TS Picks

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1. A Growing Trend of Leaving America : Jay Tolson, US News

2. Can This Planet Be Saved? : Paul Krugman, NYT

3. Afghanistan: Shoals Ahead for President Obama : Immanuel Wallerstein, Agence Global

4. Wrong on Afghanistan : Patrick Seale, Agence Global

5. Beware: ‘Machine Zone’ Ahead : Natasha Dow Schüll, Washington Post

6. Ultimatum to the GOP : Robert D. Novak, Washington Post

7. Disaster Capitalism, State of Extortion : Naomi Klein, The Nation



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And the winner is … the Israel lobby

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By Pepe Escobar

logo-aipac.jpg They’re all here - and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as “a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US foreign policy”, but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel’s direction”.

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Hope, Change, and Pissing in the Wind

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“Of Obama, Democrats, and the Power Elite”

By Patrice Greanville and Jason Miller

obama1.jpgCHARISMATIC, ARTICULATE, SMOOTH, AND INTELLIGENT, Barrack Obama is the living embodiment of his vague, ethereal, and tantalizing messages of “hope” and “change.” To the millions upon millions of US Americans desperate to purge the naked imperialism and blatant criminality of the Bush administration from the White House, Obama IS hope and change. Yet like many establishment liberals before him, Obama is no cure for the malignant creep toward fascism plaguing our nation. If elected, at best he will merely serve to postpone the inevitable a bit.

To understand why Obama and the ilk he took with him to DC would be little or no better than the human excrement currently occupying the tangible, visible positions of power in the US, let’s examine various facets of Obama(1) and of our rotten-to-the-core sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems.

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Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and the Weight of Empire

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From Smoke and Mirrors

TS Admin : What a poignant piece of writing. TS said the same in ‘Happy New Year and Row on you Galley Slaves’ but not many paid attention at the time.

pres.jpgTo say that I was surprised would be an understatement; when I heard Ron Paul was scaling back his campaign and closed out any possibility of an independent run. WTF?

You see, I had assumed his candidacy was not his own but that it belonged to his supporters; that he was just the standard bearer. Suddenly… just like that… lights out. It sank under the radar the same way his campaign stayed off the radar and everything just kept going on the way it was going on.

Then I see that Dennis Kucinich backed off of his impeachment effort, shortly after a visit from AIPAC and sundry. Word has it they guaranteed his seat in the next round. Was his seat in danger? Does that matter? Did this visit influence his choice? I don’t know that either. What I do know is that there is no honorable reason for him to have backed off. Either he had his price or someone told him they knew where his family lived. I don’t buy the re-election support thing. It sounds like something they cooked up to hide the offer he couldn’t refuse.

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Individual and State

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By Ted Lang

nationalism.pngDiversity has given way to only two distinct opposites: respect for the individual versus respect for the state. Our nation was created to protect the sanctity of the individual; for freedom, namely the individual’s inherent right to life liberty and property, can only be enjoyed by the individual. In spite of family, friends, religious and political factions and groups, we come into this life as an individual and we will leave it as an individual. Fans and advocates of big cradle-to-grave government are in complete denial when they lust after big government to bring out the best in the individual. Government uses force, to restrain and tax, and will always grow itself. And as it eternally continues to do so, it snuffs out human individuality.

Those who favor the power of the state over the reservation and protection of the rights of the individual see the individual as basically bad, and therefore in need of constant correction and supervision by the power, force and goodness of the state. Statists believe in the astonishingly ridiculous notion that one individual is inherently bad, and therefore, a great number of such individuals taken together, namely, the whole, the state, is better than all its components, and the sum of the whole is needed to ensure that its singularly evil components are prevented from doing wrong to each other. The freedom an individual derives from life and liberty is employed by him in the industry that converts his property into the earnings and wealth with which to sustain his own life and that of his family.

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
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ON MARCH 2008
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