy in the most rational and empirical manner possible.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
