Johann Hari: The three fallacies of the Afghan War, Connect the Dots

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-three-fallacies-that-have-driven-the-war-in-afghanistan-1806191.html

The three fallacies that have driven the war in Afghanistan

Case for escalating the war is based on premises that turn to dust on
inspection.

"You blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders.
but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day
determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country."

By Johann Hari
The IndependentUK: October 21, 2009

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn
with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision
about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops
have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First
and Second World Wars combined - yet the mutterings from the marble halls of
Washington DC suggest he may order a troop escalation.

Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and the
Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a small
military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The populations of
both countries are in close agreement. The latest Washington Post poll shows
that 51 per cent of Americans say the war is "not worth fighting" and that
ending the foreign occupation will "reduce terrorism". Only 27 per cent
disagree. At the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the
latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are "unacceptable", and the
US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction
assistance rather than bombs.

But there is another side: General Stanley McCrystal says that if he is
given another 40,000 troops - on top of the current increase which has
pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years - he will "finally
win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

How should Obama - and us, the watching world - figure out who is right? We
have to start from a hard-headed acknowledgement. Every option from here
entails a risk - to Afghan civilians, and to Americans and Europeans. It is
not possible to achieve absolute safety. We can only try to figure out what
would bring the least risk, and pursue it.

There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun
wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas
of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and
establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central
government at any point in their history.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability
that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a
suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders - but you also kill
98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill
your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical
numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus'
counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the
Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of
more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on
98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox
that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you
have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to
drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to
Pakistan - where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly
persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so
dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable - but
I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for
continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan
dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan,
or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11
redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries
have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required
extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11
atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed
to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders
were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs
off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow
up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and
on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's
not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security
Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan.
That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor
is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to
them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build
all the "training camps" they want there - but they have only found a
hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

Even if - and this is highly unlikely - you could plug every hole in the
Afghan state's authority and therefore make it possible to shut down every
camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can scuttle off to the next
day and pitch some more tents. Again, that's not my view. Leon Panetta, head
of the CIA, says: "As we disrupt [al-Qa'ida], they will seek other safe
havens. Somalia and Yemen are potential al-Qa'ida bases in the future." The
US can't occupy every failed state in the world for decades - so why
desperately try to plug one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water
will only seep out anyway?

There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan - but they are a
different matter to al-Qa'ida. The latest leaked US intelligence reports
say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them are "a tribal,
localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is
an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human
rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument - and
the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the
world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes"
of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They
keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being
elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not
cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the
fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of
warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely
been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now
is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any
Afghan president - Karzai, or his opponents - will only ever in practice be
the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as
Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida.
Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November
2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is
to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise
a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals
race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political
losses - without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he
said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt
America". They walked right into his trap.

Yes, there is real risk in going - but it is dwarfed by the risk of staying.
A bloody escalation in the war is more likely to fuel jihadism than thwart
it. If Obama is serious about undermining this vile fanatical movement, it
would be much wiser to take the hundreds of billions he is currently
squandering on chasing after a hundred fighters in the Afghan mountains and
redeploy it. Spend it instead on beefing up policing and intelligence, and
on building a network of schools across Pakistan and other flash-points in
the Muslim world, so parents there have an alternative to the fanatical
madrassahs that churn out bin Laden-fodder. The American people will be far
safer if the world sees them building schools for Muslim kids instead of
dropping bombs on them.

He can explain - with his tongue dipped in amazing eloquence - that trying
to defeat al-Qa'ida with hundreds of thousands of occupying troops and
Predator jets is like trying to treat cancer with a blowtorch. Now, that
really would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

***

From: Lgartt@aol.com
Subject: Lila Garrett's Connect the Dots on KPFK FM 7 to 8AM Monday

Monday Oct. 28th @ 7 Am to 8 on Connect the Dots in LA 90.7, 98.7 in Santa
Barbara 98.7 or log on to:
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/index.php?shokey=ctd

British Journalist Wayne Brittenden will discuss the decline of the English
Labor Party and the re-emergence of the right wing Tories. Is this a sign
of things to come worldwide including the United States?

The cost-of-living freeze on Social Security will hit its recipients hard.
Why is there no money for the Seniors and the disabled, but billions for
Wall St bailouts and war?

Congressional Candidate Marcy Winograd explains the real cost to those who
depend on Social Security and how the SS fund is being used to help pay for
war.

And we keep being assured that the our war on Afghanistan is protecting its
women. Is that true or is the opposite happening? A young Afghan woman
using the name "Zoya" will tell us the real story of life for women under
American occupation. That's Monday morning,
7 to 8AM on Connect the Dots.

Lila Garrett (Host of CONNECT THE DOTS)
KPFK 90.7 FM in LA; 98.7 Santa Barbara
Airs Mondays from 7AM to 8AM.
To pod cast or download the broadcast just use this link:
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/index.php?shokey=ctd
Each show is on line for three months.

The Country That Cries Wolf, Polls, Resistance on the Beach

Hi. At the bottom is the schedule of tomorrow's event at Arlington West.
Weather permitting, it should provide music, poetry, ideas and community
for a fine afternoon at the beach. Kids will love Get Lit and the drums.
Roy too. He's funny.
-Ed

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091022_the_country_that_cries_wolf/

The Country That Cries Wolf

By William Pfaff
Truthdig: October 22, 2009

PARIS-Philip Gordon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and
Eurasia, visited his European clients earlier this month to ask for more
European cooperation. The United States has elected a president all but
universally admired in Western Europe's most influential circles. If they
like the man so much, why is there not more enthusiasm for the Obama
administration's foreign policy? Where are more European NATO troops to
fight the Taliban and keep al-Qaida from making a return? "Europe," Gordon
said, "is as vulnerable as we are, if not more so."

At this point, most of his European auditors have probably tuned out.
Vulnerable to what? He said that "since the 11th of September [2001] Europe
has been struck more often than the United States by terrorists who have
their refuge in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

It is true there have been more bombings or attempted bombings in Western
Europe since 9/11 than in the United States (where there have been none).
But neither al-Qaida nor Taliban from Afghanistan have committed them. The
bombings have mostly been the work of estranged Muslims who live in Europe,
with grievances of their own.

The only successful terrorist bombings in France during the past
quarter-century were carried out by Algerian Islamist sympathizers to punish
France for keeping up relations with an Algerian military government then
attempting-by brutal measures-to put down an even more brutal Islamic
fundamentalist campaign indiscriminately killing Algerian civilians. This
was long before anyone outside security circles had heard of al-Qaida.

The Madrid train bombings and the attacks on the London Underground were
copycat affairs inspired by 9/11, but according to security and police
sources were local affairs having nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and his
friends residing in the Afghanistan badlands.

What was Gordon talking about? The Bush administration liked to admonish the
Europeans that they were in greater danger than the United States from
attack by Iranian nuclear missiles-if there were any. This was in the
context of the Polish-Czech anti-missile systems that also, at the time, did
not exist and were planned to counter Iranian nuclear missiles. This was
assuming that one day there would be Iranian nuclear missiles that the
Iranians would be disposed to use to attack Europe, for reasons presently
unknown.

This is the problem people like Philip Gordon meet during these thankless
missions to Europe to urge the Europeans to send more troops to support the
United States in Iraq (yesterday), Afghanistan (today), and (I fear)
Pakistan or Somalia or Kashmir tomorrow. They are working inside Never-Never
Land strategic schemes based on implausible assumptions and hypothetical
threats and responses.

First, after 9/11 it was the invasion of Afghanistan the allies were
supposed to support. To attack al-Qaida's base, and try to seize its leaders
and members, was perfectly justified. But why did the Taliban regime and
army have to be subjected to slaughter by B-52s, and why did Afghanistan's
government have to be handed back, amid profuse international professions of
good will, to what proved to be essentially the same conditions of disorder
and warlordism that prevailed after the Soviet defeat?

Next, everyone was supposed to join the invasion of Iraq to seize the
weapons of mass destruction that were said to have threatened international
peace but proved not to exist. There is no need to go on. But it doesn't
require great perspicacity to understand why the European allies have tired
of the cries of "wolf! wolf!" regularly heard from Washington.

The British respond because since 1944 such has been the cold and calculated
policy of the Foreign Office: Humor the Americans. Susceptible prime
ministers like Tony Blair fall for White House glamour. The Foreign Office
doesn't, nor does the War Office (now politically corrected to Ministry of
Defense), responsible for supplying the human price that has to be paid. The
Danes and the Dutch usually step up to the plate (to use the idiom
increasingly heard from Europeans). Other West Europeans are inclined to
think twice, or thrice.

The "new Europeans" have gone along because they have an engrained fear of
Russia, and the United States seems the only source of available protection.
They don't trust Western Europe.

Officials such as Philip Gordon regularly travel to Europe to ask for
support for U.S. initiatives. The Europeans reply that they have not been
consulted in making these policies. The Americans say we will be happy to
discuss them, but we are putting up most of the men and money, so it's too
late to change anything. Maybe next time.

Visit William Pfaff's Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

***

http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/10/22/post-poll-public-evenly-split-on-afghan-escalation/

WP Poll: Public Evenly Split on Afghan Escalation?

by Peter Hart
F.A.I.R.: 10/22/2009

"U.S. Deeply Split on Troop Increase for Afghan War" is the headline on the
Washington Post's October 21 report about its latest polling on Afghanistan.

The paper reports that "Americans are evenly and deeply divided" over
sending 40,000 extra troops: "47 percent of those polled favor the buildup,
while 49 percent oppose it."

If you've followed polling on this question, these results are
striking--most recent surveys show the public is deeply troubled by the war
and opposed to sending more troops. The most recent CNN survey
(10/16-18/09), to take one example, found 39 percent support for sending
more troops, and 59 opposed to that idea.

So who did the Post get those results? They've been asking questions about
troop buildup in their other polls, but for this one they changed the
wording of the question to this:

U.S. military commanders have requested approximately 40,000 more U.S.
troops for Afghanistan. Do you think Obama should or should not order these
additional forces to Afghanistan?

It's very likely that including references to "military commanders" and
Obama skew the responses to the question--as has been noted, Obama tends to
poll better than his policies do. One of the Post's recent polls
(8/13-17/09) on Afghanistan was more neutrally worded:

Do you think the number of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan should be
increased, decreased or kept about the same?

The result then: 24 percent favored an increase, 45 percent favored a
decrease, 27 percent supported keeping troop levels the same. This led the
Post to report the results of that poll under the headline, "Public Opinion
in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War."

So did the Post change the wording of the poll to get a different outcome?
Or did public opinion just dramatically reverse course in two months? The
latter seems implausible.

Tags: Afghanistan, polling, Washington Post

***

This Sunday, October 25th, Ash Grove Music and Beyond
November present "Resistance Then, Resist Now," an all
free afternoon of entertainment and dialogue on war,
recruitment, poverty and opportunities lost. We are pleased
to join with Arlington West, the long-running war memorial
for this event.

Famed veteran and peace activist Ron Kovic will MC, and
Featured artists include teenage wizards of poetry, the Get Lit
Players / musical satirist Roy Zimmerman and the SHINE
Mawusi Womens Drum Aliance.

We will hear from The Resistance, the Coalition Against
Militarization in our Schools, and others. Our latest additions:
Maricela Guzman of the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee)
will speak from the perspective of being a vet who became a C.O. during
her military time, and knows many others who share that transformation.

As a current student at CSULA, she'll also speak of the effect of the
War and the military budget on herself and many other students..

Art Goldberg was a student leader in 1960's UC Berkeley's Free Speech
Movement, and hasn't stopped since. He founded the Echo Park Workers
Law Center, has organized for peace and Justice continually and is now
a spokesperson for the Single Payer movement. Warfare vs. Healthcare.

Bring your drum or shaker for our drum circle. Adaawe, reknowned
Women's drum group will join SHINE Mawusi for this event.

It all begins 2 PM on the sand next to the Arlington West monument,
just North of the Santa Monica Pier. Be a part of this moving moment---
Resistance then, Resist now! at Arlington West this Sunday, October 25th.

For information, www.AshgroveMusic.com

KPFK is a Proud Media Sponsor.

Schedule for Sun, Oct. 25

1pm Tour of monument for early-comers
2pm SHINE Mawusi Drumming (no intro)
2:20 S. Pearl back intro, intro's Harriet, AG Secretary
2:25 Harriet intro's show, intro's Ron Kovic
2:30 Ron Kovic speaks, intro's Joe Mazlish
2:40 Joe, on The Resistance, intro's Michael Lindley
2: 47 Michael Lindley, Pres.of Vets for Peace on Arlington West
2:52 Letter from marine in Iraq
2:57 C.A.M.S. (Coalition for Alternatives to Militarization of Schools)
3:05 S. Pearl intro's Get Lit Players
3:07 Get Lit Players
3:30 Harriet Pitches as David Collects, INTERMISSION
3:50 Roy Zimmerman, Musician
4:15 Ron K intro's Gordon Alexandre, History Prof, Union Pres.
4:20 Gordy speaks, intro's Marisela, Art
4:30 Marisela Guzman, student
4:35 Art Goldberg, Healthcare, not Warfare
4:45 Drum Circle. then tour of monument
5:? Help Vets for Peace pack up the monument.

Why Obama Must Refuse to Pay Hush Money, Wed. 10.28 Healthcare Demo

http://www.alternet.org/story/143351/why_obama_has_to_do_what_letterman_did:_refuse_to_pay_hush_money

Why Obama Has to do What Letterman Did: Refuse to Pay Hush Money

By Robert Reich,
Robert Reich's Blog. October 20, 2009.

The former labor secretary says that by buying off Big Pharma in return for
its support on health-care reform, the president has succumbed to blackmail.

Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big
insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what
Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups
agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as
they were paid off.

But now that it's time to collect, the bill is larger than the White House
expected, and it's going to fall like an avalanche on middle class Americans
in coming years. That could mean an ugly 2012 election (read Sarah Palin).

So the President has to do what Letterman did: Refuse to pay.

Big Pharma is on the road to getting its deal: not only 25 to 30 million
more paying customers, but also a continued ban on Medicare using its
bargaining clout to reduce drug prices, a bar on genetic drug manufacturers
introducing similar biologic drugs until the originals have been on the
market at least twelve years, and no public insurance option to negotiate
low drug prices. (Big Pharma did agree to $80 billion of cost cuts over the
next ten years, to be sure, but its hush money payoffs far exceeded that
sum.)

Big insurance is well on the way to getting what it wants: 25 to 30 million
more paying customers (many of them young and healthy), a requirement that
almost all businesses "pay or play," and no competition from a public
option.

Doctors (that is, the American Medical Association) are on the way to
getting what they want: Instead of a temporary patch on scheduled decreases
in Medicare reimbursements to them, a permanent fix that would change the
reimbursement formula altogether and reward them $240 billion over the next
ten years.

But when they all get paid off, who will do the paying? Middle-class
Americans who are already in a financial squeeze -- whose wages are lower,
adjusted for inflation, than they were thirty years ago, and whose jobs are
disappearing. They'll face still higher premiums, co-payments, and
deductibles; and they'll pay higher drug prices, Medicare premiums, and
taxes to cover the rest.

That's because these payoffs make it next to impossible to contain the
wildly escalating costs of health care. And 25 to 30 million additional
Americans will be covered.

The only thing in the emerging bills that's related to cost containment is a
proposed excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" insurance plans, priced over a
certain threshold amount (the threshold is now up for grabs). But because
the costs of health care are likely to rise faster than inflation, whatever
the threshold, the middle class will get socked again.

So Obama has to forcefully weigh in with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as the
two try to cobble together passable bills for each chamber -- demanding real
cost containment.

The three big means of containing costs: (1) A true public option (better
yet, one that allows anyone now holding private insurance to opt into; (2)
authority for Medicare to negotiate low drug prices; and (3) lower Medicare
reimbursement rates to doctors (in other words, no "doctor fix").

In addition, the so-called "medical exchanges" in the emerging bills (as
well as the public option, which hopefully will be included) should give
preference to pre-paid heathcare plans, like Kaiser Permanente, whose
doctors are on salary and have every incentive to keep people healthy rather
than charge for more services and tests.

But if Obama doesn't weigh in forcefully and say "no" to the hush money for
Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America's middle class will get
walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other
right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama. And after she or he wallops
Obama, America will get walloped even worse.

***

From: Anthony Saidy
To: Ed Pearl
Subject: Healthcare for All WEDNESDAY 10/28 Los Angeles

Dear Anthony,

It was amazing to see such a spirited turnout at our Oct. 15th Health Care
Sit-in. You saw Democracy in Action, now we're asking you to become part of
that action and make MEDICARE FOR ALL a reality! Our next Sit-In will take
place on Wednesday, October 28, 10am - Noon, with our strategic LOCATION TBA
next week.

To hear inspiring words from Sam Pullen, who stayed in jail for 5 days after
our Sit-in go here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/20/in_his_mothers_footsteps_california_man

My name is Laura Flanagan and I will be coordinating the sit-in in Los
Angeles on October 28. I am a volunteer organizer with the Center for the
Working Poor, which specializes in coordinating non-violent civil
disobedience actions and is one of the initiating groups for the HealthCare
For All campaign.

If you are willing to risk arrest , want to learn more before making that
decision, or want to protest in another capacity please join us at one of
our upcoming Action planning & Non-violence training sessions. I was
arrested for the first time last Thursday as part of the LA 12. It was a
decision that came with many emotions attached. But as we chanted 'This is
what Democracy looks like!' I knew it was what Democracy looks like. AND
what it feels like...and that feeling is GOOD.

We have three Action planning & Non-violence training sessions before Oct.
28th, we'd love for you to attend one or more. We will discuss, create,
implement and train for the following needs:

* Non-violence Sit-in training: In most cases, being arrested in an act of
nonviolent civil disobedience is a safe but challenging experience. Because
the police can't always be counted on to be reasonable and we may face thing
we didn't predict, it's important to prepare to minimize risk and
discomfort. We will go over what to expect and how to prepare.

* Non-violence Rally Monitors: help us maintain our mission of non-violence
by volunteering as crowd wranglers and police/crowd liaisons.

* Legal Support point person: work with our legal team as our person on the
outside once arrests have been made. Collect information & belongings of our
brothers and sisters who are arrested. Stay in contact with the legal team
and local organizer as to the current status of those arrested.

* Media Relations volunteers: prep participants on talking points & for
interviews; adapt & distribute press releases; make pitch calls to press;
sign-in and reach out to press at action; record action and create indy
documentaries to promote the cause, etc

* Action Volunteers: help create banners, posters, etc leading up to Oct.
28th. Legal protest volunteers will lead the rally in chants and songs once
the Sit-in has begun.

* Mobilization Volunteers: this is something we all can do by telling
everyone you know! But we need a few key volunteers to call people who have
already expressed an interest in joining our movement.

ACTION PLANNING & NON-VIOLENCE TRAINING SESSIONS:

Saturday, October 24th from 10am-Noon at the Center for the Working Poor:
1289 Bellevue Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90026.

Monday, October 26th from 6-8pm at the Plaza Methodist Church on Olvera
Street near Union Station in Downtown LA. A change from previous meetings at
this church, the action prep will take place in the basement, which you
access from the west side of the church building. The easiest way to arrive
during rush hour is to take the metro to Union Station and then walk across
the street to the Methodist Church. If you are driving, there is a parking
lot at the corner of N. Los Angeles Street and Arcadia St. off Alameda.

Please join us even if you are just thinking about doing the sit-in or want
to support it. Invite your friends, or anyone that is interested to show up
to a non-violence training as soon as you can. If you cannot make the
training, just call me or email me, and I will update you with action
details.
It is urgent that we send this message to everyone we know who wants to
change our broken health care system. Forward this message to everyone you
know, and encourage them to sign the pledge at www.MobilizeforHealthCare.org

Medicare For All!
Laura Flanagan
Organizer - Mobilize For Healthcare For All
www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org
leflanagan@hotmail.com
C 305.542.3570

Progressive Democrats of America is a grassroots PAC that works both inside
the Democratic Party and outside in movements for peace and justice. Our
goal: Elect a permanent, progressive majority in 2008. PDA's advisory board
includes seven members of Congress and activist leaders such as Tom Hayden,
Medea Benjamin, Thom Hartmann, Jim Hightower and Lila Garrett.
More info: pdamerica.org | Find California PDA Chapters and Events

Spread the Progressive Word--Shop PDAstore!

Scheer: The Year's Biggest Hoax, Flanders: GOP Nuts Throw ACORN From a Glass House

Hi. Article #2 is essentially an expansion of Peter Drier's major article
on ACORN in yesterday's LA Times. The hubub has died down enough
for people to read and evaluate other positions on the subject.

And, for kpfk listeners, I'll be on Sonali Kolhatkar's show, 8 AM today,
along with Joe Maizlish, one of the original draft and war 'Resistors,'
talking about our Sunday beach event at Arlington West. With a more
artistic sampling, the Get Lit Players and S. Pearl Sharp will be on
the Pocho Tower of Power, at 4 PM, 90.7 fm. Ron Kovic, too!

Ed

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091021_zooming_in_on_the_years_biggest_hoax/

Zooming In on the Year's Biggest Hoax

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: October 20th, 2009

Who are these people? I am not referring to the pathetic parents of "Balloon
Boy," whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill
this week, thanks to my gym's insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to
Wolf Blitzer's nonstop self-parody.

The Colorado incident was significant only in the tawdriness of those who
perpetrated the made-for-TV scam and their allies in the mindless media who
covered this sham "reality" so relentlessly. But even so it was enough to
push aside most consideration of the true hoax reported last week with far
less fervor: the obscene rewards that Wall Street bankers bestowed upon
themselves for ripping off our economy.

The people I want to know more about are the superrich who expect to be
rewarded for their failures, like the folks at Goldman Sachs who will
receive $16.71 billion in bonuses-an average of $530,000 per employee-this
year after their company did as much as any to bring the world economy to
the brink of disaster.

"The Guys from Goldman Sachs" is what The New York Times once called them in
recognition of their chokehold on the federal government. Their power is
marked by the two treasury secretaries who led the fight to legally enable
and then reward Wall Street for its obscene excesses. Why wasn't there a CNN
stakeout at the homes of former Goldman-execs-turned-treasury-chiefs Robert
Rubin and Henry Paulson aimed at finding out how they feel about the almost
$7 billion profit that Goldman Sachs made in the last two quarters in the
wake of the government's bailout of the firm?

They were both deeply involved last fall, along with Rubin protégé and
current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed,
in saving Goldman as archrival Lehman Brothers was forced to go belly up. As
opposed to Lehman, Goldman was allowed to change its status and become a
commercial bank qualifying for Federal Reserve and TARP funding. Goldman
received $10 billion in immediate bailout funds, and we are supposed to be
grateful that the company has paid it back in return for an end to any
pretense of government control over its executive compensation. The
additional cool $12.9 billion that Goldman received from the government as a
pass-through from the bailout of AIG to cover Goldman's toxic paper is money
the investment bank has no intention of ever paying back.

The rationale for saving Goldman and the other too-big-to-fail usurers was
that the rescue would increase lending to businesses and consumers and thus
revive the economy. But Goldman made money last quarter by shunning such
loans and instead putting the government-guaranteed low-interest money it
now can borrow toward acquisitions and bond and stock trading. As The New
York Times reported: "Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are
making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than the
ho-hum business of lending people money."

Under the headline "Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth,"
Times reporter Graham Bowley detailed many of the enabling favors that the
government, under two presidents, extended to Goldman, like clearing the way
for the company to issue bonds guaranteed by the FDIC. "It may come as a
surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall
Street," the Times reported, "is not the banks but Washington. Many of the
steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial
system-reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with
taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institution
debts-helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth."

It should not come as a surprise to Timothy Geithner, who, as The Wall
Street Journal reported last week, talks to the honchos of Goldman more
often than to members of Congress ostensibly in charge of banking
legislation. Nor will it shock the lobbyists for Wall Street-augmented, as
The Nation reported last week, by the pro-Goldman efforts of former
Democratic congressman and faux populist Dick Gephardt-that the rich will
emerge richer from this deep recession in which so many Americans have lost
everything. The die is cast: People working in finance grabbed two-thirds of
the growth in GDP, with the rest of us scrambling for the other third.

Nor will the situation change anytime soon. The House Financial Services
Committee is in charge of writing new rules to protect consumers, but as the
respected Sunlight Foundation reports, 27 of the 71 members of that
committee receive at least one-fourth of their campaign funds from the
financial industry, with the rest of the committee members not far behind.

Now if we could get one of the banking lobbyists to float a duct-taped
flying saucer balloon, Wolf Blitzer might cover the real hoax.

***

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/25-1

GOP Nuts Throw ACORN From a Glass House

by Laura Flanders
Grit TV : September 25, 2009

Continuing the GOP's attack on the poor people's organizing group ACORN, the
House this month passed by a wide margin a provision that would bar ACORN
from receiving any federal funding. Every House Republican voted 'aye' as
well as 172 Democrats. Only 75 Democrats opposed it. Soon the Senate, which
has already -- by a 83 to 7 margin -- barred ACORN from receiving federal
housing grants, is considering its own complete ban measure.

Let's hope they enjoy their gloat and then get right back to business.

The legislation they passed in all their rush, you see, is written so
broadly that it just comes in very handy.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D of Florida) has already asked the Project on Government
Oversight (POGO) to find out which other contractors might be caught in the
ACORN net.

Abuse of federal funds -- Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are top of
the list, with 20 fraud cases between them. And where those military
contractors go, the cash for killers -- Blackwater can't be far behind. And
then there's Halliburton and the magically disappeared federal cash for
troop services and Iraq reconstruction.

Recipients of the $750 billion financial bailout program known as TARP are
bound to show up. Earlier this year, federal investigators said they had
opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax violations,
insider trading and other crimes.

If the GOP can get this hot and bothered over the $50 million ACORN's
supposed to have received from the federal government -- over the past 15
years -- I can hardly wait to see how outraged they'll be about the BILLIONS
received by banks in the blink of a brokers' eyelid.

Not to be left out, among the bankers, brokers, death merchants and liars,
let's not forget the child molesters...

Several faith based groups, recipients of federal grants, currently stand
accused of misspending that cash on covering up child molesting clergy.

To name just one: Catholic Charities -- in at least two cities Catholic
Charities stands accused of using federal funds to settle or cover up sex
abuse charges. But that didn't stop Catholic Charities from receiving a
federal government contract this August for $100 million to work with
victims of natural disasters.

This could all get very interesting very fast. I just can't wait. Lou Dobbs,
Glenn Beck. Who's going to be first with the outrage?

© 2009 Grit TV
Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on Free
Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) on cable (8 pm ET on Channel 67 in
Manhattan) and online daily at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com.

Hedges: A Reality Check, Tonight: CodePink, Zoya, Eve Ensler

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23755.htm#

A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction

By Chris Hedges

October 19, 2009 "Truthdig" -- We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in
nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption
of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can
install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But
unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as
ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to
protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.

"If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won't be
anything left," author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me
when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. "If all we
do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but
not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this
culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the
industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet.
Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the
planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to
stop this."

The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons
manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive
industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction.
They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not
significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard
and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to
cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by
organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is
a social problem. It requires a social response.

The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to
increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European
Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent.
But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal
in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto.
Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by
binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide
how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring.
And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized
nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries
the same. It is a huge step backward.

"All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial
capitalism as a given," said Jensen, who wrote "Endgame" and "The Culture of
Make Believe." "The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial
capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What's
real is real. Any social system-it does not matter if we are talking about
industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people-their way of life, is
dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you
don't have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you
start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life.
How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are
within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship
with? We have forgotten what is real."

The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate
and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This
does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of
sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing
a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will
dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly
melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along
the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than
carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge
quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human
species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as
Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a
new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and
flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be
suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.

We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up
rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged
would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and
environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an
excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting
the power of corporations.

The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to
the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10
percent of the nation's water while the other 90 percent is consumed by
agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for
about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed
by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste
production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but
it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic
structure of the industrial world.

"If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap
you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because
your life depends on it," said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the
country called Deep Green Resistance [click here and here] to build a
militant resistance movement. "If your food comes from a land base and if
your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In
any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his
partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become
dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important
than life."

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation
as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are
responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of
our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile
industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species
are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from
coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge
parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James
Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater
than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with
maintenance of the biosphere on the "planet on which civilization developed
and to which life on earth is adapted." He has determined that the world
must stop burning coal by 2030-and the industrialized world well before
that-if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below
that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.

"We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is
killing the planet," Jensen said. "We need to get really serious. We are
talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil
infrastructure. I don't care, and the trees don't care, if we do this
through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a
bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12
hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much
destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger
Delta has been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to
stop the oil economy."

The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer
in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human
beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because
consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the
corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal
choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic
reform. We are left powerless.

Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian
anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were
not there to rescue the system.

"We think we are the doctors," Herzen said. "We are the disease."

***

CODEPINK Presents

An Event Tonight with Zoya

"Resisting the U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan"
With
Eve Ensler, Rick Reyes & Jodie Evans

Thursday, October 22nd - 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Venice United Methodist Church - Peace Hall
1020 Victoria Avenue, Venice 90291

Featuring Zoya, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA), Afghan war veteran Rick Reyes, CODEPINK co-founder Jodie
Evans & playwright, performer & V-Day founder Eve Ensler.

Suggested Donation of $10
*No One Turned Away For Lack of Funds

For more information, please contact Whitney:
whitneycodepink@gmail.com - (310) 827-4320

See and buy treasures brought back from Afghanistan!

For more information and to RSVP, follow this link:
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=5369

*In lieu of monetary donation, bring pairs of new or gently used shoes for
Friday's "Walk In Our Shoes" protest, to be donated to local shelters.

R. Goldstone: Israel's missed opportunity, Resistance then, Resist Now!

From: The RAIN Newsletter

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/21/goldstone-report-israel-gaza-war-crimes-un

Israel's missed opportunity

My mission was determined to investigate war crimes in Gaza fairly. The
Israeli government was wrong to shut us out

By Richard Goldstone
guardian.co.uk: 21 October 2009 10.30 BST

Five weeks after the release of the report of the fact-finding mission on
Gaza, there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with
its substance. It has been fulsomely approved by those whose interests it is
thought to serve and rejected by those of the opposite view. Those who
attack it do so too often by making personal attacks on its authors' motives
and those who approve it rely on its authors' reputations.

Israeli government spokesmen and those who support them have attacked it in
the harshest terms and, in particular my participation, in a most personal
and hurtful way. The time has now come for more sober reflection on what the
report means and appropriate Israeli reactions to it.

I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its
people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the
past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law
in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the
alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of
countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq oil-for-food programme.

In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In
every instance, I spoke out strongly in favour of full investigations and,
where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years
on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights
violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran,
Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and
conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate
serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the
context of Operation Cast Lead.

As a Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well
documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and
received an even-handed mandate to investigate all sides, and that is what
we sought to do.

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the
mission's mandate we would receive the co-operation of the Israeli
government. Its refusal to co-operate was a grave error. My plea for
co-operation was repeated before and during the investigation, and it sits,
plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually
bother to read it.

Our mission obviously could only consider and report on what it saw, heard
and read. If the government of Israel failed to bring facts and analyses to
our attention, we cannot fairly be blamed for the consequences. Those who
feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents
or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its
cause.

Israel missed a golden opportunity to actually have a fair hearing from a
UN-sponsored inquiry. Of course, I was aware of and have frequently spoken
out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and
especially by the human rights council.

I did so again last week. Israel could have seized the opportunity provided
by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a
new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were
shut out.

As I stated in response to a recent letter from the mayor of Sderot, I
believed strongly that our mission should have been allowed to visit Sderot
and other parts of southern Israel that have been at the receiving end of
unlawful attacks by many thousands of rockets and mortars fired at civilian
targets by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza. We were prevented from
doing so by, what I believe, was a misguided decision by the Israeli
government.

In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I
had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted
civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast
destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its
agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works.
These are not military targets. I have not heard or read any government
justification for this destruction.

Of course the children of Sderot and the children of Gaza have the same
rights to protection under international law, and that is why,
notwithstanding the decision of the government of Israel, we took whatever
steps were open to us to obtain information from victims and experts in
southern Israel about the effects on their lives of sustained rocket and
mortar attacks over a period of years. It was on the strength of those
investigations that we held those attacks to constitute serious war crimes
and possibly crimes against humanity.

The refusal of co-operation by the government of Israel did not prevent us
from reacting positively to a request from Gilad Shalit's father to speak
personally to our mission at its public session in Geneva. No one who heard
his evidence could fail to have been moved by the unspeakable pain of a
parent whose young son was being held for over three years in unlawful
circumstances without any contact with the outside world and not even
allowed visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The
mission called for his release.

Israel and its courts have always recognised that they are bound by norms of
international law that it has formally ratified or that have become binding
as customary international law upon all nations. The fact that the United
Nations and too many members of the international community have unfairly
singled out Israel for condemnation and failed to investigate horrible human
rights violations in other countries cannot make Israel immune from the very
standards it has accepted as binding upon it.

Israel has a strong history of investigating allegations made against its
own officials reaching to the highest levels of government: the inquiries
into the Yom Kippur war, Sabra and Shatila, Bus 300 and the second Lebanon
war.

Israel has an internationally renowned and respected judiciary that should
be envy of many other countries in the region. It has the means and ability
to investigate itself. Has it the will?

***

This Sunday, October 25th, Ash Grove Music and Beyond
November present "Resistance Then, Resist Now," an all
free afternoon of entertainment and dialogue on war,
recruitment, poverty and opportunities lost. We are pleased
to join with Arlington West, the long-running war memorial
for this event.

Famed veteran and peace activist Ron Kovic will MC, and
Featured artists include teenage wizards of poetry, the Get Lit
Players / musical satirist Roy Zimmerman and the SHINE
Mawusi Womens Drum Aliance.

We will hear from The Resistance, the Coalition Against
Militarization in our Schools, Veterans For Peace, and others.

Our latest additions:

Maricela Guzman of the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee)
will speak from the perspective of being a vet who became a C.O. during
her military time, and knows many others who share that transformation.
As a current student at CSULA, she'll also speak of the effect of the
War and the military budget on herself and many other students..

Art Goldberg was a student leader in 1960's UC Berkeley's Free Speech
Movement, and hasn't stopped since. He founded the Echo Park Working
Peoples Law Center, has organized for peace and Justice continually, now
a spokesperson for the Single Payer movement. Warfare vs. Healthcare.

Bring your drum or shaker for our drum circle.

It all begins 2 PM on the sand next to the Arlington West monument,
just North of the Santa Monica Pier. Be a part of this moving moment---
Resistance then, Resist now! at Arlington West this Sunday, October 25th.

For information, call 310-391-5974 or go to www.AshgroveMusic.com

KPFK is a Proud Media Sponsor.

Code Pink's more nuanced Afghanistan policy, TONIGHT: An Afghan Woman (Zoya) Speaks Out

Hi. This morning on KPFK's 'Uprising,' Sonali K interviewed
Zoya, the primary speaker in tonight's event, listed at the bottom
of this newsletter. She was incisive, informative and honest.
Tom Hayden, Rick Reyes and a film by Rbt. Greenwald fill the bill.
Check it out. -Ed

From: <moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=49766&tsp=1

Code Pink's more nuanced Afghanistan policy

By: Joe Garofoli
SF Gate/SF Chronicle Blogsite: October 20, 2009

As throngs of protesters from across the political spectrum churned outside
President Obama's San Francisco fundraiser Thursday, one of San Francisco's
best-known anti-war activists, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, was in
Washington having just returned from a week in Afghanistan.

She returned from her fourth trip to Afghanistan since the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks with a perspective on the U.S. war in Afghanistan that's a
bit more nuanced than the sign she and her fellow activists carry: "Bring
the troops home now."

Now, she faces the same challenge that divides Obama's liberal supporters
and has baffled invading armies for centuries: Realizing there are no easy
answers in Afghanistan.

She and Code Pink still strongly oppose increasing troop levels. (Obama is
now weighing the recommendation of top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, to add 40,000 troops). And the organization believes the
U.S. should increase its role in peace talks there and "get serious" about
training Afghan security forces.

If 90 percent of what the U.S. spends on its Afghanistan effort is devoted
to military forces and the rest to diplomatic and economic outreach,
Benjamin would like to see that ratio reversed.

But while she was there with a Code Pink entourage Sept. 27 - Oct. 6, native
Afghans told them that they don't want the U.S. to pull out immediately.
Women, especially, fear that would hasten a return of the Taliban.

"Women want to be involved in the peace talks," she said. "Any talks with
the Taliban without women would be disastrous because they would just
compromise women's rights further."

While Afghans told Benjamin that they don't want U.S. forces in the city
centers, "they want them in their bases, as sort of a deterrent" to further
attacks or guarding the Pakistan border.

"Yes, it's time for a new strategy, but they didn't think that more troops
was the answer," she said. "When they see U.S. troops, they are afraid of
the guns and the troops and they feel that the troops are magnets for more
attacks."

While Benjamin's core "Bring the troops home" mantra hasn't changed, it has
become more complicated.

"What I was left feeling is that I don't know what would be a realistic
timeline without first coming up with the exit plan," she said. Before she
went there, "I felt that troops should start coming home now."

"My position hasn't been changed. But I feel now I have a better
understanding from the many people we spoke to that an exit strategy has to
have several components to it. The sooner there is a commitment to come
home, the faster that peace talks can happen."

She feels Obama has been backed into a "disastrous" political corner now
that McChrystal's proposal for a troop increase is public.

"Now it pushes him into a corner of being labeled as not supporting the
commanders on the ground," she said, "which is a very vulnerable position
for him to be in."

***

<http://www.alternet.org/world/143340/codepink_founder_jodie_evans>_

CodePink Founder Jodie Evans Challenges Obama Up Close and Personal on His
Afghanistan Policy

By Don Hazen,
AlterNet: October 17, 2009.

Armed with the signatures of thousands of Afghan women asking him not to
send more troops, Evans told Obama that women must have a seat at the
negotiating table.

Everyone in the universe by now knows that the progressive anti-war group
CodePink has plenty of chutzpah. But co-founder Jodie Evans really doesn't
mess around. She went straight to the top and challenged Barack Obama
face-to-face on his visit to San Francisco on Thursday night at a
high-priced fund raiser at the Westin St. Francis hotel.

Armed with the signatures of thousands of Afghan women who don't want Obama
to send more troops, and for the U.S. occupation to come to an end after a
reconciliation process, Evans had an intimate on-on-one with the president,
where she told him explicitly that women need to be at the table in any
negotiations to alter or end the war. She was wearing a pink shirt with "End
The Afghan Quagmire" written on it, and showed her sartorial splendor to
Obama.

Evans told me later that the evening at the Rain Forest Action Network
fundraiser at the Bentley Reserve that Obama was friendly and listened
carefully -- you can see in the video that he has his arm around her -- but
that he didn't quite get her message at first. According to Evans, when she
raised the issue of women and war, he said, "Well we have Hillary and the
Ambassador. And I said no, the Afghan women. And he said oh. "

How did Evans manage to have this little chat with the President? Well, the
old fashioned way. She paid for it. Realizing that they had an opportunity
to get through to the Commander-in-Chief unfiltered, a supporter forked over
$30,400 for two tickets to attend the super-intimate gathering, where only
the crème de la crème of big money donors were hanging with the president.

Earlier in the month, Evans recently visited Afghanistan over a ten-day
period along with a group of CodePink activists, and she was clear in a
recent AlterNet article about what she saw -- a humanitarian crisis: "The
United States has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars in eight years of
military action: what have we achieved? Most of the country is in worse
condition, the bordering countries are less stable and death fills the air.
According to the United Nations, Afghanistan is ranked 181 out of 182
countries for human development indices. Life expectancy has fallen to 43
years since the U.S. invasion. Forty percent of the population is
unemployed, and 42 percent live on less than $1 a day."

There is a schism among American feminist groups, where some -- particularly
Ms. Magazine and its parent group The Feminist Majority Foundation --
support escalation in Afghanistan as a strategy for protecting women's
rights. But many other women -- particularly activists like the women of
CodePink, who have a long anti-war history -- think that is a huge mistake
and insist that most of the women in Afghanistan do not want more military,
more war. It makes their lives even worse, if that is possible, while the
discredited President Karzai, whose re-election seems fatally tainted by
fraud and corruption and the warlords who control chunks of the countryside,
shows little interest in supporting women's rights -- a recent law
"explicitly legalizes marital rape as well as forcing women to dress and
make themselves up (while in the home, of course) according to their
husband's
demands, outlawing the ability to leave the home without a husband or a good
reason to do so, and automatically granting custody of children to the male
relatives (fathers or grandfathers)," according to an article posted on the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

In a recent CodePink video interview, Afghan Parliament member Roshanak
Wardak makes the position clear: "Most of the women do not want more
troops -- they need support to sustain their lives." The CodePink delegation
spoke with journalists, doctors, activists, NGOs, members of government and
average Afghan women. The main message they heard is they "want the U.S.
investment to reflect what is needed to bring peace. They need investment in
the people of Afghanistan."

"In truth, 90 percent of U.S. funding to Afghanistan is used for military;
only approximately 10 percent has been used for any kind of development."

Meanwhile, President Obama continues to deliberate over whether to send tens
of thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, while Vice President Biden
seems to be in an influential position to help resist military pressure for
escalation. Biden has been the leading skeptic in the administration toward
Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call for escalating the war with 40,000 more
troops. Biden's argument appears to be that the strategy should focus more
on taking out top Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan with drones and Special
Forces and shifting security responsibility to the Afghans. Time will tell
which of the arguments wins the day.

***

http://afghanwomensmission.org/index.php

An Afghan Woman (Zoya) Speaks Out Against the U.S. War

There Will Also be a Screening of "Rethink Afghanistan"
A Short Film by Robert Greenwald

Hosted by Sonali Kolhatkar of KPFK
Plus Tom Hayden & Rick Reyes

Wednesday, October 21st, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock
2225 Colorado Blvd. Los Angeles 90041

For more information call: 626-676-7884

As part of her major national speaking tour of the United States, Zoya, a
member of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), will
address two important events in Southern California this October. Coming to
California after an extensive tour of the East Coast, Zoya will share the
experiences of ordinary and struggling Afghans, how they are responding to
the US war, and whether or not the war should continue.

In addition to Zoya, acclaimed activist and writer Tom Hayden, and Afghan
war veteran Rick Reyes will speak. There will be a screening of a short
film, Rethink Afghanistan, and Afghan crafts for sale. This special event
will be hosted by Sonali Kolhatkar of KPFK.

Sponsored by Afghan Women's Mission, Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, Cafe
Intifada, and KPFK Radio. This event is wheelchair accessible.

Hi All,

Hope you can make it to this event in Los Angeles with Zoya, one of
the most incredible young women I have ever met. I will be hosting.

Please pass on the announcement

Thanks!

Sonali Kolhatkar
Host of Uprising on KPFK 90.7 FM Radio

www.uprisingradio.org

DN Interview: The Health-Insurance Industry, Antitrust and Drug Laws

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/20/congress_considers_revoking_health_insurance_industrys

Congress Considers Revoking Health Insurance Industry's Exemption from
Antitrust Laws

Democracy Now: October 20, 2009

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: We begin with a new battle that's emerged out of the
Democratic-led efforts for healthcare reform. Support is growing on Capitol
Hill to repeal a law that exempts the health insurance industry from
antitrust laws. Democrats say the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 has granted
the insurance industry a captive market with no curbs on price fixing and
other anti-competitive practices. Last week, the Justice Department's top
antitrust regulator, Christine Varney, voiced support for a repeal. Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are also backing a
repeal, and New York Senator Charles Schumer has called for including it as
part of the healthcare reform bill. The House Judiciary Committee plans to
vote on the issue on Wednesday.

In his weekly radio address, President Obama backed congressional scrutiny
of the law.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The fact is, the insurance industry is making this
last-ditch effort to stop reform even as costs continue to rise and our
healthcare dollars continue to be poured into their profits, bonuses and
administrative costs that do nothing to make us healthy-that often actually
go toward figuring out how to avoid covering people. And they're earning
these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exception from our
antitrust laws, a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on this story, we're joined from Washington, DC by
Ryan Grim. He's the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington
Post.

Welcome, Ryan, to Democracy Now! Can you just lay out what is being proposed
here?

RYAN GRIM: Sure. Right now, the insurance industry is one of the only
businesses that gets antitrust protection from the federal government. It's
basically them, Major League Baseball and National Football. It's kind of an
accident of history. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal
government could regulate insurance industries, and immediately Congress
stepped in and said, "Well, we're not going to do it." So, what they've been
able to do is set up these near monopolies throughout the United States.

The Department of Justice estimates that I think in 94 percent of the
country, there is a-what they call a highly concentrated market, which means
that it's in danger of becoming a monopoly or it has already tipped over
into a monopoly, and that allows insurers to collude legally with hospitals
and with doctors and other providers to set prices. They set high prices
that they pay to the hospitals, then they can raise premiums. And without
any competition, there's nothing that anybody can do about it, and it's
perfectly legal.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And why now is the support growing on Capitol Hill to
repeal the law?

RYAN GRIM: It's payback, pure and simple. There's been a kind of truce that
the Democrats have had with the insurance industry: you know, you guys don't
come out here with your Harry and Louise ads and just burn the town down,
and we'll give you, you know, 47 million new customers. But when the
insurance industry, about two weeks ago, came out with a report that was
very critical of reform, it was seen by the Obama administration and
Democrats on the Hill as a declaration of war, so Democrats came back with
what is their biggest weapon, probably, to shoot back at the insurance
industry.

It's strange that it took them so long to come up with this, because if
choice and competition, the mantra that you always hear from Obama, is
really the thing that you want here, then revoking the antitrust
exemption-protection is the first thing that you'd want to do, after the
public option, of course.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And shouldn't this have been part of healthcare
reform legislation in any case? Why is it only coming as retaliation for the
health insurance industry's report a couple weeks ago?

RYAN GRIM: It's kind of a nuclear issue. And so, if Democrats would have
brought it up in the very beginning and made it part of the early bill, then
the health insurance industry would have come guns blazing at healthcare
reform. And the Obama strategy from the very beginning was to try to at
least neuter, if not win over, the major healthcare players. That's why they
cut the big deals with PhRMA, with the medical device makers, with the
hospitals. They cut another deal with doctors today about their Medicare
cuts. So they've been trying to keep everybody at the table so that they
won't
blow up the process. And they feared that if they revoked this exemption
early in the process, that the health insurance industry would try to blow
it up, and maybe they would see it implode over August, and we wouldn't even
be talking about healthcare anymore. That was their strategy, at least.
Whether that's right or not, nobody knows. But now that they've come into
open war, you know, everything's on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite Obama's comments in his radio address, the White House
has refused to guarantee the President will back the repeal if it gets
congressional approval. One day after Obama's address, White House adviser
David Axelrod was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: The insurance industry for the last sixty years has
had an antitrust exemption. Was he saying that he would sign a bill that
would take that away and open the door to premium caps by the Congress?

DAVID AXELROD: Well, Congress is reviewing that. He said it's appropriate
that they review that. But let's talk about-

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Would he sign it, though?

DAVID AXELROD: Let's talk about the insurance industry for a second,
because most of the stakeholders in this healthcare debate are at the table.
They're trying to produce real reform, because everyone knows the current
system is unsustainable. The insurance industry has decided now at the
eleventh hour that they don't want to go along with this. One of the
problems we have is we have a healthcare system now that functions very well
for the insurance industry, but not well for their customers. So what we
need-

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So is he saying if they don't play ball, they're
going to lose their antitrust exemption?

DAVID AXELROD: -what we-so we need these-we need these reforms. In the
last year-in the last ten years, premiums have doubled. You've seen the
insurance companies take-ten years ago, fifteen years ago, they spent 95
percent of their premiums on healthcare, now 80 percent. More of the money
is going to bonuses, salaries, administrative costs. This is not a
sustainable path for this country. So we need reform, and that's what he is
arguing for.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But if they don't join the reform effort, will they
the lose their antitrust exemption?

DAVID AXELROD: Well, we'll see what Congress-we'll see what Congress does.
One thing we ought to do, the House bill has in it provisions that says that
if they fall below a certain level of return of these medical-loss ratios,
in other words, the amount of money that they spend on actual healthcare,
that they need to rebate some of that money to consumers. That seems like a
good idea.

AMY GOODMAN: That's David Axelrod on ABC with George Stephanopoulos. Ryan
Grim, do you think the repeal would actually happen?

RYAN GRIM: You know, it might. As Axelrod clearly stated there, it's a
nakedly political move that they're making. And as this battle intensifies,
if the insurance company ramps it up and Democrats are able to keep going
forward, then they might just do it.

You know, you're not going to hear it from the White House, because their
strategy all along has been to refuse to say what they want. And their
support among liberals and progressives in that Washington Post poll that
you mentioned is dropping, in terms of how strong Obama is being on
healthcare, because he refuses to say what he wants, and people up on
Capitol Hill are getting frustrated. They're saying, "Look, it's been months
now. Start demanding something. You know, tell us you want a public option.
Not only do you want it, but you're going to demand it. Tell us you want
this exemption through. Not only do you want it, but you're going to demand
it."

So it'll be interesting to look to the White House over the next couple
weeks to see if they do step up their rhetoric and realize that they might
actually win.

AMY GOODMAN: And Ryan, this latest poll that just came out, the Washington
Post-ABC News poll, has found 57 percent of all Americans want a public
insurance option.

RYAN GRIM: Sure. And what's amazing is that we're now in the Senate talking
about what kind of public option might be in the final bill, rather than
whether or not we're going to have a public option. That is just an
extraordinary political achievement for the left over the last six months.
Max Baucus just said the other day that there might be a, quote, "less pure
public option." Harkin said that there would be a public option in the final
bill. Dodd and Harry Reid, who are in the room writing this final bill, have
both said that they support a public option. It's astounding to a lot of
centrists and mainstream reporters and politicians that this is where the
debate is. But something has changed out there, and there's a very real
possibility that the final package will include a real public option.

AMY GOODMAN: And the split between Harry Reid and Charles Schumer of New
York, with Schumer saying Reid just has to put it in. Reid, actually facing
a very serious challenge at home, could actually lose the next Senate race?
And maybe-

RYAN GRIM: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: -Schumer would run for his position?

RYAN GRIM: Well, Reid-Schumer might. You know, he does seem like a natural
majority leader. But Reid has been kind of all over the place on this. A
couple weeks ago at a telephone town hall with constituents in Nevada, he
said, you know, something like "I guarantee that we will have a public
option in the bill that goes to the President's desk." That night I had
a-Democratic advisers calling, saying, "Whoa, whoa, you know, he didn't
quite mean that. He said he wants to, you know, have choice and
competition," the Obama terms. So part of Harry Reid really wants to go to
battle and get this done; the other part of him is, you know, hedging a
little bit. So, you know, it'll be up to the left and progressives over the
next month or so to really put pressure on Harry Reid to do what it seems
like he does want to do.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Ryan Grim, on another topic, you're also the
author of the book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of
Getting High in America. We just had the news of the Justice Department
issuing new guidelines for federal prosecutors not to pursue cases against
medical marijuana patients. What are your thoughts on the significance of
this? And explain the ambiguity between state and federal law in this case.

RYAN GRIM: Well, federal law says that the US government can, if it wants,
apply its anti-marijuana laws anywhere in the country, regardless of state
laws, but that states are still allowed to pass whatever laws they want to,
independent of the federal law. So if you're a medical marijuana patient in
California, you're protected from the local police, and you're protected
from the state police, but you're not protected from the DEA. What this
policy does is formalize a decision that they had announced during the
campaign and then announced again in March of earlier this year that says
that if you're following a state law, and your state law allows you to use
medical marijuana or be a caregiver for it, then the DEA won't mess with
you.

Now, you have to be very careful, because the DEA over the last several
months has been raiding joints out in California and other places, saying
that there are state tax violations or, you know, any other kind of very
marginal type of discrepancy between state law and what these businesses are
doing. So now the DEA is getting, you know, into the business of enforcing
very small state laws. So if you own a medical marijuana shop in California,
you better make sure all your parking tickets are paid, basically.

And this just goes back to the kind of, you know, schizophrenic relationship
that this country has always had with drugs, and I write about it in the
book, going back 200 years, 300, 400, even back to the founders. You know,
we have this insatiable desire to alter our consciousness, and at the same
time we have this need to control the behavior of other people. And it's
something that's been in conflict, and it always will, and this is kind of
the result of it, although this is a wave of a more libertarian and more
liberal kind of philosophy.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And finally, Senator Richard Durbin introduced a bill
on Thursday that would eliminate the disparity in sentencing between crimes
of-crimes convicted of cocaine or crack. Can you respond to that?

RYAN GRIM: It's astounding that we even have to talk about something like
this. This is one of the legacies of the '80s, where if you're caught with
five grams of crack cocaine, you get the same penalty as if you're caught
with 500 grams of powder cocaine. You know, and it's obvious who the users
of powder cocaine are compared with who the users are of crack cocaine. It's
one of the most racist laws that we have on the books today.

And it says something that, finally, Democrats are at least addressing it. I
think a lot of it has to do with actually the reduction in the crime rate
over the last ten years or so, which has given Democrats a little bit of
window to start speaking up on civil rights again and not be afraid of being
accused of soft on crime or soft on drugs.

There was a, you know, very dark period for this country in the '80s on drug
policy, and as a result, we went from around 500,000 prisoners to over two
million. You know, we lead the world in locking people up. And we also lead
the world in drug use. So, clearly, something is not working.

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, we want to thank you very much for being with us,
senior correspondent for the Huffington Post. His book is This Is Your
Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.

Fidel Castro: A Nobel Prize for Evo Morales

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23749.htm

Fidel Castro: A Nobel Prize for Evo Morales

By Fidel Castro

October 18, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- If Obama was awarded
the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being
African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite
his being a native and his having delivered on his promises.

For the first time, in both countries a member of their respective
ethnic groups has won the presidency.

I had said several times that Obama is a smart and cultivated man in a
social and political system he believes in. He wishes to bring healthcare to
nearly 50 million Americans, to rescue the economy from its profound crisis
and to improve the US image which has deteriorated as a result of genocidal
wars and torture. He neither conceives nor wishes to change his country's
political and economic system; nor could he do it.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three American presidents,
one former president and one candidate to the presidency.

The first one was Theodore Roosevelt elected in 1901. He was one of
the Rough Riders who landed in Cuba with his riders but with no horses in
the wake of the US intervention in 1898 aimed at preventing the independence
of our homeland.

The second was Thomas Woodrow Wilson who dragged the United States to
the first war for the distribution of the world. The extremely severe
conditions he imposed on a vanquished Germany, through the Versailles
Treaty, set the foundations for the emergence of fascism and the breakout of
World War II.

The third has been Barack Obama.

Carter was the ex-president who received the Nobel Prize a few years
after leaving office. He was certainly one of the few presidents of that
country who would not order the murder of an adversary, as others did. He
returned the Panama Canal, opened the US Interests Section in Havana and
prevented large budget deficits as well as the squandering of money to the
benefit of the military-industrial complex, as Reagan did.

The candidate was Al Gore -when he already was vicepresident. He was
the best informed American politician on the dreadful consequences of
climate change. As a candidate to the presidency, he was the victim of an
electoral fraud and stripped of his victory by W. Bush.

The views have been deeply divided with regards to the choice for this
award. Many people question ethical concepts or perceive obvious
contradictions in the unexpected decision.

They would have rather seen the Prize given for an accomplished task.
The Nobel Peace Prize has not always been presented to people deserving that
distinction. On occasions it has been received by resentful and arrogant
persons, or even worse. Upon hearing the news, Lech Walesa scornfully said:
"Who, Obama? It's too soon. He has not had time to do anything."

In our press and in CubaDebate, honest revolutionary comrades have
expressed their criticism. One of them wrote: "The same week in which Obama
was granted the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Senate passed the largest military
budget in its history: 626 billion dollars." Another journalist commented
during the TV News: "What has Obama done to deserve that award?" And still
another asked: "And what about the Afghan war and the increased number of
bombings?" These views are based on reality.

In Rome, film maker Michael Moore made a scathing comment:
"Congratulations, President Obama, for the Nobel Peace Prize; now, please,
earn it."

I am sure that Obama agrees with Moore's phrase. He is clever enough
to understand the circumstances around this case. He knows he has not earned
that award yet. That day in the morning he said that he was under the
impression that he did not deserve to be in the company of so many inspiring
personalities who have been honored with that prize.

It is said that the celebrated committee that assigns the Nobel Peace
Prize is made up of five persons who are all members of the Swedish
Parliament. A spokesman said it was a unanimous vote. One wonders whether or
not the prizewinner was consulted and if such a decision can be made without
giving him previous notice.

The moral judgment would be different depending on whether or not he
had previous knowledge of the Prize's allocation. The same could be said of
those who decided to present it to him.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile creating the Nobel Transparency Prize.

Bolivia is a country with large oil and gas depots as well as the
largest known reserves of lithium, a mineral currently in great demand for
the storage and use of energy.

Before his sixth birthday, Evo Morales, a very poor native peasant,
walked through The Andes with his father tending the llama of his native
community. He walked with them for 15 days to the market where they were
sold in order to purchase food for the community. In response to a question
I asked him about that peculiar experience Evo told me that "he took shelter
under the one-thousand stars hotel," a beautiful way of describing the clear
skies on the mountains where telescopes are sometimes placed.

In those difficult days of his childhood, the only alternative of the
peasants in his community was to cut sugarcane in the Argentinean province
of Jujuy, where part of the Aymara community went to work during the
harvesting season.

Not far from La Higuera, where after being wounded and disarmed Che
[Guevara] was murdered on October 9, 1967, Evo -who had been born on the
26th of that same month in the year 1959-was not yet 8 years old. He learned
how to read and write in Spanish in a small public school he had to walk to,
which was located 3.2 miles away from the one-room shack he shared with his
parents and siblings.

During his hazardous childhood, Evo would go wherever there was a
teacher. It was from his race that he learned three ethical principles:
don't
lie, don't steal and don't be weak.

At the age of 13, his father allowed him to move to San Pedro de Oruro
to study his senior high school. One of his biographers has related that he
did better in Geography, History and Philosophy than in Physics and
Mathematics. The most important thing is that, in order to pay for school,
Evo woke up a two in the morning to work as a baker, a construction worker
or any other physical job. He attended school in the afternoon. His
classmates admired him and helped him. From his early childhood he learned
how to play wind instruments and even was a trumpet player in a prestigious
band in Oruro.

As a teenager he organized and was the captain of his community's
soccer team.

But, access to the University was beyond reach for a poor Aymara
native.

After completing his senior high school, he did military service and
then returned to his community on the mountain tops. Later, poverty and
natural disasters forced the family to migrate to the subtropical area known
as El Chapare, where they managed to have a plot of ground. His father
passed away in 1983, when he was 23 years old. He worked hard on the ground
but he was a born fighter; he organized the workers and created trade unions
thus filling up a space unattended by the government.

The conditions for a social revolution in Bolivia had been maturing in
the past 50 years. The revolution broke out in that country with Victor Paz
Estensoro's Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR, by its Spanish acronym)
on April 9, 1952, that is, before the start of our armed struggle. The
revolutionary miners defeated the repressive forces and the MNR seized
power.

The revolutionary objectives in Bolivia were not attained and in 1956,
according to some well-informed people, the process started to decline. On
January 1st, 1959, the Revolution triumphed in Cuba, and three years later,
in January 1962, our homeland was expelled from the OAS. Bolivia abstained
from voting. Later, every other government, except Mexico's, severed
relations with Cuba.

The divisions in the international revolutionary movement had an
impact on Bolivia. Time would have to pass with over 40 years of blockade on
Cuba; neoliberalism and its devastating consequences; the Bolivarian
Revolution in Venezuela and the ALBA; and above all, Evo and his MAS in
Bolivia.

It would be hard to try summing up his rich history in a few pages.

I shall only say that Evo has prevailed over the wicked and slanderous
imperialist campaigns, its coups and interference in the internal affairs of
that country and defended Bolivia's sovereignty and the right of its
thousand-year-old people to have their traditions respected. "Coca is not
cocaine," he blurted out to the largest marihuana producer and drug consumer
in the world, whose market has sustained the organized crime that is taking
thousands of lives in Mexico every year. Two of the countries where the
Yankee troops and their military bases are stationed are the largest drug
producers on the planet.

The deadly trap of drug-trafficking has failed to catch Bolivia,
Venezuela and Ecuador, revolutionary countries members of ALBA like Cuba
which are aware of what they can and should do to bring healthcare,
education and wellbeing to their peoples. They do not need foreign troops to
combat drug-trafficking.

Bolivia is fostering a wonderful program under the leadership of an
Aymara president with the support of his people.

Illiteracy was eradicated in less than three years: 824,101 Bolivian
learned how to read and write; 24,699 did so also in Aymara and 13,599 in
Quechua. Bolivia is the third country free of illiteracy, following Cuba and
Venezuela.

It provides free healthcare to millions of people who had never had it
before. It is one of the seven countries in the world with the largest
reduction of infant mortality rate in the last five years and with a real
possibility to meet the Millennium Goals before the year 2015, with a
similar accomplishment regarding maternal deaths. It has conducted eye
surgery on 454,161 persons, 75,974 of them Brazilians, Argentineans,
Peruvians and Paraguayans.

Bolivia has set forth an ambitious social program: every child
attending school from first to eighth grade is receiving an annual grant to
pay for the school material. This benefits nearly two million students.

More than 700,000 persons over 60 years of age are receiving a bonus
equivalent to some 342 dollars annually.

Every pregnant woman and child under two years of age is receiving an
additional benefit of approximately 257 dollars.

Bolivia, one of the three poorest nations in the hemisphere, has
brought under state control the country's most important energy and mineral
resources while respecting and compensating every single affected interest.
It is advancing carefully because it does not want to take a step backward.
Its hard currency reserves have been growing, and now they are no less than
three times higher than they were at the beginning of Evo's mandate. It is
one of the countries making a better use of external cooperation and it is a
strong advocate of the environment.

In a very short time, Bolivia has been able to establish the Biometric
Electoral Register and approximately 4.7 million voters have registered,
that is, nearly a million more than in the last electoral roll that in
January 2009 included 3.8 million.

There will be elections on December 6. Surely, the people's support
for their President will increase. Nothing has stopped his growing prestige
and popularity.

Why is he not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

I understand his great disadvantage: he is not the President of the
United States of America.

Fidel Castro Ruz

October 15, 2009

The Banks Are Not Alright, Ari Shavit: The Iceberg

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/opinion/19krugman.html?th&emc=th

The Banks Are Not Alright

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: October 18, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. O.K., maybe not
literally the worst, but definitely bad. And the contrast between the
immense good fortune of a few and the continuing suffering of all too many
boded ill for the future.

I'm talking, of course, about the state of the banks.

The lucky few garnered most of the headlines, as many reacted with fury to
the spectacle of Goldman Sachs making record profits and paying huge bonuses
even as the rest of America, the victim of a slump made on Wall Street,
continues to bleed jobs.

But it's not a simple case of flourishing banks versus ailing workers: banks
that are actually in the business of lending, as opposed to trading, are
still in trouble. Most notably, Citigroup and Bank of America, which
silenced talk of nationalization earlier this year by claiming that they had
returned to profitability, are now - you guessed it - back to reporting
losses.

Ask the people at Goldman, and they'll tell you that it's nobody's business
but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: "There
is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or
indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the
financial system." Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading
operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies
that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to
the guarantees extended to many of Goldman's bonds.

So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers,
the Obama administration's chief economist - and one of the architects of
the administration's bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on
financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves.

Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the
financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout,
is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what
they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing
aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this
left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now,
once again, making a lot of money.

But there's an even bigger problem: while the wheeler-dealer side of the
financial industry, a k a trading operations, is highly profitable again,
the part of banking that really matters - lending, which fuels investment
and job creation - is not. Key banks remain financially weak, and their
weakness is hurting the economy as a whole.

You may recall that earlier this year there was a big debate about how to
get the banks lending again. Some analysts, myself included, argued that at
least some major banks needed a large injection of capital from taxpayers,
and that the only way to do this was to temporarily nationalize the most
troubled banks. The debate faded out, however, after Citigroup and Bank of
America, the banking system's weakest links, announced surprise profits. All
was well, we were told, now that the banks were profitable again.

But a funny thing happened on the way back to a sound banking system: last
week both Citi and BofA announced losses in the third quarter. What
happened?

Part of the answer is that those earlier profits were in part a figment of
the accountants' imaginations. More broadly, however, we're looking at
payback from the real economy. In the first phase of the crisis, Main Street
was punished for Wall Street's misdeeds; now broad economic distress,
especially persistent high unemployment, is leading to big losses on
mortgage loans and credit cards.

And here's the thing: The continuing weakness of many banks is helping to
perpetuate that economic distress. Banks remain reluctant to lend, and tight
credit, especially for small businesses, stands in the way of the strong
recovery we need.

So now what? Mr. Summers still insists that the administration did the right
thing: more government provision of capital, he says, would not "have been
an availing strategy for solving problems." Whatever. In any case, as a
political matter the moment for radical action on banks has clearly passed.

The main thing for the time being is probably to do as much as possible to
support job growth. With luck, this will produce a virtuous circle in which
an improving economy strengthens the banks, which then become more willing
to lend.

Beyond that, we desperately need to pass effective financial reform. For if
we don't, bankers will soon be taking even bigger risks than they did in the
run-up to this crisis. After all, the lesson from the last few months has
been very clear: When bankers gamble with other people's money, it's heads
they win, tails the rest of us lose.

***

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1121263.html

Israel needs legitimacy to wage war and peace

By Ari Shavit, Haaretz Correspondent

Haaretz Sat., October 17, 2009

It seems as if everything is fine. Israel's borders are quiet, the state is
stable, the economy is recovering. Hezbollah and Hamas have been deterred,
real estate prices are skyrocketing, and chemist Ada Yonath is on her way to
Stockholm to pick up the Nobel Prize. Even Ra'ad Salah's attempt to ignite
Jerusalem has thus far not succeeded: Palestinian sanity and Israeli
discretion are still maintaining order. So it is not surprising that
according to a recent comparative survey, Israel is one of the 30 countries
in the world in which life is just fine.

With a strong shekel, relative security and temporary calm, life here really
is good. Corruption and cynicism have both been hit hard, and today's Israel
is cruising on still waters. Without major achievements and without major
failings, without peace and without war, it seems as if things are all
right. Not great, but all right.

But things are not all right - they really are not. Why? Because underneath
those still waters on which Israel's ship is sailing lurks an iceberg.

The Goldstone report marked the iceberg's first appearance. Turkey turning
its back on Israel was the second. Attempts by European courts to try Israel
Defense Forces officers were the third; the boycott of Israeli products and
companies in various places round the world was the fourth; and global
indifference to the nuclearization of a regional power that threatens to
wipe Israel off the map is the fifth. Every week, almost every day, the
iceberg peeks above the surface. And when one takes a good look over the
railing of this pleasure cruise, one can see exactly what it is: The iceberg
is the loss of the State of Israel's legitimacy.

Ninety-two years ago, Lord Balfour sent Baron Rothschild a letter in which
he recognized the Jewish people's right to create a national home in the
Land of Israel. Sixty-two years ago, the United Nations recognized the
Jewish people's right to establish a Jewish state. The 1917 Balfour
Declaration and 1947 UN partition resolution gave Zionism the diplomatic
foundation on which the Jewish state was established and perpetuated.

But over the past decade, that foundation has been worn away, and the idea
of a Jewish state is now open to attack. The Jewish people's right to
sovereignty and self-defense is now controversial. Paradoxically, as Israel
gets stronger, its legitimacy is melting away. A national movement that
began as "legitimacy without an entity" is becoming "an entity without
legitimacy" before our very eyes.

The right is the primary culprit of Israel's legitimacy crisis. With the
occupation, the settlements and brutality, religious nationalism has fed the
destructive forces that seek to trample the natural rights of Jews and
Israelis. But the left has also contributed its part to the legitimacy
crisis. Those on the radical left did not always make certain that
opposition to Israeli policies would not turn into reservations about
Israel's very existence.

The right sinned by contaminating Zionism with the occupation, and the left
sinned by abandoning the campaign over Zionism's justice. As a result,
Israel lost not only its way, but its voice. The fundamental truths that
brought us here, and which justify our existence here, have been lost and
forgotten.

The campaign to renew Israel's legitimacy is a vital one. Without
legitimacy, Israel will be unable to contend with Iran in any way, shape or
form. Without legitimacy, Israel will not achieve peace, nor will it be able
to wage war. Nonetheless, to give Israel back what it has lost, the prime
and defense ministers need to do more than deliver speeches. They need to
act.

On one hand, there is an urgent need for a creative, daring diplomatic
initiative that would prove that Israel is truly and genuinely striving to
end the occupation. Without such an initiative, the world will not listen to
Israeli justice, which today remains a concept largely invisible to the
world. On the other hand, there is a need to enlist Israeli and Jewish
elites in the struggle to once again strengthen the foundations of Israel's
legitimacy.

This diplomatic and moral effort is no less important than the struggles
that produced the Balfour Declaration and the UN partition resolution. If
such an effort is not launched immediately, and does not soon succeed,
Israel will become an international pariah.