contributions

London Review of Books: The Israel Lobby
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. (…)

Fortune Magazine/Nelson D. Schwartz
A year ago Tamiflu was known, if at all, as an obscure remedy for influenza, which doctors typically treat with bed rest and chicken soup. Today, with panic mounting over a potential bird flu pandemic, it’s the most sought-after drug in the world, as everyone from suburban soccer moms in the U.S. to health officials in London and Taipei scramble to stockpile the pill. At the moment, it seems, virtually the entire world is on sick-chicken alert.
"One (…)

Agencies | March 14 2006
Related: Why Milosevic Was Murdered
Slobodan Milosevic’s son today claimed his father was murdered, as he arrived in the Netherlands to collect the former Serbian president’s body. "He got killed, he didn’t die. He got killed. There is a murder," Marko Milosevic told the Associated Press.
Milosevic died in his prison cell on Saturday, months from an expected verdict in his war crimes and crimes against humanity trial in The Hague.
A post-mortem by Dutch (…)

ExxonMobil has been selected for boycott because of its apparent active involvement in U.S. policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, and its power to help change these policies.
Campbell Soup, Carlson Companies (Radisson Hotels, TGI Friday’s), Corning Inc., Metlife, Novartis, Pfizer, Verizon, Wells Fargo and Wyeth are also selected for boycott because these firms can influence ExxonMobil through board members they share in common with ExxonMobil.
When governments (…)

From
People are fragile, countries are fragile and the peace of the world is fragile. And so are financial systems based on paper. Prosperity itself is fragile. All you need is a trigger mechanism, like a widening war, and the world itself can fall to pieces. Or maybe it’s falling into pieces now and further disintegration is inevitable. Like a contagion, anger and hatred travel around the world. All totalitarian regimes are based on anger and hatred, and hatred begets violence. The (…)

Nine indicators prove that the crisis is unfolding
Nine indicators developed in this month’s GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin, coordinated by Franck Biancheri, out of which 5 are presented in this public communication, enable LEAP/E2020 to confirm the beginning of a global systemic crisis by the end of March 2006. The recent international trends that particularly affect the international financial system, and the preoccupying trends in the US, namely as concerns the reliability of (…)

For years I’ve been writing about the Federal Debt being much worse than the $400 Billion (annual) deficit that is often reported in the media. The total Federal Debt was $6 trillion when Bush came into office, now it’s $8.2 TRillion and climbing, or so I thought. Then I read this:
The federal government’s fiscal exposures now total more than $46 trillion, up from about $20 trillion in 2000.
This staggering revelation was included in the US Dept. of Treasury’s own report.
2005 (…)

KARACHI - The city of Samarra, target of the biggest US air strike since the invasion of Iraq three years ago, has been the nucleus of the national resistance since the fall of Baghdad.
The Sunni-dominated city 125 kilometers north of Baghdad, despite several attempts, has never been subjugated, because of the strong tribal structure and fierce nationalism of its residents.
Operation Swarmer, which began on Thursday with more than 650 American and 800 Iraqi soldiers, 200 tactical (…)

What Now? March 17, 2006 For several decades now the world has been living with the illusion that the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) established a functioning treaty regime that has spared the world from nuclear danger. It is an illusion partly because three nuclear weapons aspirants (Israel, India, Pakistan) have kept clear of the treaty, and suffered no adverse consequences when they developed nuclear arsenals. On the contrary, President Bush’s proposed nuclear deal with India must be (…)

The farcical trial of Saddam Hussein staged by the Bush administration and its Iraqi puppets was thrown into chaos when the deposed Iraqi president took the witness stand Wednesday.
He used his intervention not to answer the charges laid against him in the court-whose legitimacy he has rejected from the beginning-but to speak directly to the Iraqi people, urging an end to sectarian bloodshed and a continuation of armed resistance to the US occupation of their country.
“My conscience (…)