Peace and Justice Post

Nobel Prize recipient Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget guru Linda J. Bilmes are revising their original $3 trillion war cost estimate. As Bilmes reports, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are at least 25 percent costlier than previous projections.

As Election Day draws near, it’s pretty clear: Voters are worried about jobs, the budget deficit and the rising national debt.

But behind those issues—behind the ads and candidates’ speeches, behind the rhetoric about “out-of-control” government spending—there lurks a hidden, less-talked-about issue: the cost of the ongoing wars.

Already, we’ve spent more than $1 trillion in Iraq, not counting the $700 billion consumed each year by the Pentagon budget. And spending in Iraq and Afghanistan now comes to more than

$3 billion weekly, making the wars a major reason for record-level budget deficits.

Two years ago, Joseph Stiglitz and I published The Three Trillion Dollar War in which we estimated that the budgetary and economic costs of the war would reach $3 trillion.

Taking new numbers into account, however, we now believe that our initial estimate was far too conservative—the cost of the wars will reach between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.

For example, we recently analyzed the medical and disability claim patterns for almost a million troops who have returned from the wars, and, based on this record, we’ve revised our estimate upward to between $600 billion and $900 billion—a broad specter, yes, but certainly also a significant upward tick from our earlier projection of $400 billion to $700 billion, based on historical patterns.

Similarly, our estimates for the economic and social costs associated with returning veterans can be expected to rise by at least a third—the staggering toll of repeated deployments over the past decade.

Continues >>

by David Griffiths, New Statsman,  28 October 2010

Increasingly powerful voices in India are calling for a true end to discrimination based on caste.

Every day, Uma walks through the village with her basket to the communal latrine. Nobody touches her along the way. She has an enamel toilet in her own home, but she cleans the excrement of others because this is the job assigned by her caste.

When President Obama visits India next month, it is quite certain that he will pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, perceived around the world as one of history’s most celebrated symbols of liberation, and a source of inspiration for the US president himself.

But there are calls within India for Obama to look further than Gandhi in paying homage to Indian heroes. For India’s community of 167 million Dalits, once known as “untouchables”, the true icon is Dr B R Ambedkar. Himself an untouchable, Dr Ambedkar gained doctorates from Columbia University, where President Obama, too, was educated, and at the London School of Economics, before becoming the architect of independent India’s new constitution.

Relatively little-known internationally, Ambedkar has accrued almost divine status as a focal point for Dalit aspirations. Within India, Ambedkar appears everywhere. His statues easily outnumber those of Gandhi. Deep in communities of Dalits, you will hear the greeting, “Jai Bhim“, meaning “hail Bhimrao [Ambedkar]”. You will see his portrait in any self-assertive Dalit’s home, and his name is spoken with pride. When, in 2006, the nation marked the 50th anniversary of his death, over 800,000 Dalits crowded to pay him their respects in Mumbai.

Dalits stress that, unlike the Mahatma, Ambedkar challenged the very existence of the caste system as the basis for discrimination against Dalits. It is because of Ambedkar, they say, that Dalits play any role in India’s political and administrative structures – albeit a limited part. That is why anti-caste activists are urging Obama to pay homage to Ambedkar as a true giant of the cause of liberation from oppression.

Continues >>

By Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, Oct 28, 2010

Israel National News (INN) has published an op-ed about my essay “The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel“, in which they asked Dr. Mordecai Nisan, a lecturer at Hebrew University, to respond. There are two observations to be made about this op-ed: First, it does not actually refute so much as a single point of fact or logic from my article, and, second, Dr. Nisan in fact acknowledges that my thesis is correct.

“Of course it is a myth to assert or believe that the U.N. created Israel,” Dr. Nisan admits in his reply. One might think that, since there is agreement on this point of fact, there would be not much else to debate. What he challenges, however, is not the thesis itself, but the corollary that the Zionist leadership lacked any legal foundation for their unilateral declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.

Continues >>

Intifada Palestine, Oct 24, 2010

By Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban

Seconds passed like an eternity for a heart beating for freedom, a soul which fought against occupation and its humiliation and a body shrinking into itself trying to avoid 21^st century brutality in a prison cell without door or windows. The body is thin and delicate, the head is scarved and the eyes are blindfolded in absolute absence of human conscience; while the monsters of the Western age in the land of Jesus Christ dance around their victim. Are these monsters dancing in celebration of kidnapping an Arab girl whose only sin is that she has fought for her and her people’s freedom? Or are they dancing in celebration of the death of world conscience which drawls human rights and freedom while turning its back on the most sacred cause of freedom in the 21^st century – the freedom of the Palestinian people and its fight for salvation from Israeli terrorism perpetrated through Western support for over sixty years.

Released prisoner, Ihsan Dababseh (24), tells the story of the video in which Israeli soldier Avi Yakobov, who abused her by performing a belly-dance and rubbing against her bound and blind-folded body in December, 2007 at the Gush Etzion military base. She says, “Another soldier brought a bottle of wine and asked me to drink”. Minutes later, soldiers attacked her like frenzied wolves with gun butts. “One soldier kept hitting my head against an iron bar until I blacked out”.

Continues >>

 

World Bulletin, Friday, 29 October 2010

International aid agency Oxfam warned that three months into Pakistan’s unprecedented flood crisis funds were drying up, putting millions at risk with swathes of farmland still under water.

The United Nations issued a record two-billion-dollar appeal for funds to cope with Pakistan’s worst humanitarian disaster, which ravaged an area roughly the size of England and affected 21 million people.

“Funds for the UN flood appeal are drying up and threatening the aid and reconstruction effort,” Oxfam on Friday said in a statement marking the third month since heavy monsoon rains began falling in northwestern Pakistan.

“The crisis is far from over,” said Oxfam’s director in Pakistan, Neva Khan.

“Fund issue”

A United Nations appeal for $1.9 billion for Pakistan is only 39 percent funded, spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said.

“We still have a long way to go. The food security, health and camp management sectors are really under-funded,” she said.

“Cases of disease are increasing and large areas remain under water in southern Sindh province,” said Oxfam. “As winter approaches, seven million people are still without adequate shelter.”

UN officials say 10 million people are in need of immediate food assistance and health authorities have reported 99 confirmed cases of cholera.

Continues >>

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Tonight’s guest is veteran Middle-East correspondent and author Robert Fisk.

Following the release by WikiLeaks of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents, Mr Fisk wrote an angry piece headlined “The Shaming of America” in his newspaper The Independent.

He claimed the Pentagon’s anger over the leaks was not because their secrecy had been breached, but because they’d been caught out telling lies, and he joined us just a short time ago from Beirut.

Robert Fisk, thanks for being there.

ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: You’re welcome.

TONY JONES: Now, what’s the significance of the close-to-400,000 secret US military documents that have been posted by WikiLeaks, as far as you’re concerned?

ROBERT FISK: Well I think there are several very important elements to this story.

First of all, the individual items like, you know, there are witnesses, American witnesses to torture, they didn’t do anything, that the Iraqis – security authorities were torturing Iraqis, that American air strikes were killing many civilians.

We knew about this, but it was always denied by the Americans. I was doing stories years ago about Iraqis torturing Iraqis and the stories were coming from American officers who were leaking them to me.

But of course every time I wrote them in the paper, the Americans denied that it was true. I went to the scenes of US air strikes. They were obviously limbs, hands, arms of children, babies, women, civilians, as well sometimes as armed men, and we wrote about this. . . .

Continues >>

Victor Stenger, The Huffington Post, Oct 28, 2010

Based on opening remarks presented in the debate “Science and Religion: Confrontation or Accommodation” on October 7, 2010, at The 30th Anniversary Conference of Free Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism,” Los Angeles.

Belief in ancient myths joins with other negative forces in our society to keep most of the world from advancing scientifically, economically, and socially at a time when a rapid advancement in these areas is absolutely essential for the survival of humanity. We are now probably only about a generation or two away from the catastrophic problems that are anticipated from global warming, pollution, and overpopulation. We can expect flooded coastal areas, severe climatic changes, epidemics caused by overcrowding, and starvation for much of humanity. Such disasters are predicted to generate worldwide conflict on a scale that could exceed that of the great twentieth-century wars, possibly with nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable nations and terrorist groups.

This is a time, if there ever was one, when science is needed to lead the way. It won’t do so by sitting back and letting irrationality rule the day. And make no mistake about it; the irrationality we see on today’s political scene, as exemplified by the Tea Party, is fueled by the irrationality of religion.

It’s time for secularists to stop sucking up to Christians — and Muslims and Jews and Hindus and any others who claim they have some sacred right to decide what kind of society the rest of us must live in–what a human being can do with her own body. The good news is that young people are joining the rising atheist movement in increasing numbers. I have not met one yet who is an accommodationist. I have great hope that in perhaps another generation America will have joined Europe and the rest of the developed world in shucking off the rusty chains of ancient superstition.

Continues >>

Officials: 3 suspected US missile strikes in 24 hours kill 14 people in NW Pakistan

RASOOL DAWAR, Antiwar Newswire, Oct 28, 2010
Source: AP News

American unmanned planes fired two missiles at a house in a Pakistani tribal region close to the Afghan border on Thursday, killing seven alleged militants, the latest in a barrage of such attacks, intelligence officials said.