1. Iran:
” Blame the usual players in Congress and the mainstream media for a lot of it, but the case being made that Iran is a threat to the remainder of the world is largely being cranked up by Israel and its yapping poodles loosely described as the Israel lobby. That Iran spends only 1% as much on its military as does the United States appears to be irrelevant to the argument because everyone who reads the Washington Post and New York Times knows that those wily mullahs have nukes hidden up the sleeves of those loose gowns that they wear, secret warhead programs, and ballistic missiles that will be able to strike Europe someday for reasons that continue to be somewhat elusive.
Israel, which gets nearly $3 billion in “military assistance” and numerous other perks from Washington annually and spends twice as much as Tehran on its own military gets a free pass even though it has a secret and uninspected nuclear arsenal that undoubtedly contributes to Iranian paranoia. Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has made very clear that he wants the United States to attack Iran. What Israel wants from Washington it usually gets and there is no sign that President Barack Obama has the guts needed to change that sorry history.
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And so the propaganda campaign, referred to during the cold war as agitprop, continues with Iran in the crosshairs. There are reports that Israel has funded a group of young bloggers who have good English to go onto websites to disseminate the party line, particularly regarding Iran, so it is safe to assume that an Orwellian conflict that has no rhyme or reason will be promoted all over the internet. There will be no rest in Congress, within the media, and in the corridors of power in Israel until Iran is defanged. And if it will take the deaths of a few thousand more young Americans and the total destruction of the US economy to accomplish that objective, so be it. Congress and the White House have not been answerable to the American people for quite some time so why should another war change anything?”
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/11/11/same-song-different-verse/
2. Afghanistan:
“In Kabul’s ‘Obama Market,’ U.S. military rations on sale
Now Afghans are beginning to call their notorious bazaar full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases by the name of the current American president, a modest counterweight to his Nobel Peace Prize.
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In front of Tor’s shop was a nearly waist-high, three-deep wall of boxed food that apparently had been destined for military chow halls. There were cases of pre-cooked cheddar gravy sausage biscuits (forbidden to Muslims, who don’t eat pork), and dozens of flats of the Otis Spunkmeyer muffins and white chocolate macadamia cookies that soldiers often get at mealtime.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/78728.html
3. Good, a US General who says no more troops in Afghan:
“AP says that the key intervention here came from US ambassador in Kabul, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who warned that the government of Hamid Karzai is not a reliable partner.
The BBC says that Eikenberry is against sending thousands of more troops, and he warned of corruption in the Karzai government. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is said to be fuming over the intervention.
Eikenberry is a China specialist who can not only speak but interpret Chinese, who has a Stanford MA in international affairs, and who served two tours in Afghanistan under Bush. His appointment as ambassador in Kabul had been a surprise, since the generals are not usually sent in as diplomats, and the US military was already well represented in US government counsels on Afghanistan. But now it appears that Obama cleverly put Eikenberry in as chief diplomat precisely because he is worldly and experienced in the country, and in a position to second-guess the Washington war hawks who always think that a victory is around the corner with just a few more troops.”
4. “Confirmed: Defense Spending Creates Fewer Jobs Than Other Types of Spending
The table first shows in column 1 the data on the total number of jobs created by $1 billion in spending for alternative end uses. As we see, defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present. Thus, personal consumption generates 10,779 jobs, 26.2 percent more than defense, health care generates 12,883 jobs, education generates 17,687, mass transit is at 19,795, and construction for weatherization/infrastructure is 12,804. From this list we see that with two of the categories, education and mass transit, the total number of jobs created with $1 billion in spending is more than twice as many as with defense.
“Military Keynesianism” – the idea that war is the best economic stimulus – is false.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/confirmed-defense-spending-creates-less.html
5. “A Morally Bankrupt Military: When Soldiers and Their Families Become Expendable
The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own.
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Rich told Truthout, “In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn’t have mental issues because we were too ‘high speed.’ So I was afraid to go because I didn’t want to be labeled as a weak soldier.”
What followed was more harrowing.
“The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg. Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife.”
Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16049
6. “America’s Labor Movement: The Political Winds are Shifting
As long as organized labor maintains any semblance of its partnership-with-the-employers approach, working people will be compelled to sacrifice for the “good” of the company. If the business moves to another country to take advantage of cheap labor, workers must passively accept their layoffs. If a company orders massive layoffs while requiring the remaining people to work twice as hard, workers will not be allowed to protest. And if wages and benefits are slashed to the core in order to raise profits, workers must submit in silence.
As the above cracks in the partnership testify, however, there is a growing recognition that the interests of workers and their employers do not always converge. And if these trends continue, they will culminate in the recognition that in fact the interests of workers and their employers stand diametrically opposed. First and foremost, businesses produce for a profit. On the other hand, people work simply in order to make a living. The higher the wages and benefits, then the higher is the standard of living. But the profits of the employer are proportionately lower. Therefore, any partnership with the employers will be forged at the expense of the workers. And there can be no doubt that the partnership philosophy has produced uninterrupted loses for the workers during the past four decades.
But if the interests of working people and their employers do not converge, it makes little sense for labor to operate within the Democratic Party, given that corporations and the rich control the Party. In the final analysis, in order for working people to effectively pursue their own interests, they will be compelled to organize their own party — a labor party — that can operate exclusively for them.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16050
7. “The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk”
Peter Galbraith’s vast, undisclosed financial interests in the policies he spent years advocating as an “expert.”
Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people — on the crazed “Arab street” and in American-hating leftist circles — actually believed in “conspiracy” theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?
Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy. He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so — the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox — all while those interests remained concealed. His uniting with the country’s most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq didn’t prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.’s number two official in Afghanistan. He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert. In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America’s Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function. “
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
8. “Let’s once and for all stop getting excited about America mounting pressure on Israel to freeze West Bank settlements. The entire fascination with the topic is a product of Zionist spin. It is there to divert attention from the root cause of the conflict: The robbery of Palestine and Palestinians in the name of a ‘Jewish home coming’. The call to stop Israeli construction in the West Bank is there to leave us with the false impression that the robbery of Palestine started in 1967. The facts are known to many of us, but not to all. The vast majority of Palestinians were expelled from their towns, villages, fields and orchards in 1948.
What seems as an American peace initiative putting pressure on Israel to halt its expansion into the West Bank is in fact an agenda that is promoted by Zionists within the US Administration
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How long will it take before Israelis grasp that they dwell on stolen land? How long will it take before the Israelis realise that the battle is lost? How long will it take for the Israelis to internalise the obvious fact that they have once again managed to get on the wrong side of their Neighbours?”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23953.htm
