Globalization is killing Europe, just as it’s already wiped out much of the American middle class.

Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren’t making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did.

Globalists/corporatists/conservative “free market” and “flat earth” advocates say this is a great opportunity to cut benefits for the old folks (and for the young folks in the future), thus bringing the countries budgets back into balance, and this story is the main corporate media storyline.

But it overlooks the real issue (and the real solution): how globalization is killing these nations’ economies and what can be done about it.

From the days of Adam Smith, classical economics pointed out that manufacturing and extraction are the only two ways to “create wealth.”

“Wealth” is different from “income.” Wealth is value, which endures at least for some time. Income is simply compensation for work. If you wash my car for $10 and I mow your lawn for $10, we have a GDP of $20 and it looks like we both have income and economic activity. But no wealth has been created, just income.

On the other hand, if I build your car, I’m creating something of value. And if you turn my lawn into a small farm that produces food we can all eat, you’re creating something of value. Not only do we have an “economy” with a “GDP,” we also have created wealth.

A stick on the ground has no commercial value, but if you add labor to it by carving it into an axe handle — a thing of commercial value — you have “created wealth.” Similarly, metals in the ground have no commercial value, but when you add labor to them by extracting, refining, and forming them into products, you “create wealth.” Even turning seeds and dirt and cows into hamburgers is a form of manufacturing and creates wealth.

This is the “Wealth of Nations” that titled Adam Smith’s famous 1776 book.

On the other hand, when a trader at Goldman Sachs makes a “profit” trading stocks, bonds, or currencies, no wealth whatsoever is created. In fact, to the extent that that trader takes millions in commissions, pay, and bonuses, he’s actually depleting the wealth of the nation (particularly to the extent that he moves his money offshore to save or invest, as many do).

To use the United States as an example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s manufacturing accounted for a high of 28 percent of our total gross domestic product (and much of the rest of the economy like agriculture that, in a classical sense is “manufacturing” wasn’t even included in those numbers), and when Reagan came into office it was at a strong 20 percent. Today it’s about ten percent of our GDP.

What this means is that we’re creating less wealth here, because we’re not making much anymore. (And the biggest growth in American manufacturing has been in the military sector, where goods are made that are then destroyed when they explode over foreign cities, causing even more of our wealth to vanish.)

The main effect of the globalism fad of the past 30 yearrs — lowering the protective barriers to trade that countries for centuries have used to make sure their own local economies are self-sufficient — has been to ship manufacturing (the creation of wealth) from developed nations to developing nations. Transnational corporations love this, because in countries with lower labor costs and few environmental and safety regulations, it’s more profitable to manufacture products. They then sell those products in the “mature” countries — the places that used to manufacture — and people burn through the wealth they’d accumulated in the earlier manufacturing days (home equity, principally, along with savings and lines of credit) to buy these foreign-manufactured goods.

At first, it looks like a good deal to consumers in developed nations. Goods are cheaper! But over a decade or two or three, as the creation of real wealth is reduced and the residue of the old wealth is spent, the developed nations become progressively poorer and poorer. At the same time, the “developing” nations become wealthier — because those are the places that are producing real wealth.

Which brings us to Spain and Greece — and the problem of all developed nations including the USA. So long as globalism continues apace, the transnational corporations and their CEOs will continue to become fabulously wealthy. But, more importantly, they also acquire the political power that comes with that control of economies.

So they tell us that instead of putting back into place tariffs, domestic content laws, and other “protectionist” policies that built America from the time the were first proposed by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 (and largely adopted by Congress in 1793) until they were dismantled by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush, we should instead simple “accept the reality” that we’re “living beyond our means” and we have to “cut back our wages and social programs.”

In other words, they get richer, our nations become poorer, and national sovereignty is reduced.

Nations — and in large countries like the USA, even states — must again rebuild their manufacturing base and become locally self-sufficient, so their own consumers are buying products manufactured by their own workers.

“But won’t that make Wal-Mart’s stuff more expensive?” whine the flat-earthers.

Yes, it will. But most Americans (and Greeks and Spaniards) would gladly pay 10 percent more for the goods in their stores if their paychecks were 20 percent higher. And manufacturing paychecks have always been higher, because manufacturing is where “true wealth” is generated (thus the basis for most union movements, which further guarantee healthy worker income and benefits).

The transnational corporations benefiting from globalization are also, in most cases, the transnational corporations that own our media, so even the word globalization is rarely heard in reports on economic crises around the world.

But globalization is the villain here, and one that needs to be taken in hand and brought under control quickly if we don’t want to see virtually the nations of the world end up subservient to corporate control, a new form of an ancient economic system known as feudalism.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,” “We The People: A Call To Take Back America,” “What Would Jefferson Do?,” “Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It,” and “Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion.” His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

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The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security does not come from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.

The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.

Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.

“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”

The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.

No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?

Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The Americans and their interpreters were shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” The group sat down to talk and “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.

But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version. The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest that she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.

“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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Global Research, February 8, 2010

At first glance it appeared there was a typo in the headlines. The national media reported that, in January, another 20,000 more jobs were lost.  Somehow, the unemployment rate dropped, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent.  Nobody thought this paradox was worth explaining; instead, the media’s attitude was “more good news” about the economy.

But there was other evidence of an obliterated job market hiding behind the cheerful headlines.  After revising the employment numbers in 2009, The New York Times reported, “…the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December, far more than the 85,000 initially reported.”  Overall in 2009, the adjusted numbers showed an additional “…1.36 million fewer jobs…” (February 5, 2010).

And yet the unemployment rate dropped.  One reason this happened is that the U.S. government uses a separate, more unreliable survey to calculate the unemployment rate, in contrast to the survey used to calculate job losses.  There are other more important ways the government obscures the unemployment numbers: if you are no longer receiving unemployment benefits you’re not counted as unemployed; if you’ve given up looking for a job, you’re not counted either.  You are counted, however, if you are working only 15 hours a week, or if you’re a temporary worker.

In this way the government cooks the books to bring fake optimism to the masses.  The mainstream mediareports these fraudulent numbers without asking questions, so that the Democrats can continue doing absolutely nothing towards creating jobs.

But there is a method to the madness.  Mass unemployment brings incredible pressure on workers’ wages and benefits.  The mere threat of being unemployed puts unorganized workers in a precarious position when they’re told to work for less.

The organized labor movement is suffering from the recession too.  In 2009 the number of workers belonging to unions fell by 771,000.   Since union workers have higher standards of living, this number implies a further drop in wages and benefits overall.

These depressing numbers are cheered by corporations and politicians alike.  To them, “economic recovery” means corporate recovery — an increase in profits, nothing more.  And lower wages mean that profits are going to be even higher.

The shallow recovery that politicians are boasting about has been limited to some big businesses, especially Wall Street.  Obama rejoiced at the recent news of 5.7 percent increase in GDP, even though this increase came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The New York Times also added insight to how corporations are boosting profits:

“Instead of adding workers, many companies are squeezing their existing work forces to produce more. Productivity rose by a seasonally adjusted 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter…”  (February 5, 2010).

To summarize: jobs continue to be cut by the thousands, while the remaining workers are forced to work harder with the same or often lower wages and benefits.  This is the “new economy” that politicians speak of when they discuss “increasing exports” on the world market, a plan that requires that U.S. workers make lower wages to compete with the slave-wages overseas.

This is why the Democrats are doing nothing of substance to create living wage jobs.  They tell lies about the job market recovering, creating false hopes by announcing skewed employment numbers to the public.

Such illusions can have only a temporary pacifying effect.  Resentment is building up and optimistic speeches are wearing thin.  But action is needed.  Workers and the unemployed must unite to demand the creation of living wage jobs — a real jobs program that rebuilds America’s infrastructure and promotes education and social services.  A good first step would be for union members to demand that all unions, from the very top to the bottom, organize the unorganized,  and fight for the jobless by building a massive spring demonstration inWashington, DC, and on the West Coast for a massive jobs program.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).  He can be reached at shamuscook@yahoo.com

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Constitutionally illiterate

When even politicians are ignorant of the founding documents, our system is in trouble

Copyright © 2010, The Baltimore Sun

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Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement

By Kleinheider Posted on February 7, 2010 at 7:33 am

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

The people we saw on the steps of Legislative Plaza and county courthouses across the state last year weren’t “movement conservatives.” Certainly the movement conservatives were there at those protests but the tea parties were much bigger in size, scope and concept than just traditional modern conservatism reheated. Last night, the professional conservatives fixed that for good.

For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.

Sarah Palin.

Palin, while explicitly saying the movement had no leader, implicitly offered herself up as one. After this speech, which was widely covered on the internet and carried on television, the tea party movement and Sarah Palin will be inextricably intertwined.

So with the spotlight on her and the attention of the curious media surrounding her what did she present as a tea party agenda? What did she discuss?

Ronald Reagan, national defense and superficial deficiencies of the current democratic occupant of the White House. Wow. In all honesty, the speech could have just as easily been given in 1994 as in 2010 which, of course, was the last time Republican operatives and professional conservatives sought to exploit an authentic populist movement of the center-right.

Ronald Reagan? Are you serious? Three times the name was invoked during the speech. Sure, it was his birthday but it serves to remind us what kind of crowd this was in front of those C-Span cameras.

These weren’t the people who were out protesting. This weren’t regular folks. This was the same old network of conservative hacks, flacks, publicists and hangers-on. This was Conservative Inc.

Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the tea party movement. Nothing. Ronald Reagan is the past. The GOP’s past, no less. The tea party movement was supposed to be the future.

The fact that Palin even has the temerity to position herself as a leader in the movement (and despite her protests that’s exactly what she was doing) is offensive to any student of very, very recent political history. Palin, as mavericky and rogue as she likes to paint herself, was the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2008. She ran with John McCain and defended the Bush legacy. A project she continued last night in front of a faux-tea party audience.

In her remarks, Palin praised the Senator from Arizona and chastised the current President for blaming the past one for his problems. Now, I don’t know every tea partier out there but I do know a few and I don’t remember any of them having a whole lot of good to say about President Bush or John McCain. While they don’t have much positive to say about Barack Obama there no love for George Bush either.

And when did the tea party movement get a foreign policy? I didn’t put a clock on it but the first portion of Palin’s speech seemed very heavy on the neoconservatism.

Palin expressed dismay about the fact that President Obama spent only “9 percent” of the State of the Union on foreign policy and stated that Americans “deserve to know the truth about the threats we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them.”

She talked about “homicide” Bombers and the slammed the administration of its handling of the man who plotted to take down a Detroit airliner on Christmas Day.

“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she told the assembled at Opryland. “They know we’re at war. And to win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

Judson Phillips and Sarah Palin

Palin talked about standing up to Iran, defending Israel and making the world safe for Democracy. All noble goals, I suppose, but what was she doing justifying and perpetuating the foreign policy of George Bush at a tea party convention?

The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.

Almost from start finish, Sarah Palin outlined an agenda that either ignored or de-emphasized the issues and the spirit that the tea parties were founded on.

Sure, there was some of the old school tea party rhetoric in there for flavor but, for a keynote address to a movement that at its inception was very radical, there was nothing radical about Sarah Palin’s speech. It was derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism as far as I could tell.

But the media now have their definition of what it means to be Tea Party. This convention gave them simplistic nativism, birtherism, media bashing, homophobia, and a heavy does of neoconservative foreign policy.

That is the image of tea partydom that Judson Phillips poured out to the eager media this weekend and is now percolating through the many channels of mass and new media.

By Monday afternoon, it will begin to harden and the tea party movement will be Sarah Palin’s movement.

And that is no tea party at all.

Admin Comment: I see a lot of sheep who are going to be led off the cliff on this one. Like I didn`t see it coming. Palin is just another establishment shill that will do as she`s told.

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Global Research, February 7, 2010

The Yemeni archipelago of Socotra in the Indian Ocean is located some 80 kilometres off the Horn of Africa and 380 kilometres South of the Yemeni coastline. The islands of Socotra are a wildlife reserve recognized by (UNESCO), as a World Natural Heritage Site.

Socotra is at the crossroads of the strategic naval waterways of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (See map below). It is of crucial importance to the US military.

MAP 1

Among Washington’s strategic objectives is the militarization of major sea ways. This strategic waterway links the Mediterranean to South Asia and the Far East, through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

It is a major transit route for oil tankers. A large share of China’s industrial exports to Western Europe transits through this strategic waterway. Maritime trade from East and Southern Africa to Western Europe also transits within proximity of Socotra (Suqutra), through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. (see map below). A military base in Socotra could be used to oversee the movement of vessels including war ships in an out of the Gulf of Aden.

MAP 2

Sea Power

From a military standpoint, the Socotra archipelago is at a strategic maritime crossroads. Morever, the archipelago extends over a relatively large maritime area at the Eastern exit of the Gulf of Aden, from the island of Abd al Kuri, to the main island of Socotra. (See map 1 above) This maritime area of international transit lies in Yemeni territorial waters. (See map 1).

Socotra is some 3000 km from the US naval base of Diego Garcia, which is among America’s largest overseas military facilities.

The Socotra Military Base

On January 2nd, 2010, President Saleh and General David Petraeus, Commander of the US Central Command met for high level discussions behind closed doors.

The Saleh-Petraeus meeting was casually presented by the media as a timely response to the foiled Detroit Christmas bomb attack on Northwest flight 253. It had apparently been scheduled on an ad hoc basis as a means to coordinating counter-terrorism initiatives directed against “Al Qaeda in Yemen”, including “the use [of] American drones and missiles on Yemen lands.”

Several reports, however, confirmed that the Saleh-Petraeus meetings were intent upon redefining US military involvement in Yemen including the establishment of a full-fledged military base on the island of Socotra. Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh was reported to have “surrendered Socotra for Americans who would set up a military base, pointing out that U.S. officials and the Yemeni government agreed to set up a military base in Socotra to counter pirates and al-Qaeda.” (Fars News. January 19, 2010)

On January 1st, one day before the Saleh-Petraeus meetings in Sanaa, General Petraeus confirmed in a Baghdad press conference that “security assistance” to Yemen would more than double from 70 million to more than 150 million dollars, which represents a 14 fold increase since 2006. (Scramble for the Island of Bliss: Socotra!, War in Iraq, January 12, 2010. See also CNN January 9, 2010, The Guardian, December 28, 2009).

This doubling of military aid to Yemen was presented to World public opinion as a response to the Detroit bomb incident, which allegedly had been ordered by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

The establishment of an air force base on the island of Socotra was described by the US media as part of the “Global war on Terrorism”:

“Among the new programs, Saleh and Petraeus agreed to allow the use of American aircraft, perhaps drones, as well as “seaborne missiles”–as long as the operations have prior approval from the Yemenis, according to a senior Yemeni official who requested anonymity when speaking about sensitive subjects. U.S. officials say the island of Socotra, 200 miles off the Yemeni coast, will be beefed up from a small airstrip [under the jurisdiction of the Yemeni military] to a full base in order to support the larger aid program as well as battle Somali pirates. Petraeus is also trying to provide the Yemeni forces with basic equipment such as up-armored Humvees and possibly more helicopters.” (Newsweek,  Newsweek, January 18, 2010, emphasis added)

Existing runway and airport

US Naval Facility?

The proposed US Socotra military facility, however, is not limited to an air force base. A US naval base has also been contemplated.

The development of Socotra’s naval infrastructure was already in the pipeline. Barely a few days prior (December 29, 2009) to the Petraeus-Saleh discussions (January 2, 2010), the Yemeni cabinet approved a US$14 million loan by Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED) in support of the development of Socotra’s seaport project.

MAP 3

The Great Game

The Socotra archipelago is part of the Great Game opposing Russia and America.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had a military presence in Socotra, which at the time was part of South Yemen.

Barely a year ago, the Russians entered into renewed discussions with the Yemeni government regarding the establishment of a Naval base on Socotra island. A year later, in January 2010, in the week following the Petraeus-Saleh meeting, a Russian Navy communiqué “confirmed that Russia did not give up its plans to have bases for its ships… on Socotra island.” (DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia), January 25, 2010)

The Petraeus-Saleh January 2, 2010 discussions were crucial in weakening Russian diplomatic overtures to the Yemeni government.

The US military has had its eye on the island of Socotra since the end of the Cold War.

In 1999, Socotra was chosen “as a site upon which the United States planned to build a signal intelligence system….” Yemeni opposition news media reported that “Yemen’s administration had agreed to allow the U.S. military access to both a port and an airport on Socotra.” According to the pposition daily Al-Haq, “a new civilian airport built on Socotra to promote tourism had conveniently been constructed in accordance with U.S. military specifications.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), October 18, 2000)

The Militarization of the Indian Ocean

The establishment of a US military base in Socotra is part of the broader process of militarization of the Indian Ocean. The latter consists in integrating and linking Socotra into an existing structure as well as reinforcing the key role played by  the Diego Garcia military base in the Chagos archipelago.

The US Navy’s geostrategist Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan had intimated, prior to World War, that “whoever attains maritime supremacy in the Indian Ocean would be a prominent player on the international scene.” (Indian Ocean and our Security).

What was at stake in Mahon’s writings was the strategic control by the US of major Ocean sea ways.

MAP 4

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal,  which hosts the award winning website: www.globalresearch.ca . He is the author of the international best-seller “The Globalisation of Poverty and The New World Order”. He is contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, member of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission and recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, Germany. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

Related Global Research Article: See Rick Rozoff,  U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean, Global Research,  8 January 2010.

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Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that Wall Street’s intransigence was the reason for Congress’s failure to pass any bill to regulate the Street. “The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis.”

In other words, it isn’t Congress’s fault. It isn’t the Senate Banking Committee’s fault. It certainly isn’t Dodd’s fault. The reason more than a year has passed since the biggest bailout in the history of the world and nothing has been done to prevent a repeat performance – even as the biggest banks are doling out more than $30 billion of bonuses, even as Goldman Sachs is awarding its big traders $16 billion in bonuses (more than the $13 billion Goldman collected from taxpayers via the bailout of AIG), even as AIG itself is handing out bonuses – the reason is … what, exactly, Senator? Because the Street has sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill?

Call me old fashioned, but I thought Congress was in charge of passing legislation, not Wall Street.

Dodd left out the most telling detail, of course. Wall Street is where the campaign money is. Dodd of all people knows that. He’s been on the receiving end of lots of it over the years.

Wall Street firms and their executives have been uniquely generous to both political parties, emerging recently as one of the largest benefactors of the Democratic Party. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street firms and executives handed out $42 million to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. During the 2008 elections, Wall Street showered Democratic candidates with well over $88 million and Republicans with over $67 million, putting the Street right up there with the insurance industry as among the nation’s largest equal-opportunity donors.

Some Democrats are quietly grumbling that all the tough talk emanating from the White House in recent weeks – the President calling the Street’s denizens “fat cats” and threatening them with limits on their size and the risks they can take, even waiving a watered-down version of Glass-Steagall in their faces – is making it harder to collect money from the Street this mid-term election year. And the Street is quietly threatening that it may well give Republicans more, if the saber-rattling doesn’t stop.

Congress isn’t doing a thing about Wall Street because it’s in the pocket of Wall Street. Dodd’s outburst at the Street is like the alcoholic who screams at a bartender “how dare you give me another drink when all I’ve done is pleaded with you for one!”

Dodd is right about one thing. The American people are frustrated, and the failure of Congress to pass real financial reform is insulting. But in trying to place responsibility for this appalling failure on Wall Street, Dodd insults us even more.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama’s transition advisory board. His latest book is Supercapitalism.

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His personal blog is Robert Reich’s Blog.

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Middle-Class Rage Against the Government

by Jack D. Douglas

The soaring, middle-class rage against government catastrophes, terrorism, and corruptions of all forms is in part due to the immense catastrophes they have seen government and Big Corporations working with government produce in front of their startled eyes over and over again. The Great Financial Crisis is certainly a colossal catastrophe they have seen crashing all around them, Government officials deny everything and try to blame it all on the local real estate guy or gal who worked with you to get a mortgage for your home, But even the terminally ignorant and dumb see that government did not prevent it and intelligent people are perfectly aware the government not only was the prime mover of it all by getting interest rates below zero in real terms and the government is now giving vast piles of their money to the Big Bank Perps, rewarding the corporate perps for the catastrophe they helped to create.

But they are also seeing the government catastrophes erupting ever more frequently everywhere, from Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to Katrina in New Orleans and even to police terrorism in our homes and FDA catastrophes across the board endangering all of us. You can see this in many ways. One of the simplest and quickest is to read America’s biggest magazine aimed at the middle class, general readers – Reader’s Digest. It’s one of the many middle class pulse-checkers and movers I check out all the time to get clear signs that we are passing the tipping points of public opinion on major issue. Other pulse checkers and movers I check all the time are AARP Magazine, newspapers and TV-news from Fox to PBS, Time and Newsweek, and magazines like Harvard and Princeton and the New Yorker and Atlantic and popular movie and TV reviews – which I normally do not have time for myself. I find the Digest about the best indicator of mass, middle class, general opinion tipping points. (AARP is a bit bigger and better for older people.)

The April 2008 issue of The Digest has a good article on “Can We Trust The FDA?” The answer is a 100 Decibel NO! The article even points out that many drug problems do not show signs of injury until they’ve been used for years – hormone replacement used by millions of women for decades is an extreme example, but they note there are many millions of people routinely endangered by Big Pharma drugs not tested for long runs and not followed once approved.

The March, 2010, issue of The Digest has a good summary article about police terrorism entitled “Terror In The House” in a standard section called OUTRAGEOUS, very appropriately. The article has not only the incredible REAL AMERICAN HORROR STORIES but also notes that the SWAT Team Terrors are soaring because the police use these heavily armed, trigger-happy cops for all kinds of nonviolent suspects these days. They quote Norm Stamper, a decent cop who moved from San Diego to Seattle to become chief there, saying that these cops forget this is a democracy with a Constitution – no excuses boys and girls!

There are lots of these now in these mass circulation, middle class Media. Only hermits can fail to get the messages and there is lots of evidence that people are convinced, from call-ins, changes in behavior on food and drugs, to political movements. We have just been through a massive campaign by Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Media and all their allies to pass a huge central plan for healthcare in America. The middle classes watched and listened and in the end decided they don’t trust them and revolted against it. No one can know what the details are or what they mean in this vast pile of rules and regulations which are not even finalized. But the people know whatever is there the planners cannot be trusted. This has already spawned a huge new Tea Party movement and radically changed Party politics at the top, The AARP tried to straddle the issue but went along with the Party on it. I think The Digest is a better indicator of middle class opinion even on health care.

Outrage against the government at the top is breaking out all over.

February 8, 2010

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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GORDON DUFF: DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, DUPLICITY IN AFGHANISTAN

WHAT OUR MILITARY LEADERS ONLY SAY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Open today’s newspaper and get a map of the battle zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  You say they aren’t there?  Open today’s newspaper and find out how many troops our enemies have, who their leaders are.  Can’t find that either?  Look in the paper to find out why we are fighting at all.  Not there too?  This isn’t half of it, we aren’t just being kept in the dark.  It goes much further.  Lets look at some things that just don’t add up.

BLAMING PAKISTAN

America loves blaming Pakistan.  Their side of the border has all the bad people and they do nothing about it.  Do you know why Pakistan can’t catch their Taliban terrorists?  Simple.  They aren’t in Pakistan, they were moved to Afghanistan and are being kept safe and warm.  Who would do this?  Who would protect these terrorists who are killing so many Pakistanis and Americans?

They were moved by American military contractors, contractors who are helping guard them inside Afghanistan.

Why doesn’t Pakistan take their huge army and go after the Taliban?  Well, the Taliban would simply cross the border like they have been doing for hundreds of years.  Nobody on the other side can stop them.  The entire border area is in chaos, nobody is in control at all.  We love calling our enemies “Taliban” but they are little more than gangsters and for some reason the United States is actually helping its own enemies?

WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?

Pakistan may be our military ally, but our real allies are Israel and India.  We could care less if Pakistan burned to the ground.  Israel and India are going to rule Asia, hold off China and help American business make billions in gas and oil profits.

OK, it gets better:  Afghanistan and India are allies.  India has bases in Afghanistan arming Taliban to attack Pakistan (and American troops too).  The CIA helps them do this, Israel helps organize it and billions in drug money finance all of it.

Our private mercenary armies inside Afghanistan and Pakistan act as “enforcers” to keep it all going, accountable to no government, only there to keep the drugs flowing, the weapons moving to the Taliban and the war going as long as possible.  Why keep the war going, you ask?  Simple.  If the war stops, the drug money stops.  We are talking tens of billions here.

OK, WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?

Much of Afghanistan and Pakistan are tribal areas controlled by the same people who live on either side of a line drawn by Britain in 1893, the Durand Line.  People used to travel back and forth, moving herds, some grew crops, wheat, not opium, and families lived on both sides of the border, a border that barely existed.

Then came the Russian occupation.  Russians dismembered the tribal structure and put land mines everywhere.  Nothing could move.  A war went on for years run out of Pakistan by the CIA who put the nastiest and crookedest people possible in power in Afghanistan and simply turned away, leaving a total wreck.

Then came the Taliban who ran flight schools in the US to train airline pilots to crash into buildings.  OK, this doesn’t make sense, but there was a Taliban and maybe some terrorists but we will never know for sure.  Too much lying has gone on.  I thought they were all in Iraq building WMDs but that didn’t work out either.  Is it possible almost everything we are told is a bit, well, imaginary?  Think about it.  We are going to touch on this in a bit.

THEN CAME 9/11

The US came in, overthrew the Taliban with the help of war lords in the north who are not very popular with most of the people of the country and we began rebuilding Afghanistan.

You like this story?  It should have had a happy ending except George W. Bush was president and the companies hired to rebuild Afghanistan stole all the money and did nothing.  Instead of stabilizing Afghanistan and rebuilding their VERY VERY SMALL economy, we attack Iraq and waited for Afghanistan to turn around and bite us.

Then, Afghanistan turned around and bit us, Pakistan too.  They are still biting us and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.  We are planning a “surge” to take care of the problem.  We can ask our British friends how this is going to work out.  They “surged” for 2 hundred years and eventually left.

How did America respond?  Abandoned by our own government, up to our neck in corruption, Washingtin and Kabul, we did the best we could with almost no troops, fighting an enemy that was never our enemy when, instead, we could have honestly done what we had promised years before:  rebuild the Afghan economy.

SO, HOW DID WE GET THIS MESS, WITH AMERICANS ON BOTH SIDES, INDIA AND ISRAEL INVOLVED, PAKISTAN AND NO HOPE IN SIGHT?

Pakistan is in over their heads.  Their yearly military budget is less than the Pentagon spends on golf courses alone, literally.  (the Pentagon runs 168 golf courses worldwide)

India and Pakistan have hated each other for 63 years.  This war has allowed India with the help of Israel, to literally take Pakistan apart.  India can arm terrorists in Pakistan, in Afghanistan and work with American mercenaries against Pakistan.  Many inside Pakistan are extremely corrupt and have made it almost impossible to govern the country.  The president of Pakistan is accused of stealing millions and many members of government face prosecution.

India and Israel both have huge intelligence agencies, the RAW and Mossad, that specialize in planning terrorist attacks and blaming others.  Some we catch, like the Christmas bombing (Crotch Bomber) in Detroit.  Others are blamed on Islamic extremists.  Since Israel controls most of the worlds newspapers and TV networks, only one side gets out.

Long ago, a free press was important as a way of protecting our democracy.  Am I clear?

DRUGS

50 billion dollars in drugs and nobody sees anything.  50 billion dollars in drugs and more poppy fields are planted every day, especially in US controlled areas.

This kind of money buys intelligence agencies, military leaders, high ranking elected members of the US government and more influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Israel than anyone will ever admit.

No matter what anyone does, the drug business will work to keep the war going and has the money and power to do exactly that.  Ask yourself why you see photographs of troops in poppy fields?  These drugs are destroying the lives of millions worldwide, corrupting governments and destroying economies.  It is the duty of every police, military and international agency to stop this drug business first but nobody is doing anything.

Everyone is involved.

MOVING FORWARD

We have some simple solutions to enact.  We can stop fighting, at least with responsible tribal leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan and help them rebuild their country.  We can negotiate an end to the presence of any foreign terrorists and guarantee the rights of all, especially the women who suffered so much under the old Taliban.  We have reason to believe that the majority of tribal leaders in Afghanistan are ready for a government that respects individual freedoms and will, with help, be able to maintain law and order instead of chaos, the real breeding ground for terrorism.

We can identify the criminals and go after them, criminals only, not the entire nation as we are now.  First we talk and earn trust.  Then we build and work together, then we fight.

It doesn’t work the other way around.  Right now, we look like invaders.

Yes, there are bad people.  People are going to have to die to save Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Others are going to have to learn to trust, do business, trade, talk, listen and work together.

REGIONAL SOLUTION

This problem involves Iran.  It also involves Israel.  China is involved as is Russia.  Nobody can be ignored.  Afghanistan and Pakistan need to be stabilized.  This is a humanitarian effort.  Too many are dying.

Regionally, India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel have to come to an understanding.  Behind the scenes, much has been done already, more than any American knows.  However, fear and hatred runs deep.  There are people of good will in each of these countries, more like this than anyone imagines.  War and terrorism, war and threat of war, war and arms buildups have taken over from business, trade and common sense.

This is not survivable for anyone.  It will only head one direction, nuclear war, maybe not this year but five years from now, maybe less.  It is inevitable.  It is also unacceptable and unnecessary.

AMERICA AND REALITY

Whether it is our phony corporate news, spineless politicans or gutless military leaders, its time we stopped misrepresenting the facts.  Every day what I hear sounds more and more like General Westmoreland in Vietnam telling me about the “light at the end of the tunnel.”  We found that light, a fast moving freight that ran us over.  All the “drones” in the world and hundreds of thousands of troops aren’t going to have any lasting effect on the lives of tribesmen living as they did a thousand years ago.

Billions of dollars, cluster bombs and American advisors talking capitalism and Evangelical Christianity under threat of torture and imprisonment hasn’t worked out so well.  Our repackaged “more of the same” solution will leave us 80 billion more in debt, hundreds of Americans dead, another 20,000 PTSD disability claims to deny and another decade of war.

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