Colin Todhunter: Imperialism In The X-Factor Age

In Vietnam, Agent Orange was dropped by the US to poison a foreign population. In Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, depleted uranium was used. In Western countries, things are a bit more complicated, because various states have tended to avoid using direct forms of physical violence to quell their own populations, unless you belong to some marginalized group or hit a raw nerve, as did the Occupy Movement last year. The pretence of democracy and individual rights has to be maintained. One option has been to use South American crack cocaine to dope up potential troublesome sections of the population. Its worked wonders: Highly lucrative for the drug running intelligence agencies and banks awash with drug money, while at the same time serving to dampen political dissent in the most economically and socially deprived areas. Another tactic has of course been the massive ever increasing growth of the surveillance industry to monitor ordinary citizens. But drugs, surveillance and direct violence are kind of a last resort to keep a population in check. Notwithstanding baton charges, tear gas and the use of rubber bullets on the European mainland and that the US Government is not ruling out the use of violence on its own people, ideology via the media has, and continues to be the choice of method for population control in Western countries. Whether its through the paranoia induced by the fear of terrorism or more general propaganda spewed out by the mainstream news channels, political agendas and modes of thought are encouraged which seek to guarantee subservience and integration, rather than forms of critical thought or action that may lead to a direct questioning of, or a challenge to prevailing forms of institutionalized power. From trade unions to political parties, oppositional groups are infiltrated, deradicalised and incorporated into the system, and critical stances are stifled, ridiculed or marginalized. Consensus is manufactured both in cultural and political terms.    

The Economist: The Politics of Hurricane Sandy!!

Is Hurricane Sandy capable of altering the election result? The presidential candidates are hunkering down and trying to avoid looking partisan as this big, wet storm heads for the eastern seabord. But any number of calculations are being made by the campaigns. Plausible arguments are flying, explaining why this storm is bad news, or is it good news, for both sides. In a conference call with reporters on Monday morning, bosses at the campaign headquarters of Barack Obama in Chicago stressed that the president is focused on the storm and governing the country, and noted that he had cancelled events in storm hit states from Florida to Wisconsin. A well handled disaster can strengthen an incumbent president, just as Katrina-level bungle is a political, as well as human disaster. Mitt Romney cancelled events planned for Monday night and Tuesday, citing the need to avoid putting supporters in danger or tying up emergency services. In Virginia,,the Romney campaign also sent out a notice that it had suspended fundraising emails to the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. To be brutal, a certain amount of bad weather on election day helps conservatives in every democracy. In crude terms, car driving conservative retirees still turn out in driving rain, when bus taking lower income workers just back from a night shift are more likely to give rain soaked polls a miss. School closures are a particular problem for low income families or single mothers scrambling to find childcare. In this case, the weather is supposed to clear up well ahead of election day, but the impact could be felt in the turnout of early voters. Democrats will perceive that as bad news. The Obama campaign has pinned big hopes on increasing turnout among Obama supporting "sporadic voters", the sort of voters who give mid term elections a miss, but may turn out in presidential years. 

Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels: Pearl Harbor and the Wars of Corporate America?

Myth: The US was forced to declare war on Japan after a totally unexpected Japanese attack on the American naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. On account of Japan's alliance with Nazi Germany, this aggression automatically brought the US into the war against Germany. Reality: The Roosevelt administration had been eager for some time to wage war against Japan and sought to unleash such a war by means of the institution of an oil embargo and other provocations. Having deciphered Japanese codes, Washington knew a Japanese fleet was on its way to Pearl Harbor, but welcomed the attack, since a Japanese aggression would make it possible to sell the war to the overwhelmingly anti war American public. An attack by Japan, was supposed to avoid a declaration of war by Japan's ally, Germany, which was treaty bound to help only if Japan was attacked. However, for reasons which have nothing to do with Japan or the US but everything with the failure of Germany's lightning war against the Soviet Union, Hitler himself declared war on the US a few days after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941. Fall 1941. The US, then as now, was ruled by a Power Elite of industrialists, owners and managers of the country's leading corporations and banks, constituting only a tiny fraction of its population. Then as now, these industrialists and financiers, Corporate America, had close connections with the highest ranks of the army, the warlords, as Columbia University sociologist C Wright Mills, who coined the term power elite, has called them, and for whom a few years later a big HQ, known as the Pentagon, would be erected on the banks of the Potomac River. Indeed, the military industrial complex had already existed for many decades when, at the end of his career as President, and having served it most assiduously, Eisenhower gave it that name. Talking about presidents: In the 1930's and 1940's, again then as now, the Power Elite kindly allowed the American people every four years to choose between two of the elites own members, one labelled Republican, the other Democrat, but few people know the difference, to reside in the White House in order to formulate and administer national and international policies.  

Prof Chossudovsky: Romnography! Where is the Persian Gulf?

Romnography. Where's the Persian Gulf? Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's the route to the sea. It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel. According to Mitt Romney, presidential debate, October 23, 2012, seeing Syria remove Assad  is a very high priority for us. The Islamic Republic of Iran has an extensive maritime coastline bordering onto the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Iran is an ally of Syria but dopes not have a border with Syria. For Iran's commodity trade to reach the Mediterranean by land through Syria would require transit through Iraq, presently under US military occupation, and /or Turkey, a US ally and NATO stronghold. D+ Romney has a degree from Harvard. So much for University standards. But let us analyze a more serious issue: What are the potential geopolitical consequences of Mitt Romney's sheer ignorance were he to become President and Commander in Chief of the United States of America? One recalls that George W Bush at the height of his election campaign in 2000 thought the Taliban were a "rock group". When a Glamor correspondent asked Governor Bush what he thought about the Taliban, he just shrugged his shoulders, bemused. It took a bit of prompting from the journalist ("discrimination against women in Afghanistan") for Bush to rouse himself. Taliban in Afghanistan! for Bush to rouse himself! Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Reprisals. I thought you were talking about some rock group. That's how well informed about the outside world the prospective US president is. Even about very important present day developments that are on everyone's lips, that is, everyone with the slightest pretensions to culture, developments that he, if elected, will have to deal with. The next president of the US will have to make some fundamental decisions of a diplomatic, strategic and military nature with regard to Iran, which require an understanding of both geography and geopolitics.

Joshua Holland: Final Debate: Obama Scores a Win!!

On Monday night, Barack Obama won a decisive victory over Mitt Romney in a debate that's unlikely to swing a lot of votes. The CBS snap poll, which had given Romney a 24 point margin of victory in the first debate, found Obama winning the third and final contest by 30 points. Public Policy Polling's survey of swing state voters found Obama winning 53-42 among that group. CNN scored it for Obama by 8, and Fox News pundits declared the debate a draw, which suggests that Obama's win was difficult to deny. But the two candidates battled over foreign policy, ranked low on voters' list of issues, and they did so going up against both Monday Night Football and the deciding game of the National League Championship series. One can be pretty confident that Monday's debate was watched by far fewer people than the first two, at a time when far fewer voters remain on the fence. Coming into the debate, Obama enjoyed the advantage of incumbency, having a foreign policy record to run on, that is seen as strong by the rather narrow standards of the Beltway media. According to Gallup,, as the evening began, Obama led on the question of who voters trust to handle foreign affairs by a 12 point margin. He pressed that advantage, taking credit for ending the American military's active involvement in Iraq, promising to fulfill his pledge to complete the transition to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, touting the number of unfair trade complaints he'd filed against China and, of course, reminding voters that he'd ordered the raid that finally got Osama Bin Laden. Romney enjoys an advantage from the debate format itself. He's able to furiously shake his etch a sketch, and in real time, the average voter has little way of knowing how far his rhetoric is straying from the positions he'd staked out for much of the campaign. Romney did exactly that on Monday, portraying himself as a candidate dedicated first and foremost to promoting global peace, a dubious claim, given that he has assembled a foreign policy team that includes some of the most belligerent veterans of the Bush administration, people like John Bolton and Eliot Cohen. In one notable exchange, Romney said, "we can't kill our way out of this mess. We're going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the world of Islam and other parts of the world, reject this radical violent extremism."

Joshua Holland: 10 Awful Things President Mitt Romney Would Do

With the polls showing a tightening race, a Mitt Romney presidency is becoming a real possibility. As I write, New York Times polling guru Nate Silver gives the Republican a 29 percent chance of emerging victorious when the votes are cast in just under two weeks. The Romney Ryan campaign has offered a bewildering and often contradictory array of positions on the issues, which makes predicting what a Romney agenda might look like exceptionally difficult. What's more, we'd see a very different Romney administration if Democrats retain control of the Senate. Silver gives them an 88 percent chance of doing so, projecting Dems to hold 52.4 seats in the next Congress - it's highly unlikely they'll win the House. 1. The Romney Ryan Budget Let's assume for a moment, that the Republicans take the Senate. Mitt Romney has at times embraced Paul Ryan's "road-map" and he's also distanced himself from it, but there will be quite a bit of pressure from conservative activists and the Republican House to enact something along the lines of the road-map. There are two things to understand about Paul Ryan's budget. First, it has been carefully written, so that most of its provisions can be passed under a process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority of votes in the Senate. Second, it is a right wing fantasy that, if enacted as written, would trigger a major drop in employment, and send the economy into a tailspin. It cuts are so deep, and would effect so many constituents, that it would have to be modified. It's one thing to campaign on such a plan, and another to govern with it. What does it do? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, by 2050, most of the federal government aside from Social Security, Medicaid, the the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3.75 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, "spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year since World War II" and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending, he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre sequestration baseline, the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans' programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like.        

John Pilger: Making the World a More Dangerous Place

The Australian parliament building reeks of floor polish. The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon like portraits of prime ministers, bewigged judges and viceroys. Along the gleaming white, hushed corridors, the walls are hung with Aboriginal art, one painting after another as in a monolithic gallery, divorced from their origins, the irony brutal. The poorest, sickest, most incarcerated people on earth provide a facade for those who oversee the theft of their land and its plunder. Australia has 40% of the world's uranium, all of it on indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a non signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long standing policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament". Like the people of Japan, Australian Aborigines have experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. During the 1950's the British government tested atomic bombs at Maralinga in South Australia. The Aboriginal population was not consulted and received scant or no warning, and still suffer the effects. Yami Lester was a boy when he saw the nuclear flash and subsequently went blind. The enduring struggle of Aboriginal people for recognition as human beings has been a fight not only for their land but for what lies beneath it. Since they were granted a status higher than that of sheep, up to 1971, unlike the sheep, they were not counted. Many of their modest land rights have been subverted or diminished by governments in Canberra. In 2007, prime minister John Howard used the army to launch an emergency intervention in Aboriginal communities in the resource rich Northern Territory. Lurid and fraudulent stories of paedophile rings were the cover. Indigenous people were told they would not receive basic services if they did not surrender the leasehold of their land. Gillard's minister of indigenous affairs has since given this Orwellian title of "Stronger Futures". The tactics include driving people into hub towns and denying decent housing to those forced to live up to a dozen in one room. The removal of Aboriginal children has reached the level of the infamous "Stolen Generation" of the last century. Many may never see their families again. Once the intervention had got under way, hundreds of licences were granted to companies exploring for minerals, including uranium. Contemporary politics in Australia is often defined by the power of the mining companies. When the previous Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, proposed a tax on record mining profits, he was deposed by a backroom party cabal, including Gillard, who reduced the tax. Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks reveal that two of the plotters against Rudd were informants of the US embassy, which Rudd had angered by not following to the letter US plans to encircle China and to release uranium for sale to US clients such as India. Gillard has since returned Australia to its historic relationship with Washington, similar to that of an east European satellite of the Soviet Union. The day before Barack Obama arrived in Canberra last year to declare China the new enemy of the free world, Gillard announced the end of her party's ban on uranium sales. Washington's other post cold war obsessions demand the services of Australia. These include the intimidation of Iran and destruction of that country's independence, the undermining of the NPT and prevention of nuclear free zones that threaten the the nuclear armed dominance of the US and Israel. Unlike Iran, a founding signatory of the NPT and supporter of a nuclear free zone Middle East, the US and Israel ban independent inspections, and both are currently threatening to attack Iran which, as the combined agencies of US intelligence confirmed, has no nuclear weapons.