Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Letter To The President - By Cynthia Mckinney (23/11/09)

Cynthia Mckinney
Monday, 23 November 2009 08:42

Mr. President:

I are writing to urge you to announce an immediate cease-fire followed by a withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan in the fastest way consistent with the safety of our forces.

I urge you to end the use of Predator drones that kill civilians.

I call upon you to cease all covert operations in Africa, Asia, and North and South America.


Too many of your military advisors are implicated in torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace. Your Justice Department operates at the zenith of injustice, defending Bush Administration criminality in U.S. Courtrooms.

I wrote to you earlier suggesting that if you did not investigate the crimes of the Bush Administration, you would be viewed as their accessory. Sadly, war crimes and torture are now committed with your name on them.

Please bring our troops home now."

Cynthia Mckinney

http://futurefastforward.com/feature-articles/2830-letter-to-the-president-by-cynthia-mckinney-231109

Oppose Obama’s escalation of the Afghan-Pakistan war! Withdraw all troops now!

2 December 2009

Obama’s speech last night, which packaged the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan as the prelude to withdrawal, was a cynical exercise in evasion, double-talk and falsification.

The new deployment is a major escalation of an unpopular war that will lead to the deaths of countless thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis and a significant rise in US casualties. Indeed, many of the West Point cadets who were assembled to listen to the president’s speech will be sent to Afghanistan to fight in a war that the majority of Americans oppose.

Obama’s invocation of the attacks of September 11, 2001 to portray the war as a defense against terrorism is a fraud. The real reason for the occupation of Afghanistan—widely discussed within the foreign policy establishment—is to maintain a dominant position in oil-rich Central Asia in the interests of the global strategy of American imperialism.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which then-president Jimmy Carter denounced as an illegal act of international aggression. What was not widely known at the time is that the US deliberately provoked Moscow to undertake its military adventure by financing and arming Mujahedeen guerrillas opposed to the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Among those on the CIA payroll were Osama bin Laden and current leaders of the Taliban.

The result of this imperialist policy, authored by then-national security adviser and current foreign policy adviser to Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been three decades of war, civil war and social devastation. The Obama administration is intensifying this colonialist enterprise.

No credibility can be given to Obama’s talk of beginning the withdrawal of troops in July of 2011. This supposed timeline was hedged by references to “conditions on the ground.” Moreover, it was followed by statements to the effect that the war in Afghanistan is only one of many military interventions to come.

“The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly,” Obama said, “and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Calling this struggle an “enduring test,” Obama went on to speak of “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies,” mentioning by name Somalia and Yemen.

In reality, the US colonial enterprise in Central Asia is open-ended. The Washington Post on Monday cited a US official as saying, “Our game is to convince them [the Pakistani military] that our commitment to Afghanistan and the region is long-term. We’re not going to pack up our bags and leave them as soon as we’re done.”

Far from Obama’s escalation hastening an end to the war, it creates the conditions for new and even greater military conflagrations. The injection of additional troops will further inflame tensions in the region and beyond—between Pakistan and India, India and China, Iran and the US, Russia and China and the US.

Perhaps the biggest lie is the claim that the war is being waged to protect the Afghan people. They overwhelmingly oppose the US-led foreign occupation.

Obama’s decision means that 2010 will be a year of increased death and destruction in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. A central focus of the new US deployment is to “lock down” Kandahar, a center of insurgent opposition to the US-NATO occupation. This can only mean a drive to terrorize the local population and kill as many insurgents and ordinary Afghans suspected of sympathizing with the resistance as possible.

At the same time, the US is threatening to launch ground operations on Pakistani soil, in addition to the drone missile attacks that are killing hundreds of Pakistani civilians. The Washington Post, reporting Monday on the recent visit to Islamabad by Obama’s national security adviser, retired Marine General James L. Jones, cited an American official as saying, “If Pakistan cannot deliver, he [Jones] warned, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan’s western and southern borders with Afghanistan.”

The cost to the peoples of Central Asia is incalculable. The American people are to pay for the war policy of the US ruling elite with the loss of thousands more lives, the squandering of trillions in resources, unprecedented attacks on social services, and the further erosion of democratic rights.

The most glaring contradiction in a speech shot through with contradictions was Obama’s attempt to disentangle the war in Afghanistan from the war in Iraq. “I opposed the war in Iraq,” he said, “precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force …” But he was unable to establish any essential difference between that criminal enterprise and his war in Afghanistan.

Obama’s escalation is yet another flagrant violation of the will of the American people. In one election after another, they have gone to the polls to express their hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In every case, their will has been ignored and the wars have been expanded.

Obama won the presidency by running as an opponent of the Iraq war and appealing to popular opposition to militarism. Once in office, he quickly increased the US deployment in Afghanistan by 21,000, while reneging on his promise to carry out a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Now he is increasing the total US troop level in Afghanistan to 100,000, more than double the level under Bush.

As with his pro-Wall Street economic policy and his assault on democratic rights, Obama, in his military and foreign policy, is continuing and deepening the reactionary program of Bush. The decision to expand the war in Central Asia is a devastating exposure of the entire US political system. Both parties and Congress are instruments of a ruling financial aristocracy, whose interests they defend in opposition to the needs and views of the working class, the vast majority of the population.

Of immense significance is the international line-up of imperialist powers behind the US-led war. The participation of Britain, Germany, France and other powers in the war constitutes an international onslaught aimed at subordinating the entire region to imperialist interests. Every one of these governments is acting in defiance of the antiwar sentiments of its population.

This underscores that the fight against war requires an international struggle of the working class against world imperialism and the capitalist system, which is the root cause of war.

In the United States, the fight against war can be waged only as a struggle against the Obama administration, the two-party system and the American financial oligarchy. It must be based on a socialist and internationalist program, and the building of a new leadership in the working class to fuse the fight against war, unemployment, poverty and attacks on democratic rights into an independent political struggle for a workers’ government.

This is the program of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. All those who are opposed to imperialist war should make the decision to join and build the SEP as the new revolutionary leadership of the working class.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d02.shtml

ECONOMY: Neo-liberalism Preys on Nordic Welfare Systems

By Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Dec 2 (IPS) - Nordic welfare state systems, often held up as model in the developed world, are crumbling under the assault of neo-liberal economic policies, say economic experts.

All five of the Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark are experiencing rising poverty, long considered eradicated but now causing concern to policy-makers.

"It is true that in the 1970s poverty was more or less eradicated but now we have come back to a situation where 10 - 13 percent of the population is poor and that raises a lot of concerns,’’ Asbjorn Wahl, a trade union advisor, said at a seminar here on ‘Poverty in the Nordic Countries’, organised by the Nordic Institute in Finland (NiFin).

The seminar, late November, brought together economy and poverty researchers from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Iceland in a bid to shed light on some of the underlying causes of rising poverty in these countries. They were addressing relative poverty rather than absolute poverty.

"It doesn’t mean that you don’t have food the next day but it means you live differently from the average citizen in not being able to attend social events, and your children cannot take part in anything that costs money. It eventually leads to and is a prime cause of social exclusion,’’ Wahl, who is Coordinator of the Campaign for the Welfare State in Norway told IPS.

Hidden from public view there is apparently a sweeping undercurrent of social exclusion affecting large sections of populations in the Nordic countries.

All of the Nordic have been hit by rising unemployment with the possible exception of Norway which has been spared the worst of the global financial recession with an unemployment rate of less than three per cent.

Sweden’s unemployment rate rose from 6.2 percent in 2007 to 7.3 percent in 2009. Finland’s unemployment similarly rose from a little over 6 percent to 8.2 as of October 2009. Iceland whose economy essentially collapsed in the financial crisis had unemployment rising from 1.6 percent in 2008 to 9.4 per cent in February 2009.

According to Wahl, the poverty rate in Norway is 12 percent if one goes by the European Union’s definition of poverty which means earning less than 60 percent of the median income in the society.

Oil-rich Norway with fewer than five million inhabitants has had a booming economy for the decade preceding the global financial crisis.

"So Norwegian society is getting wealthier while there is increasing poverty", Wahl told IPS.

The situation is similar in Finland. The previously low rate of relative poverty has doubled among adults and tripled among children, said Markus Jäntti professor of economics at the Institute of Social Research at Stockholm University.

"It is a great achievement of the social democratic parties which were responsible for eradicating poverty but are also the very ones who have reintroduced poverty" remarked Jäntti.

In 1995 the rate of poverty among all Finnish children was five percent but by 2007 the corresponding figure was 14 percent, close to three times the figure in 1995, Jäntti told IPS.

Part of the reason for the rise in poverty rate is that the Finnish government in the late 1990s, in an effort to increase work incentives, dramatically reduced the unemployment benefits of those not working.

However, the overall consequences was that it did get a few people to work but the incomes level actually fell and so children whose parents did not secure work were left with lower employment benefits, thus leading to increased poverty among those children, said Jäntti.

"The work incentive programme was essentially driven by neo-liberalism or by right-wing populism but there is little evidence that it produced any increase in work attachment. But since the programme failed to work no one is drawing the obvious conclusion that there is something wrong with our social policy", he said.

The controversial work incentive programme - also known as workfare, and first introduced in the United States which viewed unemployment as stemming from people’s inherent unwillingness to work - has now become the reigning model in most European countries. Critics say it deliberately keeps people under the poverty line and does not address the root causes of unemployment-related poverty.

"The problem of poverty is to be studied first at its sources and secondly in its manifestations", said Wahl, quoting the prominent British economic historian, Richard Tawney, in 1931.

So there should be less of mere campaigning by governments on poverty in the form of ineffectual anti-poverty programmes and more on fighting the underlying unequal power relations in society by broad social mobilisation, Wahl said.

In the immediate post-World War II period, according to Wahl, the well developed Nordic welfare states came into being as a result of social struggles based on popular mobilisation in confrontation with the counter-forces which led to a great part of the economy taken off the market and made subject to democratic control.

Capital was tightly regulated, labour legislation was introduced, there was regulation of investment, credit control and the maintenance of a huge public sector, as well as a fixed exchange rate.

But in the 1970s up to the 1990s all that changed with the emergence of neo-liberalism. There was redistribution of wealth from the public into private hands and from the poor to the rich – characterised by a growing gap between high and low income earners - and a source of discontent among the population.

When the neo-liberal offensive was launched in the 1980s and 1990s the left political parties which were responsible for the welfare reforms also drifted to the right.

All of these Nordic countries are currently under right-wing political parties, except in Norway where the ruling coalition is made of Centre Left parties - the so-called Red-Green coalition.

"The social democratic parties started moving to the right and became soft neo-liberal parties and so they lost the support of the electorate and people began moving back and forth between parties", said Wahl.

This was exacerbated by the emergence of right-wing populist parties who have been clever at supporting all kinds of dissatisfactions and have been successful in channelling these dissatisfactions into making people vote other groups instead of focusing on the economic system.

In Finland, Denmark and Norway, as across many parts of Europe, these right-wing parties have suddenly emerged as formidable electoral forces, even gaining entry into the European Parliament for the first time.

Observers note that the Nordic countries, however, still have a wide range of free public services such as free school lunch - and in the case of Finland also during summer holidays - which has blunted the severity of poverty.

Also children prefer to leave home early as soon as they become young adults thus sacrificing parental financial dependence for individual freedom but which cannot be accounted for in purely monetary terms.

Nevertheless Wahl maintains that "the only way to fight poverty is to start a new way of mobilisation to change the power relations in society and the current financial crisis has helped a great deal in that aspect because people are becoming convinced that the neo-liberal experiment has failed.''

(END/2009)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49497

The hidden meaning of the hidden Starbucks logo

16:26 November 27th, 2009
Bryant Simon

– Bryant Simon is professor of history and director of American Studies at Temple University. He is the author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks”. The views expressed are his own. –

Last week, Roy Street Coffee and Tea, located at the corners of Roy Street and Broadway in Seattle, opened. This is another one of those stealth Starbucks – Starbucks stores without the Starbucks name over the front door – the coffee giant has been opening in its hometown and in London as of late. Like the other shops of this new vintage, this one is appointed with antique-style furniture, retro lighting, and a distressed looking table top salvaged from an old ship.

The rough-hewed interiors of these not Starbucks Starbucks haven’t really mattered to the journalists and bloggers who have been writing about them. They talk only about the naming patterns in Starbucks’ most recent branding strategy.

To them, the names of the stores represent a brand crisis. Quite rightly, they point out, when a brand hides its own identity, it is in some ways admitting defeat, saying that its name – a central part of any brand – has lost value. When it comes to Starbucks, all of this is true, but the question is why? Why has the Starbucks brand lost so much value that it has to hide from customers and act like a small business? The answer to these questions rests with communities and consumers, what they care about and desire the most these days.

Over the last several years, a quiet but decided shift in buying patterns has taken place. Really, there is something of a velvet revolt or a quiet rejection of brands going on.

In the early years of this century, the then mayor of Baltimore Martin O’Malley begged Starbucks to come to his city. He thought these big name stores would lend his de-industrializing hometown a much needed upper-middle-class sheen. Same with the residents of Landsdowne, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the town had several mom and pops diners and coffee shops. One day, though, a team of local residents lined up in three rows of forty in an empty lot where a 7-11 used to be. When the photographer gave them the sign, they turned over the letters. Their message read: “Got Location! Need Starbucks!” Afterwards, the Greater Lansdowne Civic Association sent this “visual petition” to Starbucks headquarters. Landsdowne never got a Starbucks, but Benicia, California and a lot of other towns got plenty of Starbucks.

By 2007, Benicia didn’t want them anymore. When Starbucks tried to open a fifth store in the northern California coastal town some residents balked. “It’s a serious problem,” a former city councilor and owner of an independent coffee house, told the Contra Costa Times (By Danielle Samaniego, “Benicia Looks at Limiting Chain Stores,” Contra Costa Times, Feb. 16, 2007). “People need to wake up to it,” she proclaimed, “When you drive through a town and everything is so homogenized that you can’t tell where you are anymore, that’s a problem.” She had an idea. Limit the number of chains. Ban them even. Encourage, instead, small, one-of-a-kind businesses. Soon her idea gained the support of local officials looking for ways to curtail the opening of more chain stores without violating state and federal laws. When the city council started to debate a ban on all “formula” businesses, a city official told the Contra Costa Times, “it’s about protecting the unique character of the commercial areas of Benicia, and there’s nothing unique about a store that has the same look and style, not just here, but everywhere.” (By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen, “Officials Look at Ways to Prevent Starbucks Overflow,” Contra Costa Times, Feb. 9, 2007)

BRAND AVOIDANCE

This wasn’t just about Starbucks. This was about a growing resistance to brands, and their dominance of the landscape, symbolized by Starbucks. With their feet and their purchases, individual consumers are revolting as well. Scholars have started to call this trend, “brand avoidance,” as consumers worried about the larger social and economic impact of brands on society look for other options, even if those options cost a bit more. In growing numbers, buyers are choosing the local over the brand, the farmers market over the supermarket, the Main Street strip over the mall. Same with coffee.

While Starbucks closed down outlets in 2008, citing the New Recession as the cause, independent coffee houses, the Seattle Times noted, brought in new customers and they didn’t cut prices. Over the last few years, in fact, the number of independent coffee houses in the U.S. has jumped past the number of chain store outlets, and now represent 54 percent of the coffee market.

How can we explain these consumer choices and the growth of these smaller business sectors? Consumers, just like the towns they live in, are starting to think that going to the branded store – to Starbucks or Cosi or Chipotle – costs too much. It makes them look too ordinary and too much like everyone else.
This is what those not Starbucks Starbucks stores tacitly acknowledge. By hiding their logos, they speak to the growing appeal of the locally owned small businesses. (Remember the stealth Starbucks stores are individually designed and named after the streets they are on – the places themselves.)

Apparently the experiment isn’t working. A former Starbucks insider said that Seattle’s 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea – the first of the new not Starbucks stores (its website, by the way, is called www.streetlevelcoffee.com) – is doing only a third of the business of the regular green-logoed Starbucks store that used be at that site.

Perhaps consumer really do want something more than branded artifice; they want something genuinely local.

The revolt against sameness may actually be real, too real for a fake Starbucks. And certainly this growing rejection of brands presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs and small business owners to create something authentically local for their customers.

http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2009/11/27/the-hidden-meaning-of-the-hidden-starbucks-logo/

Elsa Rassbach interviews Zoya of the Foreign Committee of RAWA

By Zoya
May 24, 2009


What is RAWA's position regarding the U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan?

In 2001, the U.S. and its allies occupied Afghanistan under the beautiful slogans of "war on terror," "women's rights," "liberation" and "democracy." But when they installed the brutal and criminal warlords after the fall of the Taliban, everyone knew that Afghanistan had once again become a chessboard for world powers. They have their long-term plans in Afghanistan, and the plight of our people, and especially of women, has been misused to legitimize the foreign military presence in our country.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to fulfill its geo-political, economic and regional strategic interests and to transform Afghanistan into a strong military base in the region. In the past seven years, these troops have even further complicated the situation of Afghanistan. Not only have they pumped millions of dollars into the pockets of savage warlords but the Taliban and other terrorist groups are more powerful today. They have turned Afghanistan into the opium capital of the world, and one of the reasons for invading Afghanistan was to get hold of this multi-billion-dollar drug business.

Afghan people have been badly betrayed by the U.S. and NATO in the past few years. Despite billions in of aid, Afghan people are living under awful conditions that are worse than they were under the Taliban medieval rule. Afghanistan still faces a women's rights tragedy, and the everyday hardships of our masses are beyond imagination.

The U.S. and NATO have imposed a corrupt mafia, puppet government on the Afghan people, a government which is mostly comprised of warlords and drug lords. And now efforts are underway to share power with the Taliban and Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The U.S. and NATO are killing thousands of our innocent people, while at the same time their operations have no impact on the Taliban, because as they are not really interested in peace and in stability in Afghanistan. The presence of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups is in fact necessary for the U.S. and NATO in order to have a reason for their permanent presence in Afghanistan. Everyone knows that the U.S., a superpower, together with the biggest military pact in the world, NATO, could it is a matter of days, if not hours, defeat the Taliban and arrest Mullah Omer and Osama. But today they need such enemies to justify keeping their military machine in Afghanistan.

But even the foreign soldiers are the victims of the governments that send them to Afghanistan to be killed for nothing but guarding the benefits of multi-national corporations. These governments not only betray Afghans, but also their own citizens. They put in danger their own soldiers and spend taxpayers' money to push the region and the world towards more war and dangers. Here in Germany, I met a U.S. veteran who had been in Afghanistan. I told him that it would be important to the whole world that he tell his story. He cried and said, "Because of you, I'll go and talk." Many former U.S. veterans have shocking stories about on how they witnessed that in the name of "liberation," these troops have been committing war crimes.

The troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible. This is the first step. They should adopt less bloody alternatives. We don't want their so-called liberation and democracy. If these troops do not withdraw, we are sure that the Afghan people will have no other option but to rise up against them. Our people are already deeply fed up with the situation. The jokes being made in Afghanistan are that the Taliban are getting the most from this situation.


Would you not be afraid of a civil war if the U.S. and NATO withdrew from Afghanistan?

RAWA supports the call for the withdrawal of the U.S. and NATO troops because occupation is not a solution. They are constantly killing civilians, even at a wedding party. Do you think we are not human beings and don't have hearts? What would Americans do if an occupier were killing so many civilians in the U.S.?

We have a good history in Afghanistan of throwing out occupiers, and this is a source of pride. But we have lost pride. Over 40 countries have invaded us. People are frustrated, and they think the first step is to get the invaders out. Some may not agree with the Taliban, but some are paid to fight, and often they are starving; others are brainwashed, for example in the religious schools.

If there is a withdrawal, there will probably be a civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, but that would not be any worse than what is going on now. When these troops pull out at least we will then no more be an occupied country. It is the duty of Afghan people to get rid of the internal enemies, but today, our internal enemies are backed and supported by the external enemies that are the U.S. and NATO.

The reason the fundamentalists are powerful is because they are always being supported by the U.S., which has given billions of dollars to the Northern Alliance, money that has gone into the pockets of warlords and drug lords. Today people are crying of hunger, selling their children for $5, but where did the billions go?


What solutions would RAWA propose?

The withdrawal of military troops must be accompanied by other actions by governments, if they really want to help us as they claim. They must stop supporting any terrorist groups, including the Northern Alliance that destroyed Afghanistan before the Taliban came. There should also be sanctions on governments that support the Taliban, like Iran and Pakistan. Warlords should be brought to the International Court for crimes against humanity.

If they really have genuine concern for Afghanistan and want peace and stability in the country, the solution would be to support the democratic-minded organizations and individuals in Afghanistan, but in the past few years, much pressure has been put on such groups to give up. Today the democratic organizations are weak because no one helps them. If they received support, they would grow strong. And the democratic forces need to unite and fight against the fundamentalists.

The message of RAWA to freedom-loving people is to support the democratic organizations of Afghanistan. Freedom, democracy and justice cannot be enforced at gunpoint by a foreign country; they are the values that can be achieved only by our people and democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle. Those who claim to donate these values to the Afghan people through force will only push our country into slavery. It is our responsibility to stand up to fundamentalists and occupations.

What is RAWA?

RAWA was first established in 1977 by Afghan intellectual women, headed by Meena, to fight for equality of men and women and against male chauvinism that was and is being practiced in our society. Most women were illiterate and took literacy courses and then decided to work with RAWA. Poor, uneducated women such as farmers' widows come to RAWA for help. We encourage them to fight for their rights and get political education.

In 1979 RAWA fought against the Russians and to expose the Russian puppet government through demonstrations, leaflets, and strikes. In 1987, RAWA's leader, Meena, was killed by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB) with direct help of the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Our demonstrations were attacked, even in Pakistan. We had to live in a clandestine way. From 1992 to the present, we have fought any brand of Islamic fundamentalists, who are the main cause of our miseries and problems.

Now RAWA has hundreds of members as well as a large number of supporters, not only in Afghanistan, but all around the world. Being strongly against the fundamentalist warlords, the Taliban and the puppet government of Hamid Karzai, we still can't work publicly in Afghanistan, and we continue to work semi-underground. In Afghanistan, we don't use the name RAWA for orphanages, literacy programs for women, handicraft centers for widows, or health care centers. The Afghan intelligence agency, which is run by warlords, follows us everywhere and creates problems for our members and supporters. Some of our supporters have been imprisoned and tortured for just having copies of our magazine with them.

The U.S. government has never supported democratic organizations like RAWA. Up until now, we have received not a penny from the U.S. or any other government. At the same time, we have the honor of being supported by the peace-loving people of the U.S. and other Western countries. We have received donations of $5 and even $1000 for orphanages, schools and political work. We are proud to rely on the small donations of our supporters and well wishers in Afghanistan and abroad, which have a huge value for us. We have groups of dedicated supporters in many countries that really work hard to raise awareness and funds for RAWA projects.

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21539