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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Monday, September 7, 2009

7 Sept - War and Pieces

غابت الشمسImage by خليفه خله على كيفه via Flickr

Arming the World

Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.

The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.

U.S. Marines In The Caucasus As West Widens Afghan War

Immediately after being named new defense chief Akhalaia identified “three priorities of the defense Ministry: ensuring peace, modernization of the army, and NATO integration.”

In his own words he said: “Modernization envisages the improvement of the Georgian army’s weapons and equipment, as well as the training of soldiers and officers. And NATO integration remains our only way. Georgia should have an army that will not be a burden on NATO, but will strengthen it.” [5]

The Civil Georgia web site reported on September 1 that the U.S. Marines in the nation had launched “intensive training” which would “focus on skill sets necessary for Georgian forces to operate in a counterinsurgency environment….”

The same report divulged that “A similar training program was conducted by U.S. military instructors for the Georgian military ahead of their deployment in Iraq. Georgia withdrew about 2,000 of its troops from Iraq during last year’s war with Russia.”

On August 21 the Armenian ambassador to NATO, Samvel Mkrtchyan, met with the bloc’s new Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “said that Armenia is inclined to develop partnership ties with NATO” [14] and “Armenian servicemen will join the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan shortly.”

( Anyone who has missed reading the document 'Post-Saddam Iraq' may not realize this escalation was implied in the Iraq invasion : also per the YouTube video where Dick Cheney explains why NOT to invade Iraq for the media at the time of the Gulf War! )

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( Let's also make the connection between wastewater pollution and drinking water availability as local plants run out of operating funds. You don't need troops to kill people in a 'developed' country : simply disengage the infrastructure of energy, hospitals, regulation and funding, food delivery, intervention for the poor and newly poor. Those wanting 'less government interference' will find chaos a harsh master indeed ; almost as harsh as Monopoly. Odd how all those acts designed to maintain competition as an essential part of a functional economy disappeared.
So that's why Water Search is high on my scorecard : stress there is a signal of impending, perhaps even immediate, catastrophe for city dwellers.
Compared to the need to secure essential services, 'war' in Afghanistan and 'debate' on health insurance are sideshows for Americans. )

Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us by Chris Hedges
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/food-is-power-and-the-powerful-are-poisoning-us-by-chris-hedges

Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.

The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates.

Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers. They have poisoned our soil with pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped nutrients and phosphorus into water systems, causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the onslaught of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, are declining in the Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out the tomato crop. The draconian Food Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our governing elite to corporations, means small farms will only continue to dwindle in number. Sites such as La Via Campesina do a good job of tracking these disturbing global trends.

“The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical,” activist Henry Harris of the Food Security Roundtable told me. The group builds distribution systems between independent farmers and city residents.

Also from Dandelion Salad


Sick and Wrong


Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.


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