Sunday, December 07, 2008

On The Dole

I love ths headline, speaking truth to power as they say, too often unemployment appears to have no apparent cause but it does of course, the bosses decide....Canadian employers wipe out 71000 jobs

Even though the bosses were given HR advice not to do this, they can't help themselves they have no plan to deal with the recession so they fall back on the old tried and true, lay off workers.

Fears of a million layoffs a month in corporate America

And as usual the cheery economic advisors to the bosses didn't expect this.
Canada lost 70600 jobs in November, about three times more than many economists had expected, Statistics Canada reported on Friday.

As strategist Ed Yardeni wrote, "the latest batch of economic indicators is so bad that we are either spiralling into a depression or we are within a few months of a V-shaped recovery."
Put Mr. Abramson, 42, firmly in the V-shaped camp. He doesn't believe a years-long slump is lurking in the shadows, although the markets have been trading that way.
"It's been a rough economy, which we underestimated," he says. But the market response reflects a "psychological meltdown" that has taken stocks down to ridiculous valuations.
"We've been fully invested for a period here, because we didn't believe this was going to go as far down versus valuation and economic reality as it has. We thought this was going to be a normal 20-per-cent correction." Oops.

So while Harper created a political crisis to avoid addressing the economic crisis, it slapped him in the face like a wet fish. Indeed can you say recession, the word he refuses to use. And he has no plan to address it, so he creates a political crisis to distract us from the bad news.

Harper shuts down Parliament while unemployment hits recession levels

We are in a recession, and the dark clouds of depression creep over the horizon.

Canada loses 70600 jobs in a month, most since '82
Ontario's crumbling manufacturing sector is a major reason why the 66000 of the 71000 jobs that disappeared in Canada in November did so in this province. ...

Yep the oil crash of '82 was when we had one of our worst recessions.

Good News — Conditions Resemble 1973-74!
The recession of 1974-75 was the worst since the 1930’s Great Depression. The 1973-74 bear market in anticipation of that recession was the worst bear market since that of the 1929-32 bear market (which led to the Great Depression). The mid-1970’s were indeed a miserable period.

And that was just last months unemployment figures the news continues to be bad across Canada.

GM to lay off 700 more workers in Oshawa

AbitibiBowater to shut mills, axe 1100 jobs

Closed mines, broken dreams in the town that nickel built

However we are not alone in this sudden realization that the economy is crashing, like Harper the other recession denier sits in the White House south of here.

US Loses 533000 Jobs in Biggest Drop Since 1974

The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that last month, companies around the nation shed jobs at the fastest rate since the early 1970s, pushing the unemployment rate to its highest level in 15 years.
The figures suggest the year-old recession will approach or even exceed the 1981-1982 downturn in severity and support expectations that Federal Reserve officials will soon lower interest rates to levels not seen in a half century.

That was just the monthly unemployment rate it gets worse in the U.S. which does not have our style of EI as the unumber of unemployed or underemployed workers not on unemployment payments ballons.

Broader Unemployment Rate Hits 12.5%

One in Ten Americans Now Uses Food Stamps as Unemployment Continues to Rise

But still there are those economists who claim that the glass is half full, same guys that said there was no recession....

Unemployment hurts, but it's not a crisis yet

And some are down right optimistic......

Recession over by June?

And they are just plain wrong like they have been for the past year.

If recent downturns are any guide, it may be well into 2010 or perhaps even 2011 before unemployment peaks, which means the global economy should not count substantial U.S. consumer spending rebound any time soon. "The economy is now locked in a vicious downward spiral in which employment, incomes and spending are collapsing together," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.

Along with the credit melt down unemployment is also a global problem.

OFF THE CHARTS A domino effect in the global work force
THE world recession is spreading, and the employment outlook is turning down almost everywhere.
Even in countries like China, the latest surveys of companies show they are reducing their work forces, providing more evidence that China cannot be the engine of the world economy when the traditional industrial powers suffer.

China fears a reverse migration
China's roaring industrial economy has been abruptly quieted by the effects of the global financial crisis. Rural provinces that supplied much of China's factory manpower are watching the beginnings of a wave of reverse migration that has the potential to shake the stability of the world's most populous nation.
Fast-rising unemployment has led to an unusual series of strikes and protests. Normally cautious government officials have offered quick concessions and talk openly of their worries about social unrest. Laid-off factory workers in Dongguan overturned patrol cars and clashed with police last Tuesday, and hundreds of taxis parked in front of a government office in nearby Chaozhou over the weekend, one of a series of driver protests.

Amid the global financial crisis, China's small and medium-sized enterprises, largely labor-intensive and vulnerable to fluctuations in domestic and external demand, are affected most. In the first half of 2008, 67,000 such companies, each with a business volume exceeding 5 million yuan, closed and laid off more than 20 million employees, said the National Development and Reform Commission. That figure doesn't include service industry firms or small companies with sales of less than 5 million yuan, as there are no authoritative figures available on those categories.

A HUNDRED per cent of the global economic growth next year will come from developing countries. This, according to Stuart E. Eizenstat, former US deputy treasury secretary, is the first time in history that developing countries will shoulder the full responsibility of pulling the global economy.
The European and US economic engines are not firing and therefore will not be able to pull the world economy along as has been done previously. Some economists, including David Carbon, chief economist at DBS Bank, believe that Asia is now more capable of standing on its own.Why then should the worker in a factory in China or Malaysia be concerned when the region, by most accounts, is in a much better economic situation than in the US and other more advanced nations? Why should economies in Asia and indeed other developing countries be concerned with rising unemployment in the US and Europe?The fact is that even though Asia is not as badly off as the US, Asia's growth is also slowing. In today's highly interconnected and globalised world, what happens in one part of the world is rapidly transmitted to the other side. Contagions spread faster. Thus, with the economic meltdown in the US and massive job losses, the demand for goods and services also falls. Offshore centres in India and in other parts of the world are also feeling the heat from the US financial and economic meltdown. The production and assembly line that snakes around the world, and in some cases making its way into remote villages, has also been affected.The unemployment numbers in Europe and other developed countries are also on the uptrend, with more joining the jobless ranks every day. This, according to some, could be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s

Ok folks lets do the math. Recession + Unemployment = Depression

US "Great Depression" has begun: Best of the Boards/Blogs

There's no mystery about what the government is trying to do. After the Black October crash, the government and the Bank of England got out their history books and started looking at what happened in the Great Depression. In September 1931, as unemployment reached three million, the national government slashed interest rates and abandoned the gold standard. The value of the pound fell by 25%, just as it has today. Interest rates fell from 6% to 2% - deja vu - and this led to a modest, export-led recovery. Unemployment fell marginally in 1935 as a recovery in the housing market, mainly in the south of England, boosted economic activity. The government is clearly trying to do the same today.
However, this isn't the 1930s. For one thing, there was a lot of spare capacity then in the economy, which is not the case today. We also had the Empire. Britain erected tariff walls against imports and used the colonies - yes, we still had them - to provide cheap food imports. The 1930s depression wasn't caused by consumer spending and debt, it was a classic crisis of ineffective demand.
Also: it didn't really work. Unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the 1930s outside the south-east of England, and it was only rearmament, as the Second World War approached, that ended mass joblessness. We are in a very different situation today. We cannot seek salvation in another unsustainable boom and we certainly cannot afford to go to war.

And depressions lead to workers revolt.

Workers at Republic Windows continue sit-in after company closes

Sit Ins and plant occupations were popular in the 1930;s as well, and are far more effective than strikes, they can lead to the only obvious solution to the capitalist crisis; workers control of the means of production and the socializtion of capital.

SEE
Neo-Con Industrial Strategy.
Common Sense
Neo-Cons Have No New Ideas
Back To The Fifties
Here Come the Seventies
Wall Street Mantra


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Chickens Come Home

America's secret wars reveals the reason behind recent so called unexpected terrorist assaults in Mubai and Pakistan. These are not random events but part of the asymetrical warfare that resulted from the Cold War.
While America declares war on Terrorism, the terrorists are a result of its cold war with Russia and attempts to create a global Imperial Empire. Proping up military dictatorships in opposition to the Soviet Union especially in Pakistan, led to the creation of the modern Islamic terrorist network, originally funded by the CIA. Al Quadia, and other such groups organized to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.
After their victory over the Soviet Union and the subsequent decline in Russia's Imperial power in the region with the end of the Cold War, embolldened they turned their attention to the other Imperial nation in the region of the Middle East and Africa. Pakistan was an American client stte whith support from China. India was a Russian client state. The Taliban were created to take over in post soviet Afghanistan, by the Pakistan secret service, with a wink and a nod from the Pakistan government of the American backed Benazir Bhutto.
The Cold War has never really ended, it merely has morphed into the modern war that America is fighting in Afghanista, Pakistan, the Middle East and in The horn of Africa. And the globe is being divided yup between new Imperialist powers, not unlike the old colonial days of the 19th Century.
Instead of combating world poverty and mass unemployment, and encouraging development, U.S. Imperialism would prefer to fight the children of this impovershment. Chickens, home, roost.
Unfortunately it appears that America has not learned its lessons, and even under its new President it will continue its Imperial ambitions. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The war on terror, which began in reaction to an attack on the United States by a small group of nationalist and Islamist Muslims, outraged by the presence of American military bases in close proximity to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia, has now become a war against radicalism itself, disorderly states, other conflicts and failures in the non-Western world, poverty and social disorder ("breeding grounds” for terrorism), and “rogue nations,” meaning those that want to have nuclear weapons in order to deter attack by foreign enemies. This same war to make other states “into the American image” has been waged repeatedly during the last 50 years: in Vietnam, in Laos and Cambodia, in Nicaragua, in Iraq where “victory” (whatever that would be) still eludes the U.S., in Afghanistan in a war now spreading into Pakistan, in Somalia (through an Ethiopian proxy), and against Hezbollah and Hamas. It invariably has failed, at heavy cost to the societies involved, and little or no benefit to the United States. The rule long ago empirically established is that intervention in other countries to remake them invariably inflames and sustains nationalist resistance to the invader.

According to Islamic legal tradition, there are two different kinds of jihad. The first, offensive jihad, is when you seek out the infidel, offer him the opportunity to become a Muslim, and conquer him if he declines. That is how Muhammad and his successors went from obscure sect to global empire. Osama bin Laden has never called for an offensive jihad, probably because he knows no one would listen to him.
Defensive jihad, on the other hand, is the obligation of every able-bodied male Muslim to protect Muslim land from foreign invaders: all for one and one for all. In Afghanistan, the Soviet occupation offered bin Laden a textbook opportunity to fulfill this duty, and when the Soviets fell, he and the other foreign jihadists who had traveled there to fight were instantly branded as heroes. They hadn't just followed the classic defensive-jihad script; they'd proven that it worked.
Having found his purpose, bin Laden immediately set out to join another defensive jihad, and he wasn't picky. He even proposed to the Saudi government that he be allowed to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, since Saddam was a bad Muslim, and that was enough for bin Laden.
When the Saudis told him thanks but no thanks, bin Laden started looking at them for the bad-Muslim role. And when the Saudis opened their doors to U.S. troops to defeat Saddam and guarantee their continued security, bin Laden figured he had them. He argued that Saudi Arabia was now under foreign occupation by the Americans, making the United States a legitimate target. And then we invaded Afghanistan. Initially this was not a good thing for Osama bin Laden. He and the rest of Al Qaeda had to flee. Some were killed, and a few were caught. He lost the operating base he had built with Taliban collusion, and it was pretty much guaranteed he would be a fugitive the rest of his natural life. For the United States, it wasn't the home run that catching bin Laden would have given us. But it was a solid double, the opening of a rally that combined projection of our military power with a reminder to the world that we could not be attacked without consequence.
Unfortunately, like the Soviets before us, we couldn't leave it at that. We were a global superpower (with allies behind us), and a superpower, we told ourselves, couldn't just knock out a regime and then walk away without caring about the consequences. We needed to set up our own government, and we wanted it to rule the country. We wanted it to be at least vaguely democratic, to allow TV (talk about American values), and to permit girls to go to school. All that, it turned out, required more than bearded Special Forces operators. It required an occupation.
From October 2001 until March 2003, as America's occupation grew, bin Laden began to recoup his losses. He became not simply a notorious public figure but a global actor with a gravitas well beyond that of a mere terrorist. When the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated, the U.S. was not in fact the occupier of a Muslim country, whatever bin Laden might have claimed. Yet through the U. S. response -- the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq -- suddenly it was. Bin Laden was no longer a liar. Now he was a prophet.

Some Obama supporters are wringing their hands over the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Hillary was, after all, a consistent supporter of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much more. But Barack Obama's selection of Reaganite and Bush family operative Robert Gates to continue as Secretary of War speaks volumes about the new administration's willingness to continue pulling the same wool over the public eyes as Democratic and Republican administrations past have done. Is this the "change" tens of millions voted for?

Obama's Cabinet: In an editorial, the Guardian says as Barack Obama's choices of cabinet members and advisers emerge, it looks more and more as if putting the American political system back on an even keel is his main purpose, and "steady as she goes" the motto he has in mind. Obama's Politics: Daily Telegraph Columnist Janet Daley wonders if Barack Obama is a secret right-winger. She asks if his left-liberal stance during the presidential campaign was just a ruse to seduce a new generation of dissident voters. Gaza Siege: Commentator Hasan Abu Nimah writes on what he calls the shame of the Gaza siege. For nearly three years Gaza's entire population, 1.5 million people, has been subjected to a cruel siege from land, sea and air, he says; but worse than the siege itself is the silence of the whole world. Arab News (Saudi Arabia) Hillary Worry: An editorial expresses concern about Hillary Clinton's appointment. A New York senator with often-expressed Zionist sympathies, Clinton may not be the person to head up the renewed drive for a Palestinian settlement, it says.

While naive, giddy and myopic establishment leftists have been celebrating the great “change” heralded by the election of Barack Obama, the President elect has been busy appointing people to key positions who advocate the same Neo-Con imperialist foreign policy crafted during eight years of the Bush administration.
The New York Times, widely recognized as the voice of the establishment Democratic left, set the tone of what we can expect from an Obama foreign policy in a lead editorial last Sunday entitled, “A military for a dangerous new world.”
The editorial calls for U.S. military imperialism not to be scaled back under Obama, but to be vastly expanded both in terms of budget and scope.
Iran, China, Somalia, Russia and Pakistan are all listed as potential targets of U.S. military aggression and the paper echoes what Obama himself has said he will implement - an addition of nearly 100,000 more soldiers and marines to American ground forces, bringing the total to 759,000 active duty forces, at a cost of $100 billion dollars over the next six years.
Does this sound like a “change” from the Project For a New American century framework of endless “multi-theatre warfare,” the inspiration for eight years of Bush administration militarism, or an expansion of that very doctrine?

Report confirms 'shadow war' waged by US special forces
A 2004 classified order authorized the military to attack Al Qaeda operatives around the globe. As many as a dozen raids occurred under this mandate. Based on interviews with military and intelligence officials and senior Bush administration policymakers, The paper's report paints a picture of a shadow war conducted by commando teams from the US special forces' most elite units, often under the control of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It's a war beamed live via Predator drone cameras to US spy masters in control rooms halfway around the globe, but often invisible to in-the-dark foreign governments. London's The Times Online reports the forces fighting the US "secret war" include the Green Berets, Navy Seals, Rangers, and a shadowy unit code-named Gray Fox. The article reports the number of US special forces at about 50,000, though less than 10,000 are "earmarked" for combat. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month that some experts are concerned that clandestine US raids into sovereign territory may be counterproductive. But taking such actions in Pakistan and now Syria may involve high diplomatic risks and offer limited military gain, say experts outside the military.

After US Raid Syrians Wonder if War on Terror Has Arrived

Suspicions about American intentions have flooded the Syrian press. A recent article in Abyadh Aswad, a weekly Syrian political magazine, suggests the attack might have been intended to warn Iraq's neighbors, namely Iran, not to disobey U.S. demands. The article also reflected a common Syrian reading—that the current administration is attempting to thwart attempts by the next American president to improve relations with Syria. The article also suggests the raid could have been driven by a desire to prevent Syrian influence in Iraq just after Syria sent its first ambassador to the country since 1979.

Did Secret Orders Keep US Commandos in Somalia?

Fifteen years ago, a botched Special Forces raid targeting warlords in Mogadishu resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemen and hundreds of others. The battle, recounted in the book and film Black Hawk Down, cut short an ambitious peacekeeping plan for war-torn Somalia. Since then, U.S. special operators have returned to the lawless East African country, thanks to secret orders approved in 2004 by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, and reported yesterday in the New York Times. So now, the question becomes: How often have those commandos been in Somalia, and how long have they stayed?

Meanwhile, the better organized, and motivated, Islamic radicals take control of more towns. These militias are only a minority of the armed groups that exist throughout the country. The non-religious warlords (mainly the Transitional National Government, or TNG) are unable to unite sufficiently to suppress the religious groups (the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, or ARS, which is the successor to the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU). Kenya and Ethiopia find their borders crossed more frequently by Somali raiders (something which has been going on for centuries), and are seeking Western nations that will help contain Somali aggression. So far, the only people seriously listening are those with counter-terrorism forces (mainly American, British and French) in Djibouti (Somalia's neighbor in the north.) But this force of commandos keeps its operations very secret. Apparently, this Djibouti based force monitors what goes on in Somalia, and occasionally intervenes to kill key al Qaeda operatives. There are more al Qaeda showing up in Somalia, and apparently they are leading a terror campaign against relatively peaceful warlords controlling most of northern Somalia (Puntland and Somaliland).

Renditions fuel anger against U.S.

NAIROBI, Kenya—Clement Ibrahim Muhibitabo is one of the forgotten ones.So is Ines Chine. So is Abdul Hamid Moosa.Rwandan, Tunisian and South African citizens respectively, the three Africans are among the victims of one of the largest if most obscure rendition programs in the global war on terror: the mass arrest, deportation and secret imprisonment of some 100 people who fled an invasion of Somalia last year—a roundup that even included women and small children.The snatch-and-jail operation was carried out by U.S. allies Kenya and Ethiopia but involved CIA and FBI interrogators, say European diplomats, human-rights groups and the program's many detainees.

Yet the justifiable joy at Obama's ascendancy must be tempered with the knowledge that Guantánamo always has been a diversionary tactic in the "war on terror". The 250 men there represent fewer than 1% of the 27,000 prisoners being held by the US beyond the rule of law. There is a reason why most people have never heard of the plight of these unfortunates - they are ghost prisoners in secret prisons. Many are in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a smattering end up in US detention in Bosnia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kosovo and in 21st-century "prison hulks" off Diego Garcia and Somalia. The most miserable are held in proxy prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.

“The same group that we believe is responsible for Mumbai had a similar attack in 2006 on a train and killed a similar number of people,” the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, said last week in a speech at Harvard. “Go back to 2001 and it was an attack on the Parliament.” The Mumbai commuter train bombings killed at least 186. A dozen died in the assault on Parliament, which led to talk of war.
Second, Pakistan’s intelligence services have used Lashkar as a guerrilla force to fight India over their disputed border in Kashmir. That fight has raged since the British partitioned India and Pakistan in 1947. The rival nations went to war that year over Kashmir, and again in 1965 and 1971. Tens of thousands have been killed in political warfare since then.
Third, and most significantly, Lashkar’s roots, like Al Qaeda’s, lie in another war — the battle between Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan and Islamic rebels who fought them in the 1980’s. The rebels were backed by billions of dollars from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their money and guns flowed through Pakistani intelligence.
In 1989, the Red Army left Afghanistan. The international Islamic holy warriors did not; many thousands of radicals from some 40 nations came to learn the lessons of jihad in Afghanistan, and Lashkar’s first foot soldiers were among them.
Lashkar was founded in 1989, supported by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani spies, according to Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s current ambassador to the United States, a former journalist who opposed Gen. Pervez Musharraf when the general was Pakistan’s ruler. Pakistan’s role as quartermaster and state sponsor of Afghan jihad forces created “a nexus between Pakistan’s military and secret services, which was heightened by the state sponsorship of jihad against India,” he has written.
In December 2001, after the Lashkar attack on India’s Parliament, President Bush added the group to the official United States list of international terrorist organizations. He asked General Musharraf to jail Lashkar’s leaders and break up the group.
Some members were arrested. Others went to fight Americans alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan rather than continue their battles against India’s Hindus in Kashmir, as the State Department and India’s Defense Ministry have reported; by 2006, attacks by Lashkar and its allies in Kashmir were half what they were a few years before.
But on April 23, 2006, Osama bin Laden seemed to signal an open alliance with groups like Lashkar, and their goals. He issued a proclamation denouncing “a Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.” He referred to the United States, Israel and India in the statement, as it was broadcast and translated by Al Jazeera. “A U.N. resolution passed more than half a century ago gave Muslim Kashmir the liberty of choosing independence from India,” it said. “George Bush, the leader of the crusaders’ campaign, announced a few days ago that he will order his converted agent Musharraf to shut down the Kashmir mujahedeen camps, thus affirming that it is a Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.”


On possible intent and strategy of the terror group that struck Mumbai on 26/11
The strategy and intent was to create chaos, fear, lack of confidence, communal divide. There is nothing like specific homegrown (terrorist) group. The terrorists have tapped on sense of anger and alienation and taken advantage of lack of government’s effort to take to task all the right wing parties. In the 2002 Gujarat massacre, there was no case made out against the perpetrators and even in the compensation given to the victims of the violence there was a disparity. The government has failed to address the root grievances. You see it in the north-east of India, as well. In Kashmir, the insurgency happened because of the repeated negativism of Delhi politics in the (Kashmir) Valley.
On Pakistan’s role in terror attacks on India
In Pakistan, for the last two decades, ISI operatives have been entrusted with the task of identifying families of poor. Usually, the family has one boy who is a wastrel and has no purpose in life. This good-for-nothing fellow is selected by the ISI and told things like he is a failure but this task (militancy which they call ‘Jihad’) will give him respect in his society. They tell him even if he dies in the course of operation, he will attain martyrdom, and will be hailed as a hero. This youth is then recruited by luring his families with salary, pensions and other financial benefits. Normally, $10 – 20,000 is set aside for this purpose. Traditionally, people joined the armed forces after a calling. But these people are not like that. Pakistan does this entire recruitment in a much organised way. The current government may not support this but it is a situation where the country is being haunted by its own mistakes. It’s a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ that they have created. It started with former Pakistani President late Muhammad Zia ul Haq. Zia’s strategy was to “bleed India through a thousand cuts.” Kashmir was his motive. It’s no secret that Pakistan has always harboured a desire to integrate the Indian side of Jammu & Kashmir into it, and that’s what the successive governments have wanted. These groups (militants) are a larger part of the same mind set. Apparently, the present Pakistan government is unable to control the militants.

US appears to be losing its secret war in Somalia
"Your government gets away with a lot here," said the prison warden, Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."
It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts.
It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and — according to Isse and civil rights activists — secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.
Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that the U.S. appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.
"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."
What the Bush administration wanted, when it tacitly backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006, was clear enough: to help a close African ally in the war on terror crush the Islamic Courts Union. The Taliban-like movement emerged from the ashes of more than 15 years of anarchy and lawlessness in Africa's most infamous failed state, Somalia.
At first, the invasion seemed an easy victory. By early 2007, the Courts had been routed, a pro-Western transitional government installed, and hundreds of Islamic militants in Somalia either captured or killed.
But over the past 18 months, Somalia's Islamists — now more radical than ever — have regrouped and roared back.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way when the U.S. provided intelligence to the invading Ethiopians two years ago.
The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and, according to the U.S. State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local and international jihadists associated with al-Qaida.
But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe to walk in for the first time in a generation.
A military think tank at West Point studying Somalia concluded last year that, in some respects, failed states were admirable places to combat al-Qaida, because the absence of local sovereignty permitted "relatively unrestricted Western counterterrorism efforts."

Ghana: The New World Order II

Whether Afrika and Afrikans as a whole are aware, the stark reality is that there is a new "scramble for Afrika".
The original "scramble for Afrika" was in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin in 1884/1885 where America and her western cousins such as Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands literally carved up Afrika for themselves and in the process stealing vast swathes of Afrikan land and by proxy creating the artificial boundaries we see today and in the course splitting entire families.
The current "scramble for Afrika" is a sinister and deadly attempt by Afrika's so-called development partners in a bid to save themselves from the inordinate financial chaos which is engulfing them.
This new "scramble for Afrika" has even more players with China, India, Turkey and Russia all vying to rape Afrika of its vital resources like Gold, Diamonds, Colthan, Oil and Copper.
Whilst the west, India, China, Russia et al all claim to be Afrika's "development partners" the truth of the matter is that billions of dollars' worth of natural resources are being looted from Afrika sometimes with the help of corrupt Afrikan "leaders". - Many Afrikan people are unaware of this grand theft that comes under the guise of "development partners", "globalization" and "strategic investors".
Instead of enriching Afrikan countries, some big American and European multi-national corporations are facilitating corruption and provoking instability right across the Afrikan continent - AS WE SEE IN D R CONGO.
Simon Taylor, a former director of Global Witness, a UK human rights campaigning organisation, said "Western companies and banks have colluded in stripping Afrika's resources. We need to track revenues from oil, mining and logging into national budgets to make sure that the money is not siphoned off by corrupt officials".
Looting of state assets by corrupt leaders should become a crime under international law, he said "The G8 should take the lead in this".
While the British government claims it leads the world in the "fight against poverty", the reality is that it is creating poverty and misery in Afrika by being the major arms supplier to 10 out of 14 conflict-racked African countries, including Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda.

Security Blanket: Western Democracy and the Strategy of Tension

We've written often here of the Pentagon's plan to foment terrorism where needed to achieve the goals of the "National Security State." This is but one of a staggering array of examples of the use of "the strategy of tension" by the "advanced" Western democracies of the modern world. This week came yet another. As Robert Mancini reports in the Guardian, the former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, let a great many cats out of the bag . First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for "sword") is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org.
Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, controlled and funded by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states like Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece, and aided Turkey's ferocious repression of the Kurds. All of this in the name of "preserving democracy" and "defending civilization."
Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which detailed the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.And as we have often noted here, similar operations -- the "El Salvador option," death squads, "High-Value Targeting," etc. -- have been an integral part of the Anglo-American subjegation of Iraq. Indeed, they are a pillar of the "counterinsurgency doctrine" proclaimed by the other president-in-waiting, David Petraeus, and now avidly embraced by the War Machine. As Tara McElvey reports in The American Prospect, the Pentagon is eager to apply "High-Value Targeting" and refinements of the "Phoenix Program" -- in which U.S. forces and local proxies murdered more than 20,000 people -- and the whole panoply of "psy-ops" to imperial imbroglios around the world, applying them "to Afghanistan, then Pakistan, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia, and elsewhere."
But more war is exactly what we've been promised by our agents of change. More war, an even bigger War Machine, "tougher" security measures, national ID cards packed with personal data and tracking devices, more surveillance cameras, new "preventive detention" laws -- and more unbounded authority to use public money to bail out the elite. Yet how to make this happen in the current atmosphere of exhaustion and anxiety? How to catalyze the public into continuing to support the Security State? How to discredit the rising chorus of opposition to neocolonialism, elite cronyism, rampant militarism and growing authoritarianism?

Did US push detention of American without charges?

An American Muslim subjected to several years of intense FBI scrutiny and questioning about links to terrorism has been held without charges, access to a lawyer or contact with his family for nearly three months by the security services of the United Arab Emirates.
The case of Naji Hamdan, coupled with FBI interrogations of an American citizen secretly detained without charges in East Africa, raises the question of whether the Bush administration has asked other nations to hold Americans suspected of terrorism links whom U.S. officials lack the evidence to charge.
That allegation is central to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union was planning to file Tuesday in federal court in Washington against President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
"If the U.S. government is responsible for this detention and we believe it is, this is clearly illegal because our government can't contract away the Constitution by enlisting the aid of other governments that do not adhere to the Constitution's requirements," said Ahilan Arulanantham of the ACLU's southern California office.
The lawsuit, to be brought on behalf of Hamdan's wife and brother, demands that the U.S. government extend to Hamdan his constitutional guarantee against illegal detention by asking the UAE to release him.
"The most elemental legal principles by which we govern ourselves cannot countenance the lawless detention of a United States citizen at the behest of his own government," said a draft of the lawsuit provided to McClatchy by the ACLU.
A spokesman for the FBI's Los Angeles office, Alonzo Hill, referred all inquiries about Hamdan, a former resident of the city's Hawthorne neighborhood, to FBI headquarters in Washington, saying, "This is a counter-terrorism case."

The American Way of Justice

As his client, Salim Hamdan, is released from Guantanamo Bay, revisit one bold JAG lawyer's inside accounting of how he convinced the Supreme Court that President Bush had breached the Constitution.

What I sought was simply that the president, just like the soldiers, sailors, and marines under his command, be required to comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Because I believe that resorting to secret prisons, coercive interrogations, and the abandonment of the rule of law is not the way to keep our country safe from a handful of fanatics. Last summer, with the help of my civilian co-counsel, Professor Neal Katyal, and the law firm of Perkins Coie, I won the case in the Supreme Court of the United States. The problem is that the victory, as big as it was, was disdained by the administration, which has attempted to defy the Supreme Court and the rule of law by building Guantanamo up in the wake of the decision, instead of down. That needs to change.

SEE:

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Somali Eco Disaster Bred Pirates

Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out

Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

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