KARZAI SAYS WE'RE TRAPPED IN AFGHANISTAN DISASTER FOR ANOTHER DECADE

from UNDERNEWS by TPR

NPR - Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a global meeting that he will soon convene a peace conference in his country to lure Taliban fighters to renounce violence but he still expects foreign troops to stay for up to a decade. Karzai called on delegates from about 70 nations and world bodies to support a plan to reintegrate Taliban soldiers into mainstream society with offers of housing and jobs in the police, army, or in agriculture.. . .

Karzai said he envisions Afghanistan's government taking control of security in all 34 provinces by 2015 but foreign troops could remain for up to a decade."With regard to training and equipping the Afghan security forces, five to 10 years will be enough," Karzai said in a joint BBC interview with Brown, broadcast Thursday. "With regard to sustaining them until Afghanistan is financially able to provide for our forces, the time will be extended to 10 to 15 years."

Democracy in America: an Useful Fiction

By Chris Hedges - Truthdig

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,” Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the “persons” agree to a “settlement.” Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not “admitting any wrongdoing.” There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world’s largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is “conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,” Wolin writes. “It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

“It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,” Wolin writes. “Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,’ never of democrats.”

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country’s foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as “soft” or “unpatriotic.” The “patriotic” citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

Honduran Coup d’état, a ‘win’ for the U.S.?

January 27, 2010

Today, Pepe Lobo will be inaugurated as the new President of Honduras in what many consider to be an institutionalization of the coup d’état which took place seven months ago. Lobo comes to the Presidency as a result of a highly disputed election process carried out by the coup regime. The elections, which have been widely condemned as illegitimate were boycotted by a large percentage of the Honduran population.

U.S. Undersecretary Thomas Shannon, in a maneuver that totally subverted an extended negotiation process, announced that the U.S. would recognize the election, even if there was not a prior return to constitutional order. The U.S. celebrates today’s inauguration as the ‘way forward’ for Honduras and has aggressively pressured other Latin American countries to recognize Lobo’s government.

While the United States is eager normalize the situation and to get on with business as usual, the June 28th coup d’état has yielded unexpected consequences for Washington, both inside and outside of Honduras. Unforeseen by the coup plotters and the United States, the military takeover of Honduras unleashed a broad based, sustained resistance movement inside the country. A spirit long dormant in Honduras was awakened, transforming the country into a hub of political activity previously unimaginable.

The resistance movement has brought together people from many sectors of Honduran society, including large numbers of disaffected Liberal Party members. The unifying theme is that they no longer accept the status quo for their country. Events of the last seven months have accelerated and deepened a process demanding deep structural change. Organizations such as “Los Necios”, a small, left wing organization of students and young people struggled to maintain a membership of around 100. In these few months, their membership has swelled to over 1000.

Currently 57 local expressions of the national resistance organization operate in cities and towns around Honduras. Confounding the coup leader’s strategy, the movement is gaining strength despite brutal repression, state terror and the attempt to institutionalize the coup via elections. The resistance movement is holding large protest marches today and is working to implement a four-year plan for movement building in preparation for the next national elections.

In Latin America, the coup in Honduras is widely understood to be a test case for U.S. policy towards Latin America. By attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of the ALBA countries, the U.S. hoped to strike a blow to this alternative economic block which the U.S. counts as enemy. However, in the wake of the coup, the U.S. found itself in a historically unprecedented position at the OAS. Viewed by Latin American governments from both the right and the left as a potential direct threat to each of them, the OAS took a unanimous position denouncing the coup and ejecting Honduras from the OAS. The U.S. was forced to accept this decision. Most countries in Latin America continue to refuse to recognize the results of the coup regime sponsored “elections” on November 29th despite heavy pressure and arm twisting on the part of the Unites States to do so.

Disappointment stemming from the contradiction between statements of a recently inaugurated President Obama to Latin American heads of state at the Summit of the Americas in April of 2009, and a virtually unchanged U.S. policy has been articulated by leaders throughout Latin America. Three recent ‘moments’ have contributed to a rapid readjustment of expectations. First was the coup in Honduras and refusal of the U.S. to take proactive policy measures against it. Second was the announcement of seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia. And the third was Secretary of State Clinton’s declaration that Latin America countries should “think twice about flirting with Iran.”

The willingness of Latin American countries to challenge U.S. positions indicates a slowly changing balance of power in the Hemisphere. Soon after Arturo Valenzuela was confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere he paid a visit to the Mercosur Countries. Far from the diplomatic protocol to which the U.S. is accustomed, in Brazil and Argentina, the first two countries which he visited, Mr. Valenzuela was not received by the President or the Foreign Minister in either country. In a press statement near the time of Valenzuela’s visit, Brazil’s Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim criticized the US for being “extremely tolerant” of the coup and the de facto regime.

What seems most clear is that the U.S. State Department remains mired in an outdated cold war mentality, failing to recognize and adapt to the profound and complex changes that have occurred in Latin America during the last decade. Unfortunately, there seem to be few signs that this will change anytime soon.

Today’s inauguration in Honduras is happening in a context in which the old ghosts from the worst decades of U.S. policy toward Latin America have been conjured in an attempt to silence opposition. The sharp escalation of human rights violations and use of state terror in an attempt to destroy the resistance movement has now entered a phase which human rights defenders describe as “silent, selective and systematic.” Death squads and paramilitaries relentlessly pursue those resisting the coup. Many have been executed, and others have fled in order to save their lives.

The repression continues in the context of a people who are empowered, determined and who are not afraid. The resistance movement has declared that it will not recognize Porfirio Lobo as President, but rather consider him to be the continuation of the dictatorship imposed though the June 28th military coup. Their non-violent struggle for deep structural change via a constituent assembly will continue. What has happened in Honduras serves as a marker for change in Latin America. It signals that attempts by the United States to rule the hemisphere through coercion and force will be met with new and unexpected challenges and forms of resistance.

Tom Loudon
Quixote Center
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Honduras’ Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo: Another Disaster for Central American Democracy Waiting in the Wing
by COHA Senior Research Fellow Adrienne Pine

Tomorrow, January 27th, as the world’s eyes continue to be riveted on the unfolding disaster in Haiti, Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo will be installed as Honduras’ president, succeeding de facto president Roberto Micheletti. Lobo, a supporter of the June 28th military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, was chosen in a November election held under conditions of qualified state terror. As the majority of Hondurans boycotted the elections, and dozens of candidates for lower offices withdrew, the vast majority of countries around the world classified the ballot as illegitimate.

In the hours and days following the election, the illegally-appointed Supreme Electoral Tribunal committed fraud by announcing a voter turnout that was indisputably more than 12 percentage points higher than its own officially-published numbers. The doctored higher figure was cited repeatedly by Lobo, Secretary of State Clinton, and other friendly faces to legitimize the disputed ballot. Many Honduran and foreign observers argue that later international support for the Lobo Administration will eventually ensure the invalidation of Zelaya’s most important reforms. This support will guarantee long-term repression and a growing degree of tight-fisted control in the country, as well as endangering democratic institutions and social justice reforms throughout the hemisphere as the result of an echo effect.

Though State Department officials insist that the Honduras election process was transparent, in fact, no international observers were present to confirm the tally because—as announced by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on September 23rd—the conditions for a free and fair election were not present. A scathing 147-page report released Wednesday, January 20th, by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission corroborates this, citing a litany of well-documented human rights abuses, including numerous political assassinations committed prior to, and following the election. The report describes a militarized environment in which dissonant or critical opinions have been officially prohibited in “an egregious, arbitrary, unnecessary and disproportionate restriction, in violation of international law, of the right of every Honduran to express himself or herself freely, and to receive information from a plurality and diversity of sources.”

While no official international observers were on the ground election day, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) sent “monitors” to oversee the Honduran election that the OAS and Carter Center had refused to legitimize with their presence. Both the NDI and IRI are funded by the U.S. Congress through a highly conservative Reagan-era umbrella organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The archly conservative IRI has supported efforts implicated in the ousting of democratically-elected presidents in Haiti and Venezuela in recent years. The day of the election, the NDI had its monitors caught on tape refusing to discuss police violence, which they had witnessed outside the polls in Honduras’ industrial city of San Pedro Sula.

The parallels between Honduras and Haiti are striking; each country has been saddled by a history of undeserved debt—an enduring legacy of colonialism—and in each country’s case (after over a century of often U.S.-installed dictatorships) an elected president who was responsibly engaged with bringing social justice to its citizens, was evicted from office. The vehicle for this was a military coup at least tacitly backed by Washington. By aiding the foes of Manual Zelaya in Honduras and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Washington indirectly or directly ousted from power those who had been prepared to protect public resources from the pressing demands of the IMF for privatization, and shrink the public sector infrastructure of both countries. The skewed development of these countries, as well as guidance from private entities and the U.S. government, subjected the national interests of Haiti and Honduras to be hostage to the view of these outsiders. This is a situation that could turn the smallest windstorm into a hurricane, when it comes to a natural disaster’s impacts on the average resident and outside political manipulations.

Although President Obama initially joined the international community in condemning the Honduran coup and calling for the restoration of democratic order as a precondition for recognition of elections in that country, Washington in fact has been aggressively lobbying other Latin American presidents to recognize the incoming Lobo government. Despite the de facto government’s refusal to reinstate Zelaya or follow the time line and process laid out by the Guaymuras Accords, the Obama Administration has signaled its intention to recognize a “unity” government representing only the coup leaders, and to support the Honduran Congress’ decision to give amnesty to those responsible for the military coup and the thousands of human rights abuses that followed. In a recent interview with COHA, independent Honduran journalist and filmmaker Oscar Estrada expressed some of the opposition’s apprehensions about Lobo:

“With the entrance on the scene of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, there begins a new phase in the project of domination begun by the June 28th coup d’état. [Lobo’s] recent reconciliation agreement is nothing more than an attempt to whitewash the coup and demobilize the popular resistance.”

Lobo, the man who speaks today of dialogue and peace, has offered safe conduct for Mel Zelaya to leave the country. But, just days ago, he proposed a neoliberal “national plan” for the next 28 years. By means of his own legislative bloc, he seeks to approve an amnesty that principally favors the country’s violators of human rights, and plans to govern with the backing and protection of the paramilitary structures that have terrorized the people during the past six months.

Honduran opponents of the coup, who since June 28th have organized almost daily protest actions, including numerous marches numbering in the hundreds of thousands, similarly plan to protest Lobo’s inauguration.

The Obama Administration has so profoundly bungled the situation in Honduras that it has destroyed hope among many of its citizens as well as Latin Americans that a ‘new era’ of relations with the United States is in the making. Add to that the multiplication of U.S. military bases in Colombia, the mistakes being made in response to the tragedy in Haiti, and the missed opportunities in Cuba, and one cannot claim with any degree of optimism that Obama is off to a robust start to implement an energized and enlightened new Latin American policy.

COHA Senior Research Fellow Adrienne Pine, Ph.D, also serves an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University. Dr. Pine recently authored the book Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (University of California Press).

Haiti and the seismic weapon

by Thierry Meyssan *

The controversy that followed the publication on our website of an article entertaining the possibility that the earthquake in Haiti was caused artificially, calls for clarification. Yes, seismic weapons do exist and the United States, among others, have them. Yes, the U.S. military forces were pre-positionned to be deployed to the island. These facts are not conclusive in themselves but they certainly warrant heightened scrutiny into this matter.
Read all here

Background: "The Destabilization of Haiti: Anatomy of a Military Coup d'Etat"
by Michel Chossudovsky (written February 29, 2004; prefaced January 25, 2010; brief preface by LfL)

Obama Administration Orders World Bank To Keep Third World In Poverty

Depopulation by mass starvation: a non-declared aim of the GW scam/scare:

More starvation and death guaranteed by blocking poorer countries from building coal-fired power plants
Paul Joseph Watson - Prison Planet.com - Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Under the provably fraudulent and completely corrupted justification of fighting global warming, the Obama administration has ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met.