Ellen Brown: How Banks and Investors Are Starving the Third World!

Underlying the sudden, volatile uprising in Egypt and Tunisia is a growing global crisis sparked by soaring food prices and unemployment. The Associated Press reports that roughly 40 percent of Egyptians struggle along at the World Bank-set poverty level of under $2 per day. Analysts estimate that food price inflation in Egypt is currently at an unsustainable 17 percent yearly. In poorer countries, as much as 60 to 80 percent of people's incomes go for food, compared to just 10 to 20 percent in industrial countries. An increase of a dollar or so in the cost of a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread for Americans can mean starvation for people in Egypt and other poor countries. The cause of the recent jump in global food prices remains a matter of debate: Some analysts blame the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program (increasing the money supply with credit created with accounting entries), which they warn is sparking hyperinflation. Too much money chasing too few goods is the classic explanation for rising prices. The problem with that theory is that the global money supply has actually shrunk since 2006, when food prices began their dramatic rise. Virtually all money today is created on the books as credit or debt, and overall lending has shrunk. Please click on my heading to read the full story about Rising Food Prices in Egypt by Ellen Brown, at Global Research!

2011 Will Bring the End of Israel as We Know It!

The year 2011 WILL be the end of Israel as we know it: Jeff Halper, who has lived in Israel for about 40 years, understands that country more than anyone on this earth. Most Israelis know that there has never been a "peace process" for his confused little country, but now it's imminent demise is painfully clear. Netanyahu's first election was a wake-up call: A number of Israelis from different organizations got together recently, to think about how to re-engage resistance to Israeli occupation. By talking to Palestinians, we asked them what their priorities are, and the issue of house demolitions always came up: Their comments always involved the bulldozing of their homes, since this is something every Palestinian can relate to. Strangely, Israel denies that it has an occupation of Palestinian land. Since 1967, Israel has refused to grant building permits to Palestinians. When cornered, Israelis start hemming and hawing, because they don't want to talk about occupation, they don't want to hold Israel accountable! The Egyptian revolution changes the dynamic in that part of the world. First of all, it isolates Israel in the Middle East. If Egypt and Jordan goes, Zionism will become associated with neocolonialism, and the US will be seen as part of that!

Egypt Strikes Continue, as Doctors, Lawyers, Join Protests

Doctors in white lab coats and lawyers in black robes streamed into Cairo's Tahrir Square on Thursday as labor unrest across the country gave powerful momentum to Egypt's wave of anti-government protests. With its efforts to manage the crisis failing, the government threatened the army could crack down by imposing martial law. The protests in their 17th day - which have focused on demanding President Hosni Mubarak's ouster and the end of his regime's heavy hand on power - have tapped into the even deeper well of anger over economic woes, including inflation, unemployment, corruption, low wages and wide economic disparities between rich and poor. The whole world has been inspired by the pro-democracy revolution underway in Egypt. But here in America, we're also worried about further government escalation and crack downs against the non-violent opposition. We should be. We've already seen a scary preview of what that would look like, when Egypt's brutal police forces used "Made in America" tear gas on protesters. You see, the US gives Egypt over $1.3 billion every year to buy tanks and guns. We even REQUIRE them to buy those weapons from American gun merchants, in a huge backdoor subsidy of the US weapons industry.

Robert Scheer: Hey Obama, Read WikiLeaks!!

In his posting on truthdig, Robert Scheer advises our president that the Obama administration's response to the democratic revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal. Now distancing itself from the essential demand of the protesters that the dictator must go, the administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship. Predictably, it is one guided by a local strongman long entrusted by the CIA, Vice President Omar Suleiman, described by the US officials in the WikiLeaks cables as a "Mubarak consigliere." The script is out of an all-too-familiar playbook: Pick this longtime chief of Egyptian intelligence, who has consistently done our bidding in matters of torture and retrofit him as a modern democratic leader. But this time, the Egyptian street will NOT meekly go along. The first test was on Tuesday, after the weekend theatrics of Suleiman making a show of meeting with the opposition, but rejecting its demands. A huge crowd-inspired by a most most modern protest figure, a Google executive-showed up to reject defeat as a compromise. Defeat, because under Suleiman's plan all the levers of oppressive power would remain, including Hosni Mubarak as president and a state of emergency denying fundamental freedoms that date back four decades. Conning the masses with fears of a foreign enemy is a political art form in Egypt (and also in our USA) going back to the pharaohs, but this time, perhaps thanks to new empowering technology, or just too much suffering, it is not working.

Our "Friend" Mubarak is NOT Alone: Here are 7 of the Worst Dictators we are backing:

Joshua Holland reminds us that there others beside Mubarak who give our country a very, very BAD name. When I served as the Intelligence Operations Officer of our 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany, Steve Mayfield, a CIA man who wanted me to spy for us in (then East Germany, related his tour of duty in Jordan: If our country wanted to kill someone in that country, we would hire a thug who could afford a knife, and point out the target of his "company". But I digress: In Cameroon, Our Paul Biya, who has ruled that country, since "winning" an election by getting 99 percent of the vote, was one of our "friends". Together, while in the UN Security council in 2002, Cameroon and OUR United States worked together on a number of initiatives. While the US government provided substantial funding for international financial institutions. As part of a strategy to stifle opposition, the "authorities" perpetrated or condoned human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions and restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Human rights defenders and journalists were harassed and threatened. Men and women were detained because of their sexual orientation.
Please click on my headline to read the other atrocities of our "allies", including Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Uzbekistan, and Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia by Joshua Holland, an editor and senior writer at Alternet. He is the author of "The 15 biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

US Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt

Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has supported Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak with $l.3 billion annually, though mostly in military aid. In return, Egypt minds US interests in the Middle East, especially by providing a buffer between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Egypt collaborates with Israel to isolate Gaza with a punishing blockade, to the consternation of Arabs throughout the Middle East. The United States could NOT have fought its wars in Iraq without Egypt's logistical support. Now with a revolution against Mubarak by two million Egyptians, all bets are off about who will replace him and whether the successor government will be friendly to the United States. Mubarak's whole system is corrupt, said Hesham Korayem, an Egyptian who taught at City University of New York and who provides frequent commentary on Egyptian and Saudi television. He told the author of this article that there is virtually no middle class in Egypt, only the extremely rich - about 20 to 25 percent of the population - and the extremely poor - 75 per cent. The parliament has NO input into what Mubarak does with the money the United States gives him, 300 million of which comes to the dictator in cash each year. To read the rest of this rapidly breaking story, please click on my heading -
US Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt, at www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23048