TS Picks

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1. What Do You Call a Terror(Jihad)ist? : NYT Op-Ed

2. Indefensible spending : America’s massive military budget is irrational, costly and dangerous. Why isn’t it a campaign issue?

3. Don’t Get Burned! : How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon’s Pain Gun

4. Kohn Signals Wall Street May Get Permanent Access to Fed Loans : Bloomberg News

5. Coming Late to the Table : Bob Herbert, NYT

6. How the War Ends in Iraq : Immanuel Wallerstein, Agence Global

7. Violence Is the Norm of ‘Security’ States : Rami G. Khouri, Agence Global




Britain, the new Banana Republic

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Economic crises… unelected cabals kicking out the Prime Minister: the signs are all there

By Gerard Baker

monkey-banana-holder.jpg It’s at this time of year that an expat’s thoughts turn most wistfully to England. Spring in full blush never seems to hold quite as much promise elsewhere. When you’ve lived abroad for as long as I have, the heart pines more urgently for the little rituals that mark the lengthening of sublime English days. The happy wheeling out of the barbecue for the inaugural dinner al fresco. A thrilling English Test victory at Old Trafford. The annual exchange of recriminations over the Eurovision Song Contest.

This is the time of year that inspired the poets to write about the bucolic pleasures of England - all blossomed pear trees and wise thrushes. For me, the most painfully nostalgic of home thoughts from abroad is this: why is it that strawberries never taste so good anywhere on Earth as they do over there? But, and I worry about writing this, because it can be irritating when people say critical things about their country from afar, but this year it’s not the sweet scent of strawberries that is emanating from Britain but the faint whiff of banana.

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Bomb Haters, Unite!

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Who was it that said, if you live with a cripple, you would learn to limp.

By Anwaar Hussain

kandahar_crutch.gif Walk down a busy Kabul street and try coming back unscarred.

Legless men rattle down bazaars in wheelbarrows, little children with missing limbs crab along like some decapods, one-legged men hobble about on ugly crutches among the throng of people. The common threads; they are all war victims, they are all beggars. Welcome to the land of the wretched.

Perhaps no other place on earth has a larger proportion of disabled citizens living out their miserable existences in such heart rending circumstances as Afghanistan. Three decades of war, millions of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children to trip over, not to include the hordes of suicide bombers now killing in the name of God, have turned Afghanistan into a wasteland of the mutilated and the crippled.

War-related disabilities, primarily loss of limbs, account for an overwhelming proportion of non-birth-defect cases. Cluster munitions and land mines are among the main causes. Out of a population of 25 million, 123,000 Afghans have directly been so incapacitated by war and its consequences.

The Afghans are not alone in their suffering though. Owing to these horrific weapons of war, countless more human beings today live in similar misery in Laos, Iraq, Chechnya, Kosovo, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

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TS Picks

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TS Admin : From today onwards, TS will occasionally be posting its pick from the web for our readers. This also looks after the copyright problems that TS faces with some pieces. This is being done on trial basis pending our readers’ response. TS may continue the practice if the feedback is positive.

Comments, here at the bottom to this post or via email at eagleeye@emirates.net.ae are welcome. So here are today’s TS Picks;

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Orwellian America - 911 & The Road To Iran

Bush’s Endless, Diabolical Hypocrisy On Terror

Oil - A Global Crisis

Roads High and Low : NYT Op-Ed by Bob Herbert

Fall of the house of Shah: end of an era for the world’s last Hindu monarchy

Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled U.S. on Iraq

Iceland tops list of peaceful nations, U.S. 97th

Why Does the Wall Street Journal Hate America?

The Last Roundup

Bush’s Reaction to War



Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11

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By James Petras - May 2008

Wars in an imperialist democracy cannot simply be dictated by executive fiat, they require the consent of highly motivated masses who will make the human and material sacrifices. Imperialist leaders have to create a visible and highly charged emotional sense of injustice and righteousness to secure national cohesion and overcome the natural opposition to early death, destruction and disruption of civilian life and to the brutal regimentation that goes with submission to absolutist rule by the military.

Provocations as Pretexts for Imperial War From Pearl Harbor to 911

 

The need to invent a cause is especially the case with imperialist countries because their national territory is not under threat. There is no visible occupation army oppressing the mass of the people in their everyday life. The ‘enemy’ does not disrupt everyday normal life - as forced conscription would and does. Under normal peaceful time, who would be willing to sacrifice their constitutional rights and their participation in civil society to subject themselves to martial rule that precludes the exercise of all their civil freedoms?

The task of imperial rulers is to fabricate a world in which the enemy to be attacked (an emerging imperial power like Japan) is portrayed as an ‘invader’ or an ‘aggressor’ in the case of revolutionary movements (Korean and Indo-Chinese communists) engaged in a civil war against an imperial client ruler or a ‘terrorist conspiracy’ linked to an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial Islamic movements and secular states. Imperialist-democracies in the past did not need to consult or secure mass support for their expansionist wars; they relied on volunteer armies, mercenaries and colonial subjects led and directed by colonial officers. Only with the confluence of imperialism, electoral politics and total war did the need arise to secure not only consent, but also enthusiasm, to facilitate mass recruitment and obligatory conscription.

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Military or Market-Driven Empire Building: 1950-2008

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By James Petras

Picture by Carlos Latuff.

Military or Market-Driven Empire Building 1950-2008

Introduction

From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale: One predominantly based on military conquests, involving direct invasions, proxy invading armies and subsidized separatist military forces; and the other predominantly based on large-scale, long-term economic penetration via a combination of investments, loans, credits and trade in which ‘market’ power and the superiority (greater productivity) in the means of production led to the construction of a virtual empire.

Throughout the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, European and US empire building resorted to the military route, especially in Asia, Africa, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. By far the British and US colonized the greatest territories through military force, followed by the introduction of state directed mercantile systems, the Monroe doctrine for the US and imperial preference for the British. South America following independence became the site of the growth of market powered empire building. British and later US capital successfully captured the commanding heights of the economies, especially the agro-mining and petroleum export sectors, trade, finance and in some cases attached customs and treasury to cover debt collection. As late developing capitalist countries and emerging imperial powers (EIP), the US, Germany and Japan faced the hostility of the established European empires and limited access to strategic markets and raw materials.

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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
.: ARTICLE BLOCKED :.
ON MARCH 2008
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