Peace and Justice Post

CounterPunch, April 9, 2008

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy lost 98,000 private sector jobs in March, half of which were in manufacturing. Today 13,643,000 Americans are employed in manufacturing, of which 9,849,000 are production workers.

Government employs 22,387,000 Americans, 8,744,000 more than manufacturing. Even the category leisure and hospitality employs 13,682,000 Americans, slightly more than manufacturing. There are as many waitresses and bartenders as production workers.

Wholesale and retail trade employ 21,467,000 Americans. Professional and business services employ 18,036,000 Americans of which 8,368,000 are in administrative and waste services. Education and health services employ 18,699,000 Americans.

Financial activities employ 8,228,000 Americans. The information sector employs 3,010,000. Transportation and warehousing employ 4,532,000. Construction employs 7,338,000, and natural resources, mining and logging employ 751,000. Other services such as repair, laundry, and membership associations employ 5,516,000 Americans.

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Socialist Worker, April 11, 2008

NICOLE COLSON reports on the aftermath of the Iraqi government’s offensive against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

SECURITY FORCES of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government may have carried out summary executions of members of rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, according to media revelations that have once again exposed the scale of brutality in “liberated” Iraq.

At the end of March, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered a halt to the government’s assault on Mahdi fighters, following days of intense combat in which at least 500 people in Basra and in the Sadr City section of Baghdad are said to have been killed. The offensive was an attempt to crack down on the Mahdi Army and force it to disarm.

According to a report by National Public Radio, audiotape of police radio transmissions reveal what appears to be the execution of detained Shiite militia members. On the tape, intercepted from an Iraqi police radio channel in the city of Karbala, an Iraqi policeman reportedly asked his commander what to do with a wounded militia fighter.

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By Abid Aslam | Inter Press Service, April 8, 2008

WASHINGTON – U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.

Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.

David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, is to brief the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees on Tuesday and Wednesday. The latest findings are unlikely to have a significant impact on this week’s proceedings but could stoke anti-incumbent sentiment in this year of presidential and legislative elections.

Lawmakers charged with overseeing Pentagon contractors hold stock in those very firms, as do vocal critics of the war in Iraq, says the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP).

Senator John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachusetts who staked his 2004 presidential bid in part on his opposition to the war, tops the list of investors. His holdings in firms with Pentagon contracts of at least five million dollars stood at between 28.9 million dollars and 38.2 million dollars as of Dec. 31, 2006. Kerry sits on the Senate foreign relations panel.

Members of Congress are required to report their personal finances every year but only need to state their assets in broad ranges.

Other top investors include Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican with holdings of 12.1 million – 49.1 million dollars; Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican (9.2 million – 37.1 million dollars); Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin (5.2 million – 7.6 million dollars); and Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat (2.7 million – 6.3 million dollars).

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Manifest Destiny – 21st Century Style

By Kristina M. Gronquist

04/25/05 “ICH“ – – The concept of Manifest Destiny describes the 19th century conviction that God intended the continent of North America to be under the control of Christian, European Americans. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was the backbone of U.S. government efforts to colonize land inhabited by indigenous people in North America and expand the United States into Mexican territory.

Believers in Manifest Destiny asserted that U.S. rulers were predestined to spread their proclaimed superior values near and far. Propaganda, armed interventions, occupations, and terror were used in various insidious combinations. Indigenous people whose country we reside in can best attest to the results of Manifest Destiny policy, as they survived centuries of unspeakable injustices and lost millions, but courageously, have survived.

Ulysses S. Grant, that era’s most prominent military man, and himself a participant in the Mexican-American War, wrote in his memoirs, “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

Although the shameful concept of Manifest Destiny should be confined to history books, it has reared its ugly head, as reflected in our government’s 21st century mission to reshape the Middle East. Of course, the psychology of Manifest Destiny – the projection of Anglo-Saxon supremacy – never really went away, it has always been used to justify America’s expansionist adventures. Losing the Vietnam War drove it toward covert action, i.e., U.S. attempts in the 1980’s to undo the Nicaraguan revolution and support for death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. But U.S. foreign policy has consistently been based on an arrogant and racist view that “America knows best.”

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The Palestinian Chronicle, April 8, 2008

LONDON – The incoming UN human rights investigator in the occupied Palestinian territories insisted on Tuesday, April, 8 that Israeli atrocities against Palestinians were similar to those of Nazi Germany.

“If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison,” Richard Falk told the BBC News.

Falk, a world-renowned Jewish-American professor of international law at the prestigious Princeton University, first made the comparison last June.

“Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not,” he wrote in an essay titled “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust”.

“It is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.'”

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Ambassador Ryan Crocker could not point to anything new, either. Political progress in Iraq has been – disappointing was a word General Petraeus had used previously. Yet, the situation is far from bleak. Despite the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad, the spike in violent incidents and the uptick in the number of US casualties in March, put in the proper perspective the trends are still positive.

In a nutshell, the situation in Iraq remains largely unchanged since the last time General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testified in September 2007. So does the position of the Bush administration that insists progress is taking place but refuses to be pinned down to any long-term plan.

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Axis of Logic, April 2007 By Nesreen Melek, Iraqi Poet

I want to sit on Dijlah’s shore at night
Get a wooden stick and place a white candle on it
I will light the candle, will look at the sky and make a wish
I wish the past would vanish that moment
I wish to live the good days again when all worries were small
When my mother’s touch would heal my pain
When my father’s laps would comfort my soul
When my relative’s words would sooth my spirit
When my friend’s laughter would ease my days
When my country’s love would nourish my heart

What happened to Dijlah, what happened to my family and what happened to my country?

We had a life like others
We had our dreams and hopes
Our children went to school
They worked hard and became prosperous
They grew up and decided to build their country
They became engineers, doctors, teachers and others decided to choose different careers
Our women were envied by other women in the world
They were educated and strong willed
They worked hard to raise their children
Men and women worked side by side
The country was blooming
We had everything, we had peace and we had each other
But we had oil

A cowboy decided to invade the blessed soil
He broke the law where the first law was invented
He killed children even though he had children of his own
He insulted them even though he didn’t like someone to insult his own
He raped women even though he might be loved by a mother or a wife
He spread fear in the heart of the civilian
He ruined the society even though he had one of his own

Unless this cowboy will have dreams
Unless this cowboy will be loved
Unless he has a loving society to cuddle him
Unless he belongs to a country which he will be proud of
Unless he will know how to love and give
Unless he will learn how to respect others
Unless he will realize than he is not better than others
The killing, the rape and the destruction will continue

But one day Iraqi men, women and children will rise
They will stop the killing, the rape and the destruction
They will be united by the love for their country and their land
They will kick out the cowboy
The cowboy will go back to a country which will not take care of him
Then he will ask himself “why did I do it.. why…wh”.

• Seumas Milne
• The Guardian, Tuesday April 8 2008

A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.

The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security” without time limit.

The authorisation is described as “temporary” and the agreement says the US “does not desire permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq”. But the absence of a time limit or restrictions on the US and other coalition forces – including the British – in the country means it is likely to be strongly opposed in Iraq and the US.

Iraqi critics point out that the agreement contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries. The agreement is intended to govern the status of the US military and other members of the multinational force.

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BAGHDAD – Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the the US State Department had renewed the contract of private security company Blackwater USA without the approval of the Baghdad government.

Blackwater is the most controversial of several private security firms tasked with protecting high-profile US officials and foreign diplomats in Iraq.

The company’s guards shot dead 17 Iraqi civilians while escorting an American diplomat through Baghdad in September 2007 in an incident denounced as a crime by the Iraqi government.

Blackwater says its guards reacted in self-defence.

“As far as Iraqi government is involved, this issue is still under consideration and we are still discussing principles upon which foreign security companies must operate, especially this company because they committed a massacre against Iraqis and until now this matter has not been resolved,” Maliki said on Monday in an interview with US television network CNN.

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Colin Powell’s New Gig

By Seth Sandronsky | ZNet, April 7, 2008

Before U.S. forces attacked Iraq in March 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell argued at the U.N. for the armed removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction threatened the American people. Iraq’s WMDs have yet to found. But Powell found a new mission as founding chair of America’s Promise Alliance. USA Today calls it “a group of foundations, advocacy and non-profit organizations, and corporate and religious groups focusing on children’s education, safety and health.” Alma, Powell’s wife, is the current chair of APA, which released an April 1 report on which students do (not) earn high school diplomas in the U.S.

The report is titled Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation. It found a 17 percent gap in the graduation rates between students at U.S. urban and suburban high schools. Christopher B. Swanson of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center wrote the report with data from the federal Education Dept. The Education Research Center gets support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The foundation’s largesse is due in no small part to the support Gates gets from the federal government: the copyright monopolies it grants to Microsoft software. This is no case of the market magic. To the contrary, this is a government policy of intervention for a multi-billionaire and his U.S.-based global corporation.

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