As Shukria Dellawar and Antonioa Juhasz Point Out - Violence Never Solved Anything!!

In fact, when I served as Advisory Team Leader north of Kontum, I told the soldiers under my command, that I would use violence only as a last resort: In Afghanistan, violence escalates daily with the approach of the 10-year anniversary of the US invasion on October 7. At the same time, a little noted energy agenda is moving rapidly forward that may not only deny Afghans the much needed economic benefits their energy resources could provide, but may also exacerbate insecurity and instability, ensuring a prolonged US and foreign military presence. It is an agenda remarkably similar to one well underway in Iraq. Eight years of war in Iraq succeeded in transforming the country's oil industry from a nationalized model, largely closed to American oil companies, into an all but privatized industry open to foreign oil companies. Exxon-Mobile and BP, among other companies, are today producing oil in Iraq for the first time in over 30 years under some of the most corporate-friendly terms in the world. However, opposition from Kurdish leaders, Iraqi unions, civil society organizations, and some parliamentarians, who worry that the terms would grant undue benefit to foreign companies, to the detriment of Iraq's economic stability and security, has kept the Iraqi Oil and Gas Law, written to lock in access, from passage. Afghanistan's known hydrocarbons are primarily located in the North. Its approximately 1.6 billion barrels of crude oil, and 15.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas, are minor in comparison to the the resources of its neighbors: (Iraq's oil reserves are estimated at 115 billion barrels), but are comparable to those in nations such as Chad and Equatorial Guinea, and may be considerably larger, since there has been no significant exploration in decades.

Eric Blair: Obama and Congress ARE Wall Street!

Barack Obama and his challenger John McCain both received more money from Wall Street donors than their combined lifetime government salaries: It was a billion-dollar-plus campaign. In fact, all of Congress makes more from Wall Street and corporate campaign contributions than their public salaries. It is the nature of the modern political system! Timothy Geithner, despite cheating on his own taxes, was plucked from the New York Federal Reserve to serve as US Treasury Secretary. My question is: whom can "we, the people", turn to for solutions? Some very well- meaning people have suggested that apparent solutions to alleviate some of these challenges mean a separation of money and politics! Some have called for ending the Federal Reserve System. Some have suggested a complete write-off of all fraudulent debt. Some want higher taxes imposed on the well-to-do. Some demand more free government services like healthcare and higher education. Some say ending of wars at home and abroad will be the cure-all. Each of these proposed solutions seem to have some attractions, but they also have flaws that need to be addressed!

Musharraf: Afghanistan Is a "Proxy Conflict" Between Pakistan and India!c

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said he believes that Afghanistan has become the source of a proxy battle between his country and India. "In Afghanistan there is some kind of a proxy conflict going on between Pakistan and India. India is trying to create an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan," he said in an interview with David Bradley, owner of the Atlantic Media Company, at the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday. Musharraf, who led Pakistan from 1999 through 2008, said this was part of "India's vision of dominating the region" and its "ambition to create a weak Pakistan." Musharraf, who was personally involved in Pakistan's conflicts against India, added that many Afghan officials are trained by their Indian counterparts. "We know that Afghanistan's intelligence, Afghanistan's diplomats, Afghanistan's soldiers and army, all go to India for training, so we have offered them free training. Not one man has come to Pakistan for such training! We receive diplomats, soldiers, intelligence officers indoctrinated against Pakistan's interests." He did however urged calming of that relationship. "I have called India to tell them that I am a man of war, but I am really a man of peace. I understand the ravages of war more than most people."

Andy Kroll: Food Pantries Picked Over, Incomes Drying Up!

Here is our current dilemma: Food pantries picked over, Incomes drying up, Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you'll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it. In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means, now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century, and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period, and yet the verdict couldn't be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past ten years were a bust, a washout, a decade from hell! Paychecks shrank. Household wealth melted away like so many sandcastles swept off by the incoming tide. Poverty spiked, swallowing an ever-greater share of the population, young and old: "This is truly a lost decade," Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz said of these last years. "We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990's."

Robert Harris: How Supercomputers are Taking Over World Stock Markets.

The fear haunting Europe is the specter of capitalism. A vast and highly unstable mixture of debt, trillions of dollars of sovereign, corporate and private borrowing, accumulated over decades, is strapped to the Western economies like a suicide bomber's gelignite vest. The task facing our politicians is somehow to defuse the bomb, without inadvertently triggering the sequence of defaults and bankruptcies that would set it off. No wonder they walk around the problem scratching their heads, prodding it gingerly here and there. The horrible truth is dawning that the problem may not be technically solvable. For the first time in my life, I get the sense of what it must have been like to have lived in my grandparent's or great-grandparents' generation: In 1913, say, or 1937. One feels a great smash coming ever closer, almost in slow-motion, and yet there seems to be nothing that can be done to avoid it. How have we gotten ourselves into this mess? After all, we ae supposed to be living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Communism had collapsed, and the threat of nuclear annihilation had receded. Immense advances in computer technology were creating a whole new economies. Vast markets were opening up in the developing world. Above all, we were supposed to have learned enough about economics to have created the necessary institutions - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, the OECD, to ensure we never repeated the mistakes of the Thirties. Where did it all go wrong? A good place to start looking is a hole in the ground near the small town of Waxahachie, Texas, or, to be more precise, 17 holes in the ground, each of them an air shaft leading down to 14 miles of abandoned tunnel dug into the hard Texan rock, which are all that remains of a grandiose scientific project called the Desertron.

Steven Lendman: Palestinian UN Membership Roulette!

As Palestinian legal adviser in1987, Law Professor Francis Boyle drafted its Declaration of Independence, creating a Palestinian state. Palestinians now want to, and deserve official recognition, and full de jure UN membership, but Washington and Israel - the latter who dared to sink the USS Liberty with rockets and machine-guns, when I served as Intelligence Operations Officer of our American 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany. At the time, General Sherrer, our commanding general had commented: "With friends like the Israelis, we have no need of enemies!" But I digress: Israeli contempt for the rule of law, democratic values, and equal justice is palpable. On the Progressive Radio News Hour, to air October 2, Boyle said 170 nations support Palestinian UN membership, according to the Financial Times! In all, 193 nations may vote, but only 129 are needed to admit Palestine as the UN's 194th member. According to Boyle, it's achievable by mid-October if Abbas follows proper procedures. Nevertheless, diplomatic roulette continues. On September 23, Abbas petitioned the Security Council for membership. It recommends new members, and only the General Assembly admits them by a simple two-thirds majority of voting member states, minus those abstaining!

Dave Hodges: The Great BP Gulf Coast Holocaust!

The horrible Gulf Coast Holocaust of April 20, 2010, also known as the BP oil spill, stands as the greatest ecological disaster in mankind's history! What has been labeled as a tragic accident by America's corporate "controlled" media, was anything but that! The four horsemen of that Apocalypse (Trans-ocean, British Petroleum, Halliburton and Goldman Sachs had demonstrable foreknowledge of the impending explosion on the Deep-water Horizon oil rig. Rather than alerting the authorities, the public and the employees stationed on the Deep-water Horizon oil rig of the impending disaster, they chose to remain silent and tried to position themselves to profit from the event, which resulted in 11 completely avoidable fatalities, as well as resulting in the ecological destruction of an entire region, with an ever-expanding perimeter of devastation! "Follow the money" is a familiar refrain when one wants to get the heart of a matter!" Greed was certainly a motivating factor for the collective criminal actions of "The Four Horsemen". However, this deplorable incident is not just a case of unrestrained greed. The Gulf oil spill consists of a combination of greed and utter stupidity, perhaps even the need to acquire unwarranted levels of power, leading to the establishment of of a "one world currency": Here is the lurid story of Trans-ocean's shady past: On the food chain of Gulf Coast co-conspirators, we see Transocean merely as a "bottom feeder", yet that criminal organization willingly served as a "perfect stooge", from which to do the bidding of a global elite (Read Goldman Sachs). Contrary to popular belief, BP did NOT own the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The real owner was a Trans-ocean, a proven criminal enterprise with a long history of the bribery of foreign governmental officials, tax fraud, tax evasion and falsifying records!