Friday

The Daily WAR (12-26)

Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
 
 
 
    Today in the Vatican, Benedict XVI received 150 members of the Papal Foundation, an organization based in the US that was created to provide the Holy See with a stable source of income, which each year presents the Pope with a check that represents the accrued interest of investments.
    The pope expressed his gratitude for the "generous support the Papal Foundation offers through aid projects and scholarships which assist me in carrying out my Apostolic Ministry to the universal Church".
 
    Compared to some of his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI rarely travels abroad. But speculation in his native Germany is mounting that he will return for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009.
 
 
 
    Earlier this week, it seemed as though President Bush were softening his tone regarding Germany's presence in Afghanistan. Now, though, it seems that such hopes might have been premature.
 
    Germany is considered to be the current leader of Europe and Chancellor Merkel the Continent's most influential politician, according to a 6-nation poll published today. Only the US begs to differ.
 
 
 
    The EU is not united. In fact it is far from united on a great range of foreign policy issues as a result of which its voice on the world stage is weak and inhibited. Instead of speaking with a single strong voice, the EU speaks with many weak ones. The result is that nobody's interest is served.
 
    The EU wants to "deepen" its ties with 4 of its neighbours - Ukraine, Moldova, Morocco and Israel - the external relations commissioner said. "Based on their progress and their ambition to work more closely with us, we want to go significantly further with these 4 countries."
 
    Turkey's attempt to enter the EU is now being called Europe's "biggest project". But new doubts have emerged that it will ever happen.
 
    A disappointed Macedonia warned Thursday that its failure to join NATO could lead to instability in the region. While Ukraine and Georgia were also rejected, the 2 countries welcomed the pledge that they would one day be part of the alliance.
 
    At this week's NATO summit in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, President Bush has faced concerted European opposition to his plans for a further eastward expansion of the alliance. Only a last minute compromise allowed the American president to save face.
    German politicians in particular were reported to be angry and disconcerted at the insistence by the American president on the speedy inclusion of Georgia and the Ukraine into the ranks of the NATO.
    Following intense deliberations on Wednesday night between German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a compromise was finally struck.
    The formulation agreed to by the participants at the summit on Thursday pointedly failed to give any timetable for Georgian and Ukrainian membership. It was widely regarded as a face-saving deal for the US president and a victory for German diplomacy.
    In their reports of the tensions between the US and its European allies at the Bucharest conference, German newspapers openly described the American president's behaviour at the summit as a provocation aimed at splitting the alliance.
    The original notion behind the setting up of the NATO alliance was not to combat an external threat, but in fact to prevent war amongst its constituent members. In other words, the centrifugal pressures evident in Bucharest, which are now threatening to tear NATO apart, also create the conditions for renewed military confrontation between the major imperialist powers.
 
    Canadians should be concerned regarding Kosovo's current leadership. The current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was the leader of the KLA. He has admitted that the KLA orchestrated the infamous Racak "massacre" dressing their KLA dead in civilian clothes, machine gunning them and dumping them in a ditch and claiming it was a Serbian slaughter of civilians.
    Canada should remain united with the approximately 157 member countries of the UN and with the leaders of the vast majority of the world's population in not recognizing Kosovo's illegal unilateral declaration of independence. Independence has to be earned by a group meeting specific criteria and in accordance with legal protocol. Kosovo does not even come close to qualifying for such recognition.
 
 
 
    MK Arieh Eldad (National Union-National Religious Party) criticized Prime Minister Olmert, saying that the only reason he has been able to gain power was his corrupt manner of rule. "Olmert surrounded himself with a network of partners in crime and he runs the country as though her were a crime boss."
 
    Israeli Defense Minister Barak canceled a trip to Germany because of anticipated provocation from Syria on the death of a Hezbollah leader, sources said. Barak called off his trip because he expects Syria to release findings of its inquiry into the assassination of Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh and use the report findings to put the terrorist group into a position where it must react to his death.
 
    Syria and China Wednesday signed an agreement to establish a petroleum refinery as part of plans to bolster cooperation in the oil and gas industry.
 
    What happened in Iraq this week was a beautiful lesson in the weird laws of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, it was the Americans who got schooled. Even now, people at my office are saying, "We won, right? Sadr told his men to give up, right?"
    Wrong. Sadr won big. Iran won even bigger. Maliki, the Iraqi Army, Petraeus and Cheney lost. Sadr's Mahdi Army humiliated the Iraq Army on all fronts. Thousands of police who were supposed to be backing up the Iraqi Army either refused to fight or defected to Sadr's Mahdi Army.
    In Basra, the Iraqi Army was stopped dead and clearly in danger of being crushed or forced to retreat from the city. In Baghdad, Sadr's militia was rocketing the Green Zone non-stop -- not a good look for the "Surge is working" PR drive -- and driving the Iraqi Army clean out of the 2.5-million-strong Shia slum, Sadr City.
    And in every poor Shia neighborhood in cities and towns all over Iraq, local units of the Mahdi Army were attacking the government forces.
    If you want to know how not to think about Iraq, just start with anything ever said or imagined by Cheney or Bush.
 
    Pakistan's Foreign Minister has said Pakistan is not subordinate to the US, and added that Islamabad will continue cooperation with Washington for the elimination of terrorism. He said that no foreign country would be allowed to launch any operation inside Pakistans territory.
 
    A small Israeli company has refuted claims by the opposition party in Zimbabwe that it was hired by President Mugabe to provide software to rig the elections. "Mugabe and his cronies intend to steal this election through the use of sophisticated software provided by the Israeli company with Mossad connections.
 
    A German Left Party politician has caused controversy with a speech in which she indirectly compared the Dalai Lama to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. She also claims the Dalai Lama represents the "deification of political power."
 
 
 
    Diplomats say Iran has assembled hundreds of advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment, a step meant to speed up the process that can produce both fuel and the fissile core of nuclear warheads.
 
I knew that story yesterday was fishy...
    China denied that it had provided the International Atomic Energy Agency with intelligence linked to Iran's alleged attempts to make nuclear arms. An AP report published Wednesday was "totally groundless and out of ulterior motives."
 
    In a long-promised online Q&A session, Zawahiri says it would be "in the interest" of Al-Qaeda to see Iran "sap[ped]" by a fight with the US. This isn't the first time Zawahiri has criticized Iran, either. In a videotape released in December, he said that "Iran has stabbed the Muslim Ummah [nation] in the back" during the US invasion of Afghanistan.
 
    By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources.
    Tehran keeps silent about its role. The most important Iranian calculation would be not to provoke the Americans unnecessarily by rubbing in the true import of what happened.
    What has happened is essentially that Iran has frustrated the joint US-British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which the strategy of establishing control over the fabulous oil fields of southern Iraq will not work.
    Control of Basra is a pre-requisite before American oil majors make their multi-billion investments to kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq. Iraq's Southern Oil Company is headquartered in Basra.
    Highly strategic installations are concentrated in the region, such as pipeline networks, pumping stations, refineries and loading terminals. The American oil majors will insist on fastening these installations.
    To be sure, Cheney must be furious that Tehran torpedoed the entire US strategy for Big Oil. Nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are hit. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran standoff may have just begun...
 
    Former Chief Inspector of the UN Commission on Iraq Scott Ritter has claimed that there is an 80% chance of a US war with Iran. He noted that the pattern of preparations for such a conflict has been steadily developing and involves Congress as well as the Bush-Cheney administration.
    According to Ritter, a war with Iran would speed up the ongoing decline of US standing in the world, and afterward Russia and China would be ready to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum.
 
Yes!!...
    Five years into the ill-starred military incursion into Iraq there are now rumors floating that a plan is in the works to attack Iraq's neighbor -- Iran. These rumors seem to pinpoint Vice-President Dick Cheney as being "the mastermind" behind such a plan.
    The mentality which considers that such an attack might have any legitimacy at all, is a mentality which clearly has made haste directly into the center of a most complete madness. Only the most self-absorbed and deranged people in the top echelons of our States united could even consider such a thing.
    Any attack on Shi'ite Iran would be judged as being an attack on all of the Shia faithful anywhere in the world. And an attack would probably do all that is needed to unite one billion Muslims against any country or group of countries foolish enough to pull the trigger.
    To attack Iran with atomic weapons will trigger so many unexpected consequences as to make even a savant turn speechless. One thing leads to another, of course. There is the issue of the huge amounts of food which are now imported into the US: disruptions by riots abroad, or by strikes, or by government-led boycotts could decimate the "just in time"delivery systems which service ALL of our major supermarkets and tin-roof discount chains.
    It is going to be a long and a very hungry summer in the US.
 
 
 
    Every time an important fact undermining the official story about 9/11 is raised, defenders of the government's version try to label it as an "old story" which is "not news". In modern day America, is checking the government's claims so unusual that that is considered news?
 
    Four decades after Martin Luther King was murdered, black Americans are torn between the hope that Barack Obama will reach the White House and the fear that he too could fall to an assassin's bullet.
 
    A new ad for Absolut vodka reconfigures North America according to the aspirations of many Mexicans, who believe the US Southwest was stolen and should be returned.
 
    The suburbs of the US are no longer the same as those immortalised in 1950s movies, with white families living in big houses and the father driving off to work in his Buick, past manicured lawns. These days, it is more likely that English will not even be the first language you hear on the streets.
    But among the hard-working families lurks a darker shadow. Vicious street gangs, committed to violence, have spread throughout the Americas and are now a significant threat in the US. MS-13 - or Mara Salvatrucha - is the biggest and fastest-growing of the Latin American street gangs.
 
    "One in 36 adult Hispanic men, 1 in 15 black adult men; and 1 in 9 black men ages 20-34 are behind bars. While rates of violent crimes has fallen by 25% over the last 20 years, prison population has tripled. Overall, the US imprisons more people than any other nation. Second is China, with 1.5 million people in behind bars."
 
    Americans traditionally thought of their country as a "city upon a hill," a "light unto the world." Today only the deluded think that. Polls show that the rest of the world regards the United States and Israel as the 2 greatest threats to peace.
    This is not surprising. In the words of Arthur Silber: "The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for."
    There is no one in the Bush administration with enough integrity to resign. It is a government devoid of truth, morality, decency and honor. The Bush administration is a blight upon America and upon the world.
 
    Weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration declared the military exempt from a major plank of the US Constitution's bill of rights, according to a legal memorandum uncovered this week. In a 2003 footnote, Bush lawyer John Yoo writes: "Our office recently concluded that the fourth amendment had no application to domestic military operations."
 
    I have difficulty briefly describing America's form of national government. According to the CIA, the USA, which is the Federal government, is a constitutional federal republic with a strong democratic tradition (representative democracy). On paper, this is correct.
    But these terms do not describe our national government. If they did we'd see, which we do not, the government establishing justice, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the sovereign people and its posterity. The government would obey the US Constitution, which it does not.
    What terms do capture the central thrust of America's government over the course of many decades? The USA has (in alphabetic order) elements of authoritarianism, fascism, kleptocracy, meritocracy, plutocracy, socialism, and totalitarianism. These co-exist with its being a constitutional federal republic with representative democracy.
 
 
 
    At a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, top financial regulators said the unprecedented actions by the Federal Reserve Board last month to prevent the failure of investment bank Bear Stearns were taken to avert a collapse of the entire US financial system.
    While the regulators had a vested interest in justifying the allocation of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up giant Wall Street firms by portraying the immediate crisis they confronted in dire terms, there is no doubt that the disaster scenario over the weekend of March 14-17 which they described was very real.
    The very fact of their admission of a financial emergency of historic proportions is an extraordinary testament to the profound and systemic nature of an economic crisis that only a few weeks ago President Bush called a "rough patch."
    What none of the officials, and none of the senators on the Banking Committee, broached was what the development of such a potentially catastrophic crisis says about the nature and condition of American capitalism.
 
    So far, the subprime tsunami has wiped out half a trillion dollars from the books of major financial institutions in the US and Europe. Foreign central banks keep looking for ways to unload stockpiles of dollars without disrupting their economies or the global financial system.
    The more financial trouble the US finds itself in, the better the investment climate as US business and financial entities decide to opt out into the arms of a foreign buyer rather than seek bankruptcy protection.
    According to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, another massive bubble that keeps ballooning is the derivatives market, which has quintupled in five years since 2002 to more than $500 trillion -- not billion.
    Fed interest rate cuts mean to the rest of the world that the Fed continues to print money at an alarming rate. Banks are borrowing from the Fed and then hoarding cash, apparently fearful the worst is yet to come.
(Cartoon: Cash!)
 
    International banks are scrambling to sell their holdings of Spanish mortgage debt at a steep discount, fearing that the country may be sliding into the worst economic downturn in its modern history.
    The root cause of the crisis is in a sense Europe's monetary union. The euro effect halved Spain's interest rates almost overnight. Rates then fell below Spain's inflation rate for several years, fuelling an explosive credit boom. The process has now kicked into reverse.
 
    The landmark merger that created Citigroup Inc. was a "mistake" that failed to benefit the financial services conglomerate's investors, customers and employees, said John Reed, who masterminded the $166 billion deal with Sandy Weill in 1998.
 
    Today, the economic negligence of Washington and Wall Street, more than 2 decades in the making, has led to a multi-dimensional crisis in which this country faces an unprecedented convergence of problems: unprecedented debt, tumbling home prices, reckless money supply expansion, growing inflation, insufficient and expensive oil, and an eroding dollar. Sadly, there may no longer be a plausible way out.
 
    The nation's free-market doctrine is ill-suited for today's global market, Hillary Clinton emphasized in an interview with USA Today.
 
    The big banks' fear of big losses is threatening to bring down the entire system, with dire consequences for all of us. Here's what's going on, and what we can do about it.
 
    The US financial industry has been shedding jobs at a record clip, and some analysts predict the pace will accelerate over the next 18 months as banks cut costs in the face of the housing market slump and the weak economy.
    Analysts said in a report that it expects the US commercial banking industry — essentially, all companies that lend or collect deposits — to lose 200,000 of its 2 million jobs over the next 12 to 18 months. An annual loss of 200,000 jobs at the nation's commercial banks would be an unprecedented number.
 
The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
    Every now and then a 'prize' of a book comes along that includes all the elements of good writing.  Bad Samaritans is one of them.  Using straightforward language that generally avoids using the lexicon of economists, and explains it well when it is used, Ha-Joon Chang writes a strong narrative about the ills of the capitalist world.
    His title is most appropriate as he readily supports his position that free trade is a myth, and a realistic presentation of the history of capitalism demonstrates the reality behind the myth.
    The main underlying position that demolishes the myth of capitalist free trade and its supposed successes with globalization is that all the current wealthy countries achieved their wealth not through free trade, but through the use of highly protective tariffs and effective use of subsidies and laws that regulated foreign business within their own country.
 
    Crude oil for May delivery rose as much as $1.20 cents, or 1.2%, to $105.03 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
 
    Corn prices jumped to a record $6 a bushel Thursday, driven up by an expected supply shortfall that will only add to Americans' growing grocery bill and further squeeze struggling ethanol producers.
    Corn prices have shot up nearly 30% this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels. Prices are poised to go even higher after the US government this week predicted that American farmers -- the world's biggest corn producers -- will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year.
 
    World grain stocks haved reached the lowest in 4 decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates.
 
 
 
Paranoid or "prophet"?...
    The year 2040 will find the world's crops dead, most of the people in a similar state of decay, and those few left alive will be cannibals, according to a prediction from Ted Turner. "Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state like Somalia or the Sudan."
    [WAR: "Whom have you ever treated like this? Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for?" (Lam 2:20). "Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers." (Eze 5:10). "I will not be your shepherd. Let the dying die, and the perishing perish. Let those who are left eat one another's flesh." (Zech 11:9)]
 
The case against lawns
    Why do we dedicate so much property to something that requires precious resources, endless hours and contaminates our air and water? The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape.
    Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth, and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of biodiversity.
    In becoming gardeners we will reconsider our connection to the land, what we take from it, and what we put in it. Each yard will be a unique expression of its location and of the inhabitant and his or her desires.
 
 
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