1. “Iraq War Vet: “We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us”
2. Well, certainly not with the official 9/11 narrative:
“How Do We Teach Students About 9/11?”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/23142
3. “The Rape of the Afghan Boys
If winning the war against the “evildoers” means ignoring evil among our allies, then we have truly lost our soul. Cockburn argued that our governments should not put another Western soldier into Afghanistan while there is such obvious corruption snaking through the Afghan security services, not to mention the Karzai government. Too late. The U.S. military is set to expand its footprint of 100,000 by the end of the summer. Complaints within the ranks about Afghan military’s worthiness in the field will continue to simmer, while most of this stuff about debauchery, man-love Thursdays, sexual abuse, and the like will be left to percolate on the milblogs and in the tales soldiers bring home. Forget the State Department reports and the undercover investigative journalism; until the military (which is, like it or not, the face of America in Afghanistan) starts publicly condemning bacha bazi and the abuse of Afghan children with all the force and authority it can muster, then we might as well be putting our red scrawl on a pact with the devil.
No doubt the military cannot and will not seriously envisage withdrawing from that country now, but it should nonetheless consider this: take a long look at the boys shackled in the prisons, the orphans in the streets, the blank resignation of the victims of rape – they will no doubt be history’s next mujahedin, and they will be coming for the devil’s consorts.”
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2010/04/12/a-deal-with-the-devil/
4. So, the US is now a banana republic, meeting all qualifications:
“A Banana Republic With No Bananas
Experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic (and see this and this).
Are they right?
Well, let’s look at Wikipedia’s description of the four factors which make a country a banana republic.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/04/banana-republic-with-no-bananas.html
5. “Latvia’s Cruel Neoliberal Experiment
Latvia is being devastated by two global wars. On the geopolitical front is the Cold War’s coup de grâce. Neoliberals have managed to de-industrialize Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union, persuading parliaments to dismantle government support for economic renewal. The “Washington Consensus” has backed a policy of giving away public enterprises and land to a newly minted oligarchy of insiders, and helped them sell shares to Western investors. The ensuing economic wreckage has helped avert future military rivalry to U.S. hegemony.
Western investors are waging their own social war of finance and property against labor. Initiated by the Chicago Boys in Chile in 1973, sponsored in Britain by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives after 1979 and by Ronald Reagan’s Republicans in the United States after 1980, this class war was capped by “Rubinomics” under Bill Clinton and the Democrats after 1992. Rejecting the classical distinction between earned income (wages and profits) and unearned income (economic rent, financial charges and land-price gains or other asset-price gains), this global war seeks to rationalize privatization of the land and key resources of the former Soviet Union and China as well as those in Third World debtor countries. Its aim is to roll back a century of Progressive Era regulatory reforms and taxation of rentier wealth. So over and above being on the losing side in this victory over Communism, Latvia has been swept up in this war of oligarchy against democracy.
Western Europe has viewed the post-Soviet economies as markets for its surplus exports (especially those subsidized by the Common Agricultural Policy) and bank credit. The last thing the West wants is to help potential competitors develop in the way that it has developed itself – by protectionist tariffs, public subsidy of industry and agriculture, infrastructure spending, social-democratic regulation, and progressive taxation. The strategy is for global conglomerates to buy up property (with tax-deductible credit), while European banks extend loans to fuel debt bubbles. This policy has left the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries economically dependent beyond their ability to pay down the debts they have run up so rapidly over the past decade.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18636
