Another Great Article by Pat Buchanan on America's Non-Intervention in Syrian Civil War

I think that the most disturbing line from the article and the one that I think is really preventing the secularists as Pat calls them from really helping out the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime is that 'As The New York Times reported Sunday, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of." I think that in light of this, Pat makes a really good argument to not get involved, at least not militarily, because it has become or always was or maybe is just becoming, but I'm seeing it this way more and more the more I watch on it, including that Frontline documentary a few weeks ago, as just another in a long long line of conflicts betwenn sunni Islam and shia Islam.  It's sad that this, what started in Tunisia as a real non-violent movement promoting democracy and liberal values (free speech press petition the government for a redress of grievances), has been hijacked by jihadists who simply see things as Salafist Islam vs the universe.  My heart goes out to the true Muslims who have left Syria because of this unlimited militancy and old energies sectarian conflict. Just sad.

Their War, Not Ours 

By Pat Buchanan | Pat Buchanan – 5 hrs ago

"The worst mistake of my presidency," said Ronald Reagan of his decision to put Marines into the middle of Lebanon's civil war, where 241 died in a suicide bombing of their barracks.

And if Barack Obama plunges into Syria's civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush.

Why would Obama even consider this?

Because he blundered badly. Foolishly, he put his credibility on the line by warning that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" and be a "game changer" with "enormous consequences."

Not only was this ultimatum unwise, Obama had no authority to issue it. If Syria does not threaten or attack us, Obama would need congressional authorization before he could constitutionally engage in acts of war against Syria. When did he ever receive such authorization?

Moreover, there is no proof Syrian President Bashar Assad ever ordered the use of chemical weapons.

U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that small amounts of the deadly toxin sarin gas were likely used. But if it did happen, we do not know who ordered it.
Syrians officials deny that they ever used chemicals. And before we dismiss Damascus' denials, recall that an innocent man in Tupelo, Miss., was lately charged with mailing deadly ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker and President Obama. This weekend, we learned he may have been framed.
It is well within the capacity of Assad's enemies to use or fake the use of poison gas to suck us into fighting their war.
Even if elements of Assad's army did use sarin, we ought not plunge in. And, fortunately, that seems to be Obama's thinking.

Why stay out? Because it is not our war. There is no vital U.S. interest in who rules Syria. Hafez Assad and Bashar have ruled Syria for 40 years. How has that ever threatened us?

Moreover, U.S. intervention would signal to Assad that the end is near, making his use of every weapon in his arsenal, including chemical weapons, more — not less — likely.

U.S. intervention would also make us de facto allies of Assad's principal enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria's al-Qaida. As The New York Times reported Sunday, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."

Do we really wish to expend American blood and treasure to bring about a victory of Islamists and jihadists in Syria?

If Assad's chemical weapons threaten any nation, it is Israel. But Israel knows where they are stored and has an air force superior to our own in the Med. Israeli troops on the Golan are as close to Damascus as Dulles Airport is to Washington, D.C. Yet Israel has not attacked Syria's chemical weapons.

Why not? Israel is well aware that Syria's air defense system is, as The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, "one of the most advanced and concentrated barriers on the planet."
And if Israel does not feel sufficiently threatened by Syria's chemical weapons to go after them, why should we, 4,000 miles away?
Then there is Turkey, with three times Syria's population, NATO's second-largest army and a 600-mile border. Why is ridding the Middle East of Assad our assignment and not Ankara's?
Surely the heirs of the Ottomans have a larger stake here.
And if we get into this war, how do we get out?
For the war is metastasizing. Hezbollah is sending in fighters to help the Alawite Shia. Other Lebanese are assisting the Sunni rebels. The war could spread into Iraq, where the latest clashes between Sunni and Shia are pulling the country apart. Young Muslims are coming in from Europe.
Iran and Russia are aiding Damascus. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are aiding the Islamists. The United States, Jordan and Turkey are aiding the secularists. Syria could come apart, and a sectarian and ethnic war of all against all erupt across the region.
Do we really want the U.S. military in the middle of this?
Because his "red line" appears to have been crossed, Obama is being told he must attack Syria to maintain his credibility with Iran and North Korea.
Nonsense. To attack Syria would compound Obama's folly in drawing the red line. Better to have egg on Obama's face than for America to be dragged into another unnecessary war.

Obama would not be alone in having his bluff called. George Bush proclaimed that no "axis of evil" nation would be allowed to acquire the "world's worst weapons." North Korea now has those weapons.

Congressional war hawks, led by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are cawing for air strikes and no-fly zones, which would mean dead and captured Americans and many more dead Syrians.
Time for Congress to either authorize Obama to lead us into a new Middle East war, or direct him, in the absence of an attack upon us, to keep America out of what is Syria's civil war.
Before we slide into another war, let the country be consulted first.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Myths of the Political Left and Right Exposed

So I actually do write some stuff myself, it's not all just posts of other people's writings, but i'm real selfish with my own writings, i don't like to share them with people, but i thought i would share this with ya all , just to prove there is something original going on in my mind after all, here ya go

The myth of the political right is the myth of the long past and long lost golden age  of the nation of the religion or whatever, that everything was better back then, that if only we could stick to the principles of the constitution then everything would be better, even the maintenance of the status quo would be at the left limit of the political right, if we could just keep things the same, not change anything, republican obstructionism, than that would be the best possible state of affairs,

the myth of the political left is the myth of  the future utopia, the myth of progressivism, that things were worse back than and that if only we change things for the better of course, change itself is assumed to be good in itself in this mindset, much less how are we going to change, that then we will have the best possible state of affairs, or if not the best possible, at least better than it was back then, this is the myth that I seem to subscribe to, all progressives must subscribe to this myth, while all conservatives must, I think subscribe tto that myth as well

more on these points later

Article by Pat Buchanan on What America's Reaction Should be to Islamism

So I've become a fan of Pat Buchanan for his moderate ideas and his soft power approach to politics, just playing the news circuit but not being formally involved in campaigns anymore, and he's good on the McLaughlin Group as well, which is a show that I like so much now I've DVR'ed it so I won't miss any episodes.  I agree with the first thign Pat says that we should get out of Muslim countries, but I don't think we necessarily need a moratorium on immigration from that part of the world, we need modern American Muslims to continue to speak out and be heard and visible in today's globalized world as a modern counterweight to salafist and traditionalists definitions of Muslim identity, that's the way to win the war against jihadists, who have already lost, to glamorize modern American Muslims and other moderate Muslims the world over, not the jihadists who dominate the news cycle 24/7. At least that's my opinion.

The Dark Side of Diversity

Pat Buchanan's column is released twice a week.

By Pat Buchanan | Pat Buchanan – 5 hrs ago

"I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people," said Edmund Burke of the rebellious Americans.

The same holds true of Islam, the majority faith of 49 nations from Morocco to Indonesia, a religion that 1.6 billion people profess.
Yet, some assertions appear true.
Islam is growing in militancy and intolerance, evolving again into a fighting faith, and spreading not only through proselytizing, but violence.
How to justify the charge of intolerance?

The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Sufi shrines of Timbuktu were blown up by Ansar Dine. In Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, Christian converts face the death sentence.

In Nigeria, the Boko Haram attacks churches and kills Christians, as in Ethiopia and the Sudan, where the south seceded over the persecution.

Egyptian Copts are under siege. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in Iraq have seen churches pillaged, priests murdered. In Indonesia, churches are being shut on the demand of Islamists. Sharia law is being demanded by militants across the Middle East, as Christianity is exterminated in its cradle.

Has Islam become again a fighting faith?
Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia are the sites of Islamist uprisings using terror to rip these statelets from Russia. Muslim Uighurs are fighting to tear off a chunk of China and create an East Turkestan. Muslim Malays in south Thailand have fought a decade-long war of secession. Albania has acquired two sister Muslim states in Europe, Bosnia and Kosovo, both born in blood.
"Islam has bloody borders," wrote the late Samuel Huntington. They are bloodier today.

At the time of 9/11, al-Qaida seemed confined to Afghanistan. Al-Qaida may now be found in the Maghreb, Mali, Iraq and Yemen. Its Syrian auxiliary, the al-Nusra Front, is dominant in the anti-Assad rebellion.

Since Y2K, Islamists have perpetrated massacres in Mumbai, Madrid, London, Moscow, Beslan and Boston. Osama bin Laden appears no longer as popular as he once was, yet tens of millions worldwide still admire him. Why?
Islamism can also call upon true believers prepared to die for the cause. No other faith produces so many suicide bombers.

Muslims counter-argue that America has killed many more noncombatants, in Iraq, and Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone strikes.

What right, they ask, did we have to attack Iraq? Did we not ourselves stir up the nest of hornets that stung us in Boston?
Yet there is another reality.
While the clash of cultures widens between the West and Islam, leaders in the Muslim world can be found working with the United States against their own extremists.
Jihadists are by no means a majority in the Islamic world, where they are also feared and hated. And in the West, they are but a fraction of our Muslim communities.
The crisis: Even a tiny minority of terrorists like the Tsarnaevs can so inflame tensions between the West and the Muslim world they can bring our two civilizations into conflict. Would we have fought those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the atrocity of 9/11?
What are the goals of the jihadists?
Expulsion of Christians and infidels from the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam. Expulsion of the American Crusaders. Overthrow of Muslim rulers who collude with the Great Satan. Annihilation of Israel. Infiltration of the homelands of a decadent, dying West. Death to all who insult the Prophet.
Ultimate goal: Bring the world to acknowledge and act on the truth that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.
And while the Islamic world remains far inferior in technology and manufacturing and military power, Muslim peoples are far more numerous and devout. With a fourth of mankind, their birth rate is higher and their numbers soaring, along with their militancy at home and in the diaspora.
In population and territory, the West is shrinking, while our Muslim minorities are growing and becoming more assertive in their demands.

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come," said Victor Hugo. Many in the Muslim world believe that as the Christian West dominated for 500 years, their time has come.

How do we deal with this irreconcilable conflict between a secular West and a resurgent Islam?
First, as it is our presence in their world that enrages so many, we should end our interventions, shut down the empire and let Muslim rulers deal with Muslim radicals.
Second, we need a moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world. Inevitably, some of the young we bring in, like the Tsarnaevs, will yield to radicalization and seek to strike a blow for Islam against us.
What benefit do we derive as a people to justify the risks we take by opening up America to mass migration from a world aflame with hatred and hostility over race, ethnicity, culture, history and faith?
Why are we bringing all of the world's quarrelsome minorities, and all the world's quarrels with them, into our home?
What we saw in Boston was the dark side of diversity.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Karl Marx says Bangladesh Workers Unite!

Does anybody else hear Karl Marx telling all of us I told you so from his grave?

Bangladesh factory collapse: Who really pays for our cheap clothes?

By Anna McMullen, special for CNN

April 25, 2013 -- Updated 1709 GMT (0109 HKT)

Editor's note: Anna McMullen is a campaigner for Labour Behind the Label which calls itself a group "that supports garment workers' efforts worldwide to improve their working conditions." She works with global partners on campaigns around poverty wages in the fashion industry, and has co-authored research reports on labor rights. Follow @labourlabel on Twitter.

(CNN) -- The sad fact behind the building collapse in Bangladesh in whch hundreds died is that it isn't an isolated problem. The story will leave the headlines at the end of this week but on Monday hundreds of thousands of workers will return to factories that are frankly further tragedies waiting to happen, and will keep producing clothes for high street brands.

Seven hundred workers have died in factory collapses and fires in this very small region outside Dhaka alone in the last decade.

Savar, where the building collapse took place, is a swampland (yes, swampland...) north of the Bangladeshi capital which has seen mass growth in recent years.

This same region was the site of a horrific factory fire in November last year, when 112 workers burned alive in a building with no fire exits.

Hundreds of factories are being thrown up in a short space of time, with limited building regulations, to meet the growing demand from western brands for cheap export clothing. And it is cheap. Wages for Bangladeshi workers are the lowest in Asia, aside from the recently opened Myanmar industry, at $37 a month.

Read more: At least 117 killed in fire at Bangladeshi clothing factory

As the demand for cheap clothing grows in the west, brands continue to look for ways to race to the bottom on prices, and sadly this involves cutting corners on health and safety. Brands will by no means admit to this.

The prices that they pay, they assure us, are enough to pay workers enough to live on and keep factories in tip top condition. But, faced with constantly decreasing incomes, factory owners inevitably let things slide, like replacing faulty machinery or fixing worrying building subsidence...

When garment factories were still mainly based in retail countries, consumers knew people who held jobs in factories, and had a personal connection with those who had been injured or put at risk in the workplace.

But with globalization has come consumer apathy. Who cares about people who make clothing? As long as it is cheap we will buy it.

Especially in a recession, cheap clothing is a welcome industry for many. People in western countries living on the poverty line need to buy clothes for their children.

Jobs in Bangladesh are also vital for a country where hundreds of thousands of people live below the poverty line. It isn't the responsibility of the consumer to feel guilty about buying what is readily available in shops.

Business must stop just holding up its hands to say: "It is not our fault -- they bought it." The responsibility for ensuring that a product was made with human rights in mind has to fall somewhere, and the United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights says that it falls jointly to states and mass corporate businesses to "protect, respect and remedy" human rights.

In short, the brands, not the consumer, are the ones who must take responsibility for the endemic problems that this industry faces.

So what can be done? Many western brands rely on audits and in-house checks to monitor whether conditions in their factories are up to scratch. In a country where a little hand shake and a small exchange of money gets the job done, this process often fails to give an accurate picture of factory conditions, building and fire safety.

It is common for fire extinguishers to be borrowed for inspection day, for workers to be schooled in what answers they have to give when asked questions.

The Clean Clothes Campaign together with local and global unions and labor rights organizations, has developed a program that hopes to solve this. The Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement is a proposal for a sector-wide initiative that includes independent building inspections, worker rights training, public disclosure and a long-overdue review of safety standards.

The crucial element of this is that unions and worker led committees take a central role in monitoring and reporting back on improvements that need to be made, in a public way.

This transparent and practical agreement is unique in that it is supported by all key labor stakeholders in Bangladesh and internationally. So far, U.S. company PVH, owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and German retailer Tchibo have signed up to the program, but it needs a critical mass of brand support to be implemented.

Joint memorandam of understanding on fire and building safety:

Labour Behind the Label and others are calling on all brands sourcing from Bangladesh to publicly sign up to take part in the building and fire safety scheme to make transparent, worker-led improvements to the industry.

Read more: Retailers and suppliers hit by fallout from deadly Bangladesh factory fire

In the wake of tragedies such as yesterday's building collapse, the Tazreen fire in November, and the nearby Spectrum factory collapse some years ago, something must be done to make a change. This proposal is the best on the table by far.

How many more deaths will it take to move brands from making CSR statements of regret, to investing in a sustainable and safe industry? We hope none.

Great News about the Propects for Peace in the Middle East!

Now let's see Israel stop the settlements and we can get some real momentum, but it will never happen because Israel has the world fooled, they do not want peace, at least their government does not, they want war and discord and disunity to continue so they can continue the land grab they started with the Balfour Declaration 100 years ago.  It's just sad that this is their reaction to the Holocaust, which they are now doing to the Palestinians, just sad!

New Hamas force in Gaza is foiling rocket attacks against Israel

The new 300 men anti-rocket force operates day and night, but will not act if Israel is the first to strike.

By Avi Issacharoff | May.10, 2012 | 2:20 AM

 The Hamas government in Gaza has been operating a force over the past few months whose sole task is to prevent the firing of rockets into Israel.

Hamas, which has always championed jihad against Israel, is now using its authority to foil the firing efforts of cells from other organizations such as the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees.

The new force was formed by and is under the direct command of Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hammad, who in the past has been considered an extremist in regard to Israel. According to a Gaza source, the force of some 300 men operates, "day and night, 24 hours, everywhere in the Strip, particularly near the borders with Israel."

The soldiers wear black uniforms and make their way around on motorcycles and four-wheel drive vehicles. According to a Hamas source, the force has a green light to shoot activists who resist arrest or fire at the Hamas soldiers. Anyone arrested can expect to spend at least a couple of months in prison, the source said. The rockets and/or mortars that are found are confiscated and transfered to Hamas.

The force has arrested many members of smaller Palestinian radical groups, but there have also been arrests of members of the Islamic Jihad and PRC, which are considered the leading opposition groups in Gaza. The Islamic Jihad members are almost always released on the spot, however, due to understandings reach between the two groups, the source said.

Although Israel and Hamas have no direct communication, the "relationship" between the two has never looked better, with what looks like close cooperation on the ground. However, there is no security cooperation between the parties as there is between the Palestinian Authority and the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank.

But the fact that this new anti-rocket force has been formed seems to demonstrate that Hamas is looking to keep things quiet on the security front so it can better establish its government in the Strip.

This force was not very much in evidence when Islamic Jihad and the PRC were firing rockets at Israel in March. This was because, among other reasons, the force won't act if Israel is the one who strikes first (and the Israeli assassination of Zuhair Al-Qaisi of the PRC in March was deemed such a provocation ). But during calm times, the force has blocked more than a few rocket and mortar strikes on the south.

Unbelieveable Washington Dysfunction!

Legislation gets passed all the time restricting or regulating our so called constitutional rights, the 1st amendment doesn't protect a citizen from being criminally responsible for libel and slander, so why is it so hard to pass the same kind of responsible legislation when it comes to the 2nd amendment.  The military industrial complex is still the real power brokers when it comes to Washington DC, just a sad day for our government, especially considering 90% of Americans support universal background checks. Just sad!

Public opinion gets trumped in gun control defeat

Posted by CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser

Washington (CNN) – Four months after the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, the gun-control proposal with arguably the best chance of passing through Congress went down to defeat. And in this case, a powerful gun lobby, coupled with 2014 campaign politics, trumped public opinion.

A bipartisan yet controversial proposal that would have extended current background checks for gun buyers to include gun shows and internet sales Wednesday fell six votes shy of the 60 needed in the Senate to advance through the chamber. The amendment by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania went down in defeat even though just about every national poll conducted the past couple of months indicated that the vast majority of Americans supported tougher background checks.
The most recent surveys included a CNN/ORC International poll released last week that indicated 86% of the public supported some form of background checks that are not currently required by law for gun sales, and an ABC News/Washington Post survey released Tuesday which indicated that 86% of Americans said they favored background checks for gun sales on the internet and at gun shows.
The two new polls were also in-line with past surveys by indicating no partisan divide on the question, with the vast majority of Democrats, independents, and even Republicans supporting increased background checks. The ABC/Washington Post survey also indicated that 86% of gun owning households supported the proposal.
The bill was backed by President Barack Obama, who's made gun control a signature issue since December's horrific shootings by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 young students and 6 adults dead. The president's been a vocal advocate for passing gun control legislation, and he's touted public opinion as he pushed Congress to act.
"The American people are trying to figure out: How can something have 90% support and yet not happen?" said the president in comments made at the Rose Garden in the White House, an hour after the vote in the Senate.
"All in all this was a pretty shameful day in Washington," added Obama, who was flanked by victims of gun violence.
"This is clearly a disappointed, frustrated president who's asking a question about how Washington can ever get anything done if they can't do something that nine of out of ten Americans want," said CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger.
But while the shocking events in Newtown influenced public opinion, in the end that wasn't enough. The White House originally pushed for passage of a new assault weapons ban as well as the limiting of high capacity ammunition magazines. But hopes of passing those proposals soon faded and they were stripped from the main Democratic bill introduced into the Senate, leaving tougher background checks as the last major component of gun legislation.
In the end, it wasn't just Republicans but also some Democrats from conservative states where gun rights are sacred, that sank the background checks compromise. Senators Mark Begich of Alaska, Max Baucus of Montana, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who all face re-election next year in red states, voted against the Manchin-Toomey proposal. So did Heidi Heitkamp. The freshman senator's not up for re-election for five and a half years but she's from North Dakota, another state with strong sentiment for gun owners rights.
The senators may have feared that voting in favor of increased background checks would hurt their re-election chances, especially with the extremely influential National Rifle Association, the leading advocate on gun rights, fiercely opposed to the Manchin-Toomey amendment. And the NRA's opposition seemed to serve as a counterweight to public opinion.
(Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also voted no at the last minute for procedural reasons, allowing him to bring the amendment back up at a later date.)
Besides Toomey, John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois were the only GOP senators to support the measure. For other Republican senators who considered supporting the proposal but ultimately voted no, re-election politics and the realization that even if the amendment had passed the Senate, it was likely to die in the GOP dominated House of Representatives, may have been factors in their decision making process.
"It came down to politics, the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections," said the president. "They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-second amendment. And obviously a lot of Republicans had that fear but Democrats had that fear too. And they caved to that pressure."
CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash analyzed the vote this way: "There is a feeling that some of these middle of the roaders on the Republican and Democratic side decided that on this gun issue there was too much risk and not enough reward to defy the NRA lobby and many of the constituents in their states."
But the NRA, in a statement, called the Manchin-Toomeny amendment "misguided" and added that "as we have noted previously, expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools."
While polling indicated widespread support for increased background checks, recent surveys also pointed to two other factors that explain why the proposal failed to survive.
The ABC/Washington Post poll highlighted an engagement gap between those who own and those who don't own guns. About one in five gun owners questioned in the survey said they have at some point contacted a public official to express their views on gun control. That number dropped by half for those in non-gun households. Nineteen percent of gun owners say they've contributed to an organization engaged in the gun control issue, with just 4% of non-gun owners saying the same thing.
The CNN/ORC poll pointed to public concerns that increased background checks would lead to a federal registry of gun owners and their firearms, which according to the survey is opposed by 55% of Americans. And two-thirds of those questioned said that if the government did keep a list of gun owners, it would eventually use that list to take guns away from people who own them.
To allay such concerns, the Manchin-Toomey proposal included language to bar the creation of such a federal registry. But it appears that wasn't enough to save the measure.

Great Al-Jazeera Article on the Great Book Robberies of Palestine by Israel during the 1948 War

The best quote from this entire article is below:

In a thoughtful summation of the events depicted in the film, Pappé claimed the pillage took place to "defeat the Palestinian narrative", and to "erase Palestinians out of history". Amit stated a similar theory. He believed the looting took place in part because of a colonialist mindset possessed by Israelis in which Palestinians were incapable of appreciating or safeguarding their own cultural heritage.

Israel's 'Great Book Robbery' unravelled

Documentary sheds light on large-scale pillaging of books from Palestinian homes in 1948, when Israel was founded.

Dalia Hatuqa Last Modified: 29 Jan 2013 09:28

Rasha Al Barghouti's father was a leading figure of Palestinian resistance [Dalia Hatuqa/Al Jazeera]

Ramallah, occupied Palestinian territories - Rasha Al Barghouti takes a few steps towards one of several large bookcases in her Ramallah home, treading slowly just four months after having hip replacement surgery. She takes out a thick blue book, and opens it to a bookmarked page, allowing her fingertips to trace the words as she reads out loud.
The book was written by her grandfather, the late Omar Saleh Al Barghouti, a leading figure of Palestinian resistance who took part in the national movement against the British occupation. During the 1948 war, when Al Barghouti was forced into exile, hundreds of his books, documents, newspapers and intimate memoirs were looted from his Jerusalem home.
The irreplaceable items representing a slice of Palestinian intellectualism were never located, except for a few - which, to Rasha's surprise, were found in Israel's National Library . "For years, we wondered what happened to my grandfather's books," said the 61-year-old, who works at Birzeit University, just outside Ramallah. "One day my sister and I looked up his name on the website of the National Library … and we found two of his books."
Rasha later found out that a whole section of the library was dedicated to her grandfather's books, a revelation that to this day moves her to tears. Al Barghouti's large collection is part of some 70,000 books that were looted just before and during the Nakba (or "catastrophe") of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes.
Large-scale looting
About 30,000 of these books were stolen from private homes in mostly affluent Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem; others from cities such as Jaffa, Nazareth and Haifa. Many were either recycled into paper (because they "incited" against the nascent Israeli state) or taken to the National Library, where some 6,000 remain with the letters AP - for "abandoned property" - labelled on their spines.
The Great Book Robbery, a documentary recently shown in Ramallah, chronicles the large-scale pillage of these priceless pieces of Palestinian culture.
Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who is featured throughout the documentary, identifies two sets of book robbers during this period: individuals acting alone who took their newly acquired possessions home, and collective or formal looters acting on behalf of the state who took the books to the National Library.
Library director Oren Weinberg told Al Jazeera that "the collection of books ... is stored in the library for the Custodian for Absentee Property.
"The books are under the legal authority of the Custodian for Absentee Property in the Ministry of Finance, [which] holds decision-making authority regarding their use."
The Ministry of Finance did not respond to repeated requests for comment before the deadline for publication of this report. Similarly, no ministry spokesperson was made available to interview as part of the documentary.
The documentary - which has also aired in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem over the past month - was based on the research of an Israeli PhD student named Gish Amit, who stumbled upon documents chronicling the "collection" of these books while carrying out research on his doctoral thesis.
Amit said he did not even know how important his accidental findings were until much later. "This was not a spontaneous act, nor was it a rescue," Amit told Al Jazeera. "It was based first and foremost on the library's organised plan to confiscate and to loot the Palestinian culture, and they really didn't think Palestinians were capable of keeping these cultural treasures."
The documentary paints a picture of a pre-1948 Palestine that was a hub for intellectuals, literary critics, writers and musicians before entire villages were destroyed, people were exiled or forced to flee, and Palestinian culture was decimated. Once a hub for art and culture aficionados, Palestine had a railway linking Haifa to Damascus and Cairo, and was frequented by acclaimed theatre troupes and poets.
Many renowned Palestinian authors and scholars, such as Khalil Al Sakakini and Nasser Eddin Nashashibi, spoke bitterly of the loss of their books, items of irreplaceable historical and religious significance.
Others, such as Mohammad Batrwai, tearfully recounted having been forced by the Haganah (the Jewish militia that transformed into the Israeli military after 1948) to loot other Palestinians' homes and, in one case, his very own.
Nothing was spared: musical instruments, newspapers and even carpets. In some cases, books that were looted were sold back to Palestinians at auction.
'Colonial mindset'
The documentary also has an associated website with a special section that aims to identify the original owners of the looted books, thus restoring pieces of cultural heritage lost. According to the director, Benny Brunner - who served in the Israeli army and fought in the 1973 war, before shedding his Zionist beliefs - this is part of a larger project to carry on the vibrant legacy of Palestinian academia and intellectualism.
In a thoughtful summation of the events depicted in the film, Pappé claimed the pillage took place to "defeat the Palestinian narrative", and to "erase Palestinians out of history".
Amit stated a similar theory. He believed the looting took place in part because of a colonialist mindset possessed by Israelis in which Palestinians were incapable of appreciating or safeguarding their own cultural heritage. "As Westerners who came from Europe, professors at Hebrew University felt they understood and appreciated these assets better than the Palestinians themselves," he said.
Further, Amit added that some believed they were rescuing these assets from destruction. "No doubt there was an act of looting and confiscation, but on the other hand some did believe that they had to take care of these books, because otherwise they would be lost," he said.
Uri Palit, a former librarian, echoed a similar sentiment in the documentary. "These books were not looted but collected. The owners were absent," Palit said.
For years, many Palestinians such as Rasha searched far and wide for the beloved books of their relatives. Today, she only has a handful of books belonging to her grandfather, who later returned to live in Ramallah. A renowned lawyer and author, who at one point served as a minister in Jordan, Omar Saleh Al Barghouthi wrote personal memoirs every day until his death in 1965.
While his 1919-1948 diaries were pillaged, his memoirs recording political and cultural life between 1950 and 1965 remained. In them, "he wrote about the pain he felt over the loss of the land and his precious books", Rasha said. "I'm so bitter that he lost so much, that we have lost so much."
Follow Dalia Hatuqa on Twitter: @DaliaHatuqa

Is Austerity good for peace with all these cuts to the military?

Worldwide (meaning USA and European) millitary spending is down, but third world (Communist and African nations) military spending is up.   Could we see a real decrease in worldwide militantism in our lifetimes?  probably not, but we can hope, can't we?

Austerity hits global military spending

By Carola Hoyos, FT.com

April 15, 2013 -- Updated 0555 GMT (1355 HKT)

(Financial Times) -- World military spending last year fell for the first time in 14 years, with the US share of the global total slipping below 40 per cent.

The world spent $1.75tn on its militaries in 2012 -- equivalent to 2.5 per cent of GDP or about $250 a person, a 0.5 per cent decrease in real terms from 2011, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its annual review published on Monday.

Spending in China, much of the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Latin America and north Africa rose, while in Europe and the US it declined as austerity measures hit budgets and the end of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shrunk discretionary defence spending.

Though the US still boasts the world's most powerful and well-funded military, the growing spending power of countries outside the OECD is shifting the military balance of power, especially in China, posing a challenge to regional and western political and military leaders.

The shift in military spending from west to east is also affecting the world's biggest western defence contractors. Not only are their traditional markets, such as the US and Europe, shrinking, but Chinese and Russian companies, buoyed by their governments' investments, are making inroads in overseas markets, making it more difficult for companies such as Lockheed Martin and BAE to make up lost ground by selling internationally.

Sam Perlo-Freeman, director of SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme, said: "We are seeing what may be the beginning of a shift in the balance of world military spending from the rich Western countries to emerging regions, as austerity policies and the drawdown in Afghanistan reduce spending in the former, while economic growth funds continue increases elsewhere.'

Nowhere is this shift more closely watched than in the US and China. As the US slashes its defence spending in protracted negotiations about how to reduce its fiscal deficit, China continues to invest heavily. From 2003 to 2012 China's military spending rose 175 per cent in real terms, the largest increase among the world's top 15 spenders. Last year China spent $166bn, up 7.8 per cent from the previous year in real terms.

The results are beginning to show. Beijing recently launched its first aircraft carrier and tested a stealth jet fighter that appears to be more advanced than US defence executives had expected. It also showed off its latest fighter drone at last year's Air Show in Zhuhai. Moreover it poses the single biggest national cyber espionage threat.

Even though the rate at which Asia's military expenditure is growing has slowed in recent years, China's dominance and tensions over the South and East China Seas continue to fuel regional spending and prompted the US to shift its strategy in Asia.

The growth of China's defence industry has also been felt further afield. Last year China ousted the UK as the world's fifth-largest arms exporter, in large part because of exports to Pakistan.

Meanwhile, companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman of the US and the UK's BAE Systems face a triple challenge: fiscal austerity is shrinking their home markets; they face more competition for oversees markets and they are all but shut out from the two fastest growing big markets: China, because of sanctions prohibiting military sales there, and Russia because it strongly favours domestic production.

Overall, Sipri expects world military spending to continue to fall until the global economy recovers, further demonstrating the fact that the industry is driven by the amount of money available to governments as much as by their perceived need for the equipment.

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Exposing the Real Takers in the USA Capitalist Economy

Private sector parasites

The real “takers” in America are not poor people dependent on welfare, but the unproductive, rent-extracting rich

By Michael Lind
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/21/private_sector_parasites/

Businessman and real estate developer Donald Trump (L) greets Mitt Romney after endorsing his candidacy for president at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada February 2, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus)
You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the 21st century are not the welfare-dependent poor — the villains of Tea Party propaganda — but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich.
The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.
Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. Land or apartment or rental-house rents flow to landlords. Royalty payments for energy or mineral extraction flow to landowners. Interest payments on loans flow to bankers and other lenders. Royalty payments on patents and copyrights flow to inventors.  Professions and guilds and unions can also extract rents from the rest of society, by creating artificial labor cartels to raise wages or professional fees. Tolls are rents paid to the owners of necessary transportation and communications infrastructure. Last but not least, taxes are rents paid to territorial governments for essential public services, including military and police protection.

All of these goods or services are necessary to make or distribute the goods and services generated by productive industry (which can be government-owned or nonprofit, as well as for-profit). If one or more of the sectors providing inputs or infrastructure to productive industry charges excessive rents, then industry can be strangled.  Industry cannot flourish if too much rent is paid to landlords, if credit is too expensive, if excessive copyright protections stifle the diffusion of technology. Even progressives must concede that guilds or unions or professions can use the power of labor monopolies to demand excessive incomes for their members and that at some point high taxes really do strangle the economy. (The evidence of successful high-tax-big government countries like those of Scandinavia suggests that you can go safely up to about 40-50 percent of GDP going to government, assuming the taxes are well spent and raised largely by less-distortionary taxes including consumption, property and wealth taxes).
All of this suggests that, if we want a technology-driven, highly productive economy, we should encourage profit-making productive enterprises while cracking down on rent-extracting monopolies, whether they are natural products of geography and geology (real estate and energy and energy and mineral deposits) or artificial (chartered banks, professional licensing associations, labor unions, patents and copyrights). This is a valid distinction between “makers” and “takers.”
Unfortunately, with the exception of some leftist and liberal economic thinkers who distinguish “rentier capitalism” or “financial capitalism” from “industrial capitalism,” conventional political discourse doesn’t distinguish among profit-earning “makers” and rent-extracting “takers.” Many progressives and populists indiscriminately denounce “big business” and “the corporations” as though a productive consumer electronics manufacturer were no different than a company that monopolizes the tolls from a privatized municipal parking meter system.  At the same time, the center-left, whose upscale supporters tend to be credentialed upper-middle-class professionals, tend to ignore the antisocial aspects of the rent-extracting schemes of the professional guilds — medicine, law and the professoriate — as well as of their elite accomplices, the credential-granting universities.
On the right, the greatest triumph of the rentier interests has been to redefine “capitalist” to mean, not productive entrepreneur or successful industrial company executive, but “anybody who makes money” — a category that includes not only investors in productive enterprises but also rentiers and a third category of speculators in unproductive assets (Picasso paintings and Persian rugs, as opposed to machine tool factories). In today’s rentier-friendly conservative ideology, somebody who makes payday loans at usurious interest rates, gouges businesses with high insurance rates, or gets paid tolls from a privatized toll road is as much a “maker” and an “entrepreneur” and a “capitalist” as someone who puts together a team of inventors, engineers, workers and investors to apply 3-D printing to printing replacement body parts. All money-making enterprises are supposed to be equally productive and socially useful, for no other reason than they make somebody rich.
A case can be made that the greatest threat to the future of industrial capitalism comes, not from excessive statism, but from the excessive share of the economy going to the “private taxation” of productive business by unproductive, parasitic private rentier interests. In the U.S., the rentier sector is sometimes described as the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector. The FIRE sector accounts for most of the rent-seeking in the U.S., although it does not include energy/mineral rentier interests or professional associations.
Without invoking a conspiracy, we can identify a Rentier Agenda that is harmful both to productive business and ordinary wage earners but promotes the policy goals of many of America’s large and influential rentier interests, particularly those in finance. The Rentier Agenda has three broad components: low taxes on rentiers, privatization of natural monopolies, and a macroeconomic policy driven by fear of inflation.
This is the first in a three-part series.

Friday, Mar 22, 2013 07:45 AM EDT

How rich “moochers” hurt America

The 3-point plan of wealthy landlords, lenders and insurance providers -- the true "takers" threatening the nation

By Michael Lind
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/how_rich_moochers_ruin_america/

In a previous column detailing the true “makers” and “takers” in America, I argued that the greatest threat to American capitalism today comes not from public taxation supporting public programs, but from “private taxation” in the form of excessive private “rents” that subsidize private sector parasites or “rentiers” (like landlords, lenders and providers of health insurance and healthcare). These excessive private taxes or rents are costs on productive enterprise that can be as crippling as excessive public taxation.
In American politics as in the American economy, power and wealth have shifted from the industrial capitalists of old to the “rent lords” of the early 21st century, based in the overgrown FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector. The agenda of the new rentier oligarchy in the U.S. is quite different from that of traditional productive businesses. The Rentier Agenda consists of low taxes on rentiers, the privatization of infrastructure and social insurance, and a macroeconomic policy that favors creditors rather than debtors, including debtor businesses and debtor governments.
Low taxes on rentiers. In the late 20th century, the U.S. and a number of other capitalist countries made tax rates on capital gains lower than tax rates on wage income. This was supposed to encourage investment in productive enterprises, but in fact it merely provided the super-rich with windfall fortunes that have often been used for stock market and real estate speculation. Thanks to privileged tax treatment of capital gains, Warren Buffett complains that he pays lower taxes than his secretary, and Mitt Romney — the poster boy of rentier financial capitalism — paid 13.9 percent in taxes in 2010, lower than the combined employee and employer payroll taxes paid by low-income workers who pay no federal income tax (and not counting the state and local taxes that they pay). America’s rentier plutocracy has deployed campaign contributions to intimidate Congress into keeping taxes extremely low on those who make most of their income from investments, whether the investments enhance the American economy’s productive capacity or not.

Privatizing natural monopolies. The classic productive capitalist wants to found a company to provide a new, socially useful good or service and make money by sales. In contrast, the classic parasitic rentier wants to bribe the state legislature into privatizing and selling state roads so that he or she can make money without effort or innovation every time somebody drives and pays a toll. Not only progressives but mainstream conservatives used to agree that natural monopolies, such as many infrastructure services—water, electricity, transportation — should be either publicly owned or publicly regulated utilities. Today, however, some plutocrats, seeking guaranteed, recurrent streams of money for little or no effort, fund politicians and ideologues who favor privatizing or deregulating infrastructure and public utilities and cutting or voucherizing Social Security and Medicare, to force the elderly to buy financial products and costly health insurance from the rentier sector.
Anti-inflationary macroeconomic policy. The rentier class overlaps largely with the creditor class, much of whose wealth is in the form of debts that must be repaid by governments, businesses and individuals. In all times and places, the creditor elite has lived in fear that its wealth may be reduced by inflation, which permits the debtors to repay their debts in currency, which is nominally the same but in reality of ever-dwindling value.
Moderate inflation is the friend of governments with high debt loads, allowing them to pay down debts more easily without hurting the economy by raising taxes too much or cutting spending too much. Most businesses can live with moderate inflation, as long as they pass on price increases in inputs to their customers.  Nor is moderate inflation a threat to the working-class majorities in the U.S. and similar industrial democracies, as long as wages and social insurance, like Social Security, are adjusted for inflation. (Only an affluent minority of Americans have substantial private retirement savings that could be harmed by inflation.)
This means that the rentiers are much more willing to have central bankers and other government policymakers slam the brakes on the economy, at the slightest sign of inflation, than are productive businesses (if they are rational), governments or wage earners. Indeed, because rising wages in tight labor markets can sometimes contribute to economy-wide inflation, the creditor class can tolerate or even approve of high levels of sustained unemployment that devastates much of a nation’s population while depriving productive businesses of great numbers of consumers.
That’s the Rentier Agenda, then — low tax rates on unearned income flowing to passive investors, replacing public utilities with private toll-charging monopolies, and pursuing policies that deter inflation, even at the risk of prolonged, mass unemployment and idle factories. It is no exaggeration to say that the private sector rentiers are not only the real “moochers” and the real “takers” but also are the greatest threat to productive industrial capitalism, in the United States and the world.
What we need is an Anti-Rentier alliance. Such a coalition would scramble the usual patterns of politics. Progressives and conservatives alike would have to distinguish between productive businesses, which we should encourage, and rent-extracting parasites that need to be dealt with. Pro-manufacturing liberals and Main Street conservative populists should unite against what the progressive economist Michael Hudson calls “the tollbooth economy” in alliance with what James K. Galbraith calls “the predator state.”
This is the second in a three-part series.

 Monday, Mar 25, 2013 10:00 AM EDT 

Defeating useless rich people

Taming wealthy, unproductive "moochers" will require a populist campaign to stop them. Here's how we can do it

By Michael Lind
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/25/defeating_useless_rich_people/

In two previous columns, I argued that left and right alike are confused by a failure to distinguish productive businesses that sell innovative goods and services from “rentier” interests — landlords, lenders, copyright holders and others — which use their natural or artificial monopoly power to extract excessive tolls, fees and other recurrent payments from the rest of society, including productive businesses. The fees or rents extracted by these interests constitute a kind of “private taxation” which — rather than public taxation — is the greatest threat facing America’s productive economy.
Today America’s powerful rentier interests, particularly those in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, are mobilizing campaign contributions and paid propaganda to promote what I called the Rentier Agenda: low taxes on those whose income is derived from capital gains; the privatization of public infrastructure and the deregulation of regulated private utilities, to generate windfall profits for investors in privatized or deregulated agencies; and a macroeconomic policy that serves the interests of creditors, at the expense of slow growth and mass unemployment, rather than productive businesses and workers. Similar observations have been made by many on the left and some mavericks on the right.
To counter the domination of America’s rentier oligarchs, we need an Anti-Rentier campaign that would unite unlikely groups: owners of productive businesses as well as workers, populist conservatives and liberal reformers. An Anti-Rentier movement would distinguish businesses that make profits by providing worthwhile goods or services in innovative ways from rentier interests that passively extract exorbitant tolls and fees from the economy without adding any value.
An Anti-Rentier movement would oppose unproductive, ill-begotten wealth, not the rich in general. Wealthy individuals who get richer by investing in start-up companies or funding long-lived, creative blue-chip firms provide a valuable benefit to society, even as they risk losing their own money. Such risk-taking investors are the opposites of financial sector rentiers who seek to bribe policymakers into letting them privatize their gains while socializing their losses.
But government can and should minimize passive rent extraction and unproductive speculation or gambling. The methods for minimizing excessive rents are as various as kinds of rentier interests. Windfall real estate profits should be taxed away by property taxes or “land value” taxes. Severance taxes or superprofits taxes should be levied on energy and other resource windfalls determined by geography rather than human effort. Banks should be low-profit, publicly-regulated utilities and laws against usurious interest rates, struck down in the U.S. in the late twentieth century, should be restored. Infrastructure assets—water systems, electricity, roads, airports and airlines, rail, inland waterways—may be privately-owned utilities, but their prices need to be regulated in the public interest. While there are legitimate roles for both professional associations and labor unions, they should not be allowed to act as predatory labor cartels at the expensive of the economy.
The Anti-Rentier tax agenda would seek to raise capital gains taxes on rentiers while lowering the tax burden on American workers and the profits of productive businesses. The Anti-Rentier policy reform agenda would involve increasing public ownership or utility regulation of infrastructure. Instead of cutting Social Security and Medicare to force the elderly to buy more products from parasitic private-sector monopolies and oligopolies, the Anti-Rentier coalition would favor expanding Social Security and other public social insurance, while phasing out tax subsidies for private health insurance and private retirement products. When it comes to economic management, an Anti-Rentier movement would tolerate a modest amount of inflation, in the interest of productive business and solvent government, at the expense if necessary of the creditor elite. An Anti-Rentier movement would consider using methods used by other governments, such as postal savings banks, public investment banks, and “financial repression” (which isn’t as scary as it sounds) to raise adequate money for government while minimizing blackmail, in the form of high interest rates, imposed by domestic creditors and foreign creditors.
If these Anti-Rentier reforms were undertaken, then genuinely productive American businesses would be freed from many costs imposed on them by the “private parasites” who are far greater threat to its future than America’s public sector. Cutting off excess rents would not only shrink the rentier elite’s share of the U.S. economy, it would also alter the membership of the exclusive club of rich Americans, which would have a much greater percentage of “makers” who got rich by selling new goods and services and a much smaller proportion of “takers” from finance and real estate. The typical rich American should be an innovative industrialist or technologist, not a Wall Street financier or a guy with a parking-meter monopoly. Super-rich bankers would be as rare as super-rich public utility executives.
Americans have tamed rentier industries before. In the early twentieth century, exploitative private power companies were domesticated as regulated public utilities. The Enron scandal, associated with late-twentieth century deregulation, proved the wisdom of the utility regime. And even conservative states like Texas have always levied severance taxes on natural resource monopolies. The challenge of our time is to extend utility-style regulation or public ownership to today’s out-of-control, predatory rentiers in higher education, health care, and — most of all — finance.
Productive Americans of center, left and right, unite! You have nothing to lose but your rents.

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Great Article on Iraq War Expounding Truths We All Knew 10 Years Ago!

I originally posted this about a month ago, but had to repost it now because of blogger technical difficulties. 

militant capitalism marches on, Marx is saying I told you so!

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

	Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil By Antonia Juhasz , Special to CNN March 19, 2013 -- Updated 1305 GMT (2105 HKT) Editor's note: Ten years ago the war in Iraq began. This week we focus on the people involved in the war, and the lives that changed forever. Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry analyst, is author of several books, including "The Bush Agenda" and "The Tyranny of Oil." (CNN) -- Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil. It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom's bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms. From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West's largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush's running mate in 2000. The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.  Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion. "Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," said General John Abizaid in 2007, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq. Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Then-Senator and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are." Surviving al Qaeda For the first time in about 30 years, Western oil companies are exploring for and producing oil in Iraq from some of the world's largest oil fields and reaping enormous profit. And while the U.S. has also maintained a fairly consistent level of Iraq oil imports since the invasion, the benefits are not finding their way through Iraq's economy or society. These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." Today it does. In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush's first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Dick Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq's entire oil productive capacity. Planning for a military invasion was soon underway. Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, said in 2004: "Already by February [2001], the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why [to invade Iraq], but the how and how quickly." In its final report in May 2001, the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment." This is precisely what has been achieved in Iraq. Here's how they did it. The State Department Future of Iraq Project's Oil and Energy Working Group met from February 2002 to April 2003 and agreed that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war. The list of the group's members was not made public, but Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum -- who was appointed Iraq's oil minister by the U.S. occupation government in September 2003 -- was part of the group, according to Greg Muttitt, the journalist and author of "Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq". Bahr al-Uloum promptly set about trying to implement the group's objectives. At the same time, representatives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Halliburton, among others, met with Cheney's staff in January 2003, to discuss plans for Iraq's postwar industry. For the next decade, former and current executives of western oil companies acted first as administrators of Iraq's oil ministry, and then as "advisers" to the Iraqi government. Before the invasion, there were just two things standing in the way of western oil companies operating in Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the nation's legal system. The invasion dealt handily with Hussein. To address the latter problem, some both in and outside of the Bush administration argued that it should simply change Iraq's oil laws through the U.S.-led coalition government of Iraq which ran the country from April 2003 to June 2004. Instead the White House waited, choosing to pressure the newly-elected Iraqi government to pass new oil legislation itself. This Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, partially drafted by the western oil industry, would lock the nation into private foreign investment under the most corporate-friendly terms. The Bush administration pushed the Iraqi government both publicly and privately to pass the law. And in January 2007, as the ''surge" of 20,000 additional American troops was being finalized, the president set specific benchmarks for the Iraqi government, including the passage of new oil legislation to "promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation." But due to enormous public opposition and a recalcitrant parliament, the central Iraqi government has failed to pass the Hydrocarbons Law. Usama al-Nujeyfi, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, even quit in protest over the law, saying it would cede too much control to global companies and "ruin the country's future." In 2008, with the likelihood of the law's passage and the prospect of continued foreign military occupation dimming as elections loomed in the U.S. and Iraq, the oil companies settled on a different track. War in Iraq: Ten years later Bypassing parliament, the firms started signing contracts that provide all of the access and most of the favorable treatment the Hydrocarbons Law would provide - and the Bush administration helped draft the model contracts. Upon leaving office, Bush and Obama administration officials have even worked for oil companies as advisers on their Iraq endeavors. For example, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad's company, CMX-Gryphon, "provides international oil companies and multinationals with unparalleled access, insight and knowledge on Iraq." The new contracts lack the security a new legal structure would grant, and Iraqi lawmakers have argued that they run contrary to existing law, which requires government control, operation, and ownership of Iraq's oil sector. But the contracts do achieve the key goal of the Cheney energy task force: all-but-privatizing the Iraqi oil sector and opening it to private foreign companies. They also provide exceptionally long contract terms, high ownership stakes, and eliminate requirements that Iraq's oil stay in Iraq, that companies invest earnings in the local economy, or hire a majority of local workers. Iraq's oil production has increased by more than 40% in the last five years to 3 million barrels of oil a day (still below the 1979 high of 3.5 million set by Iraq's state-owned companies), but a full 80% of this is being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs. GDP per capita has increased significantly, yet remains among the lowest in the world and well below some of Iraq's other oil-rich neighbors. Basic services such as water and electricity remain luxuries, while 25% of the population lives in poverty. The promise of new energy-related jobs across the country has yet to materialize. The oil and gas sectors today account directly for less than 2% of total employment as foreign companies rely instead on imported labor. In just the last few weeks, more than 1,000 people have protested at ExxonMobil and Russia Lukoil's super-giant West Qurna oil field, demanding jobs and payment for private land that has been lost or damaged by oil operations. The Iraqi military was called in to respond. Fed up with the firms, a leading coalition of Iraqi civil society groups and trade unions, including oil workers, declared on February 15 that international oil companies have "taken the place of foreign troops in compromising Iraqi sovereignty" and should "set a timetable for withdrawal." Closer to home, at a protest at Chevron's Houston headquarters in 2010, former U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer Thomas Buonomo, member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, held up a sign which read, "Dear Chevron: Thank you for dishonoring our service." Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with losers: the Iraqi people, and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead.

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The Soul of Competition!

Check out the last sentence! 

220 km Sahara desert run: 'The toughest race on Earth'

By Teo Kermeliotis, for CNN

April 9, 2013 -- Updated 1040 GMT (1840 HKT)

 (CNN) -- Would you pay thousands of dollars to spend seven days running under the scorching sun of the Sahara Desert, traversing shifting sand dunes and punishing rocky plateaus for more than 220 kilometers, with all your food and kit affixed to your back?

It may sound like insanity, but it's exactly what daring men and women of all ages have chosen to do by taking part in this year's iconic Marathon des Sables (MDS).

Known as the world's toughest footrace, the MDS began Sunday morning as the driving sounds of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" blasted through loud speakers to usher a record 1,024 competitors from nearly 50 countries into the heart of the Southern Moroccan desert.

Over the next few days, the grueling adventure will challenge participants -- the oldest aged 76 -- to test their bodies and minds as they take on whipping sandstorms and blazing temperatures of up to 50C in their epic journey across the desert.

To toughen the ordeal, competitors are required to carry all their equipment for the duration of the ultra-marathon -- from food and sleeping gear to an anti-venom pump and glow sticks. Three runners have died in the 28 years the race has been taking place.

"Some runners come here to push back their limits and brave the extreme to write their tale," says Frenchman Patrick Bauer, who founded the race in the mid-1980s.

"For a lot of participants, the Marathon des Sables is an opportunity to break with everyday life and feel a sense of timelessness. There is even a spiritual dimension, a quest for answers to what are at times very personal questions," he adds. "The desert magnifies the soul."

INDEED!