The planet is in a bad state, but some of the cures, such as that of killing off 90% of the population by ebola, are worse than the disease... or are in fact part of the disease.
Pretty much anyone who can see clearly and think straight is aware that the earth, be it human society or the environment, isn't in great shape. The list of problems we are facing is put forward in great detail each day on the Signs page. The question is, what to do about it?
There are two main poles around which solutions are being discussed: the first takes as its assumption that there is more than enough wealth and resources on the earth to feed, clothe, lodge and support the population. Therefore, the solution is a rearrangement of the production and distribution of that wealth, which should, by right, belong to everyone. The second solution begins by saying that the earth cannot support the current population and that there must be a drastic reduction (anywhere from 60%-90%) to create a viable, sustainable economy.
Our own take is that there are no solutions short of a change in the individuals that make up the population. Until each of us gets in touch with his or her higher centres and fuses the real 'I' that exists only in potential, we will continue to be buffeted by the conflicting voices of our many small 'I's, subject to the basic drives of sex, fear, and security, and the situation on the planet will express the conflict within.
We assign a high probability to the notion that the people who rule this world want to implement the second solution. It is the underlying drive for war in the Middle East, for the propaganda around the topic of "peak oil", for the so-called war on terror, for the growing loss of civil rights and the imposition of a fascist state in the US, and the other entropic lines of force we see. Obviously, those in power, speaking in strictly material terms, do not wish to relinquish power, they do not want to abandon their luxury and great wealth, their ability to consume at will. The first solution would necessitate such a change, and it isn't going to happen.
Now, if an argument was made that the population needed to be reduced by 60%-90% in order to maintain the rich and powerful in their riches and power, it wouldn't get too far among those who are excluded, so it is clear that other arguments need to be advanced to bring a certain portion of the population onside. One argument could be that the earth is running out of the necessities; there simply isn't enough to go around, and therefore, for the good of everyone -- because we don't want billions of people living in misery and starving to death, do we? -- we must reduce the population. This is the argument given by the proponents of the "peak oil" scam. They tell us that the reduction can be done through consultation with people like the Dalai Lama to ensure it is done in the best way possible.
Others think a reduction can be accomplished through growing social awareness of the problem. People will understand that we need to bring forth fewer children, only one per couple.
But what is being encouraged in all of these arguments is a linkage of the state of the planet with the need for population reduction, and the notion that population reduction is possible, even "humanely" possible.
The article "Meeting Dr. Doom" offers another path to reduction: killing off 90% of the population by unleashing the ebola virus. The article describes the warm reception, the applause and cheers, that greeted the exposition of this idea by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, known as The Lizard Man for his study of reptiles, recently in Texas. Are we to imagine that his audience of students and academics was filled with cold-hearted killers who were rising in anticipation of the idea of mass murder? Leaving aside the easy jokes that could be made about Texas and the village idiot who is now POTUS, we don't think the audience were Jeffrey Dalmer wannabees at all. But that is what is so frightening. Through the use of fear -- an accurate portrayal of the actual state of the world and where it is heading -- normal folks can be made to accept genocide. Of course, the underlying assumption on their part is that they will not be among those who will suffer the painful and horrible death that is ebola.
Wikipedia gives the description of the symptoms of ebola as follows:
Among humans, the virus is transmitted by direct contact with infected body fluids such as blood. The incubation period is 2 to 21 days. Symptoms are varied and often appear suddenly. Initial symptoms include: high fever (at least 38.8° C, 101° F), severe headache, muscle/joint/abdominal pain, severe weakness and exhaustion, sore throat, nausea, and dizziness. Before an epidemic is suspected, these early symptoms are easily mistaken for malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, or various bacterial infections, which are all far more common. The secondary symptoms often involve bleeding both internally and externally from any opening in the body: Dark or bloody stools and diarrhea, vomiting blood, red eyes from swollen blood vessels, red spots on the skin from subcutaneous bleeding, and bleeding from the nose, mouth, rectum, genitals and needle puncture sites. Other secondary symptoms include low blood pressure (less than 90mm Hg) and a fast but weak pulse, eventual organ damage including the kidney and liver by co-localized necrosis, and proteinuria (the presence of proteins in urine). The span of time from onset of symptoms to death (from shock due to blood loss or organ failure) is usually between 7 and 14 days.
Nice way to die, isn't it? Of course, in three to five weeks, the "problem" of overpopulation could be eliminated! After all, someone else's agonising death is hardly a high price to pay for guaranteed sustainable living! And it won't kill all the poor, little animals; it'll ony kill those nasty humans!
And if you still need some reassuring before giving your assent, Wikipedia indicates that some of the horror stories may well be exaggerated:
Myth: The virus symptoms are horrifying beyond belief. Victims of Ebola suffer from squirting blood, liquifying flesh, zombie-like faces and dramatic projectile bloody vomiting.
Reality: Only a tiny fraction of Ebola victims have severe bleeding that would be even somewhat dramatic to witness. Most of the bleeding is subtle, occurring internally. Ebola symptoms are usually limited to extreme exhaustion, a high fever, headaches and body pains.
The following is an excerpt from Ed Regis's interview21 with Philippe Calain, M.D. Chief Epidemiologist, CDC Special Pathogens Branch, Kikwit 1995:
"At the end of the disease the patient does not look, from the outside, as horrible as you can read in some books. They are not melting. They are not full of blood. They're in shock, muscular shock. They are not unconscious, but you would say 'obtunded', dull, quiet, very tired. Very few were hemorrhaging. Hemorrhage is not the main symptom. Less than half of the patients had some kind of hemorrhage. But the ones that bled, died."
Feel better?
Keep in mind, however, that this part of the Wikipedia entry is "disputed". After 5.5 billion people are eliminated, perhaps those who are left will have assembled enough data to come to a final decision. We hope they remember to update Wikipedia.
Dare we say that any person with a conscience would find the entire idea of population reduction to be psychopathic? But if you check out the student evaluations on the website of Dr. Pianka, you'll find that his students by and large adore him. And the evaluations do indicate that he discusses ebola and population reduction in his class! He is a man in a position of power who is using his course to indoctrinate his students into the ultimate goal of the powers that be, using their awareness of the ecological disaster awaiting us to bring them "onside". That is, he is twisting the genuine and sincere desire of young minds for a different world into cannon fodder or the apocalypse.
Gold closed at 583.50 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 4.2% from $560.00 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.8252 euros on Friday, down 0.7% from 0.8308 euros at the end of the previous week. That put the euro at 1.2118 dollars, compared to 1.2036 the week before. Gold in euros would be 481.52 an ounce, up 3.5% from 465.27 for the week. Oil closed at 66.35 dollars a barrel on Friday, up 3.2% from $64.27 at the end of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 54.75 euros a barrel, up 2.5% from 53.40 the Friday before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.79, up 0.9% from 8.71 for the week. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 11,109.32, down 1.5% from 11,279.97 the Friday before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,339.79 on Friday, up 1.2% 2,312.82 at the close of the week before. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.85%, up 19 basis points from 4.66 for the week.
Friday was the last day of the first quarter of 2006, so let's recap the year so far. Gold went from $519.70 an ounce to $583.50, a rise of 12.3% in three months. Oil went from 61.04 dollars a barrel to $66.35, an increase of 8.7% after having risen 40.5% in 2005. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note increased 46 basis points from 4.39 to 4.85 so far this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up for the quarter, going from 10,717.50 to 11,109.32, a rise of 3.7%. The NASDAQ rose 6.1%, from 2,205.32 to 2,339.79 in Q1 2006. Sounds like good news for the U.S. stock market, unless you compare stock prices to the price of oil or gold. The dollar fell 2.3% from 0.8440 to 0.8252 euros so far in 2006.
Here are some charts showing the numbers we have been following for the past five quarters:
The trends we saw in 2005 continued in the first quarter of 2006: sharp rises in gold and oil, increases in long-term and short-term U.S. interest rates, relative stagnation of stocks, and the dollar and euro trading within a limited range.
Given the complete disaster that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned out to be, given the collapse in political support and legitimacy for the neocon project domestically, and given the hatred and resentment engendered against the United States throughout the world by the neocon imperial project, it might be surprising that stocks and the U.S. dollar have not fallen further. U.S. stocks represent the profit-making ability of U.S. corporations, and the early stages, at least, of even disastrous wars offer plenty of opportunities for profit. War in Iraq and fears of a much wider war have driven oil prices up, but that only led to record profits for U.S. oil companies. Here are some examples from Britain of how it's done:
British companies draw huge profits from occupied Iraq
By Harvey Thompson
1 April 2006According to the findings of a recent joint investigation by Corporate Watch, an independent watchdog, and the Independent,a total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least £1.1 billion of contracts and investment in occupied Iraq since the US-led invasion.
Corporate Watch believes that the real figure could be as much as five times higher, as many companies have undisclosed business dealings in Iraq and the value of several large contracts is unknown. The investigation was further muddied by the UK government's refusal to release the names of companies it has directly helped to win contracts in Iraq.
British firms include private security/military services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.
The report acknowledges that although British corporations still lag behind the huge profits paid to US companies (the latest Halliburton/KBR military contract alone is worth about £2.85 billion), in two areas British firms are playing a central role. The Iraqi insurgency means private security companies (PSCs) or private military companies (PMCs) are in great demand, and it is the one area where British firms are on a par with their US equivalents. Corporate Watch estimates there are between 20,000 and 30,000 security personnel working in Iraq, half of whom are employed by companies run by retired senior British officers and at least two former defence ministers.
The biggest British outfit, Aegis - run by Tim Spicer, the former British army lieutenant colonel who founded the PMC Sandline - has a workforce the size of a military division and may rank as the largest corporate military group ever assembled, according to the report. It has made more than £246 million from a three-year contract with the US Pentagon to coordinate military and security companies across Iraq.
Other private security/military companies have sprung up almost overnight to protect British and American interests. Among the highest grossing UK corporations Iraq is the construction firm Amec, which has made an estimated £500 million from a series of contracts restoring electrical systems and maintaining power generation facilities since 2004. Another PMC, Erinys, has amassed more than £86 million, a substantial portion from the protection of oilfields.
Britain is also playing a critical role in advising on the creation of state institutions and the "business of government." PA Consulting, which has also received a contract for advising on the UK government's identity cards scheme, worth around £19 million, is now a key adviser in Iraq.
Loukas Christodoulou of Corporate Watch has been monitoring British business relations with Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. He says in his conclusion to the joint report: "The presence of these consultants in Iraq is arguably a part of the UK government's policy to push British firms as lead providers of privatisation support. The Department for International Development has positioned itself as a champion of privatisation in developing countries. The central part UK firms are playing in reshaping Iraq's economy and society lays the ground for a shift towards a corporate-dominated economy. This will have repercussions lasting decades."
In five years, the £1.1 billion official figure of contracts identified in the report will be dwarfed by what British and the US companies hope to reap from investments. In addition to this, highly lucrative oil contracts have yet to be handed out. The Anglo-Irish company Petrel Resources, an oil and gas exploration company, is seeking licences to run three existing oil wells, for example...
Clearly, then, it would be a mistake to equate the economic health of a country with that of its corporations. The Treasury has been looted for Bush's reckless wars and other giveaways to the rich. U.S. taxpayers will have to pay for these giveaways with both their taxes and with their pay and benefits. Will the United States public ever wake up enough to demand changes? The U.S. media's coverage of the labor protests in France asks that very question (from an unsympathetic point of view):
US media reacts to French protests with hatred and fear
By Jerry White
1 April 2006The US media, not known for following the internal political developments of other countries too closely unless it has a direct impact upon the US, has provided an inordinate amount of ill-tempered commentary on the wave of protests and strikes in France against the introduction of a law that enables employers to fire young workers without cause.
The reaction of the media has been universally hostile, varying from denunciations by the right-wing press of "mob rule" to the more low-key perplexity expressed by the liberal media, which suggests that French are suffering from some type of collective dementia because they believe they have the right to such things as job security.
The headlines of several newspaper commentaries give a flavor of this contempt, from the Wall Street Journal's, "The Decline of France" (March 21) and "Casseurs" (or "Smashers," March 29); to the Washington Post's "French take to the Streets to Preserve their Economic Fantasy" (March 22) and "The French In Denial" (March 28); to the New York Times' "France's Misguided Protesters" (March 27).
In one way or another all of the commentaries suggest the protests are illegitimate. They declare that France's labor laws and social protections are outmoded and must be "reformed" if corporations are to thrive and create jobs. They suggest that "everyone" agrees with this, everyone, that is, except the millions of workers and young people marching on the streets of France. Echoing the infamous comments of British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the time of the invasion of Iraq, the US media suggests that the strength of a democracy is measured by the ability of political leaders to defy the will of the people and do "what's right."
As always, the Wall Street Journal leads the pack of reactionary voices. Having spared no provocative insult against Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin for refusing to line up behind the US invasion of Iraq, the Journal now declares the French president and prime minister the champions of democracy. The French government is facing down "Jihadist" students, who, the newspaper claims, are resorting to violence to defend their "religion of job security." Writer Nidra Poller declares, "Democracies run on elections and legislation; mobs rule by fire and the sword," suggesting that state repression is needed to crush the protests and uphold "democracy."
Like the Wall Street Journal, the premise of liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times is that France's high unemployment rate is due to the unfair burden placed on employers by the social protections fought for by the working class and put in place after World War II. If corporations are given the unrestricted right to fire workers and exploit them like American workers, the story goes, this will entice companies to create new jobs.
While "those of you brainwashed by Anglo-American market capitalism" see the need for this type of "market flexibility" to increase employment, Post writer Steven Pearlstein declares cynically, "viewed through the dark prism of the French imagination, these aren't real jobs - they're 'garbage jobs' and 'slave contracts' meant to undermine the birthright of all Frenchmen to be shielded from all economic risk. Give in on this, and who knows what could go next? The 35-hour workweek? The six weeks of paid vacation? State-mandated profit sharing? Retirement at age 60?"
Oh, what horrors!
Posing as a defender of the unemployed, Pearlstein claims that the reason immigrant youth and many university students cannot find jobs is because a "shrinking pool of older, middle-class workers" enjoy the "full panoply of worker protections" and are "sucking the innovation and vitality from the economy." Expressing dismay over the fact that young people are demanding the same rights their parents achieved, Pearlstein complains, "rather than supporting the reforms that might generate more jobs and more income, the outsiders have bought into the nostalgic fantasy of a France that once was, but can never be again, making common cause with the very 'insiders' whose selfishness and pigheaded socialism have left them out in the cold."
Indeed it is the continuing influence of socialism and egalitarian ideals in France - in spite of the betrayals of Stalinism and social democracy - that most outrages Pearlstein and his cohorts in the media. The Post reporter disparagingly notes the results of a recent poll by the University of Maryland on international policy attitudes showing that only 36 percent of French respondents felt that "the free enterprise system and free market economy" is the best system. This was the lowest percentage of any of the 22 countries polled and compared with 59 percent in Italy, 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Britain and 71 percent in the United States.
Complaining that France sported "only" 14 billionaires, as compared to 24 in similarly sized Britain, Pearlstein concludes his column: "Indeed, when you ask French university students who is the Bill Gates of France, they look at you blankly. It's not simply that they can't name one. The bigger problem is that they can't imagine why it matters, or why that has anything to do with why they can't find a good job."
Nowhere does Pearlstein explain how the hoarding of vast fortunes by the super-rich and the gaping levels of social inequality have improved the lot of American workers. Instead, he, along with the other well-heeled pundits in the corporate-controlled news media take as given that US employers should wield dictatorial powers in the workplace and retain the unquestioned "right" to destroy thousands of jobs and slash wages and benefits. After all, Dr. Pangloss, this is the best of all possible worlds.
Pearlstein's fellow columnist at the Post, Robert J. Samuelson, argues that the protests in France point a "larger predicament" for Europe. "Hardly anyone wants to surrender the benefits and protections of today's generous welfare state, but the fierce attachment to these costly and self-defeating programs prevents Europe from preparing for a future that, though it may be deplored, is inevitable."
Samuelson then lets the cat out of the bag, acknowledging that the media's take on the French protests is bound up with political situation in the US and concerns over how American workers will respond to the unprecedented attacks now on the agenda of corporate America and both of its political parties. "The dilemma of advanced democracies," he says, "including the United States, is that they've made more promises than they can keep. Their political commitments outstrip the economy's capacity to deliver...To disavow past promises incites public furor; not to disavow them worsens the country's future problems."
This anxiety over possible "public furor" in the US was spelled out even more clearly in a USA Today editorial, entitled, "Before you scoff at the French, consider the U.S. connection." It begins by warning that the French protests demonstrate the "lengths that people will go to preserve guarantees and benefits" despite "harming their own long-term prospects and those of their children."
While the US should consider itself "fortunate" that it does not "endow its workers with the right not to be fired," the editorial says, "one can see counterproductive sentiments similar to those of the French protesters in the workers at companies such as General Motors. They demand preservation of generous pensions and lifetime health coverage from employers that might be driven out of business..."On a larger scale, it's possible to see the French in the intractability of the Medicare and Social Security debates," the editorial continues. Claiming that longer life spans, the coming retirement of baby boomers and exploding health costs, were pushing the government and economy toward a "fiscal abyss," the newspaper complains that "those who receive these benefits, or are about to, have shown scant interest in reforms needed to avert a looming crisis..."
The editorial concludes: "The USA rarely has the strikes and street protests that France is almost as famous for as its cheeses. But it does suffer from some of the same unwillingness to consider the future."
Thus, the media's sudden interest in France reveals itself to be a concern that working class resistance could spread to the US itself, where the reactionary agenda of free market policies was initiated in the first place, before it spread to Britain and the rest of the world. With unrelenting attacks on workers by GM, Delphi, Northwest Airlines and other US corporations, as well as plans by the Bush administration to slash "entitlement" programs to pay for further tax cuts to the rich and the burgeoning costs of America's worldwide military adventures, there is no doubt that at least some establishment figures who are not too blind to see are considering the possibility that if mass opposition could explode in France, it could happen here too.
The arguments that society simply cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of working people are becoming increasingly threadbare, not only for French workers but for their American counterparts as well. Despite their efforts to reassure themselves about popular support for the profit system, the reality is that there are growing numbers of workers and youth in America who realize that the real problem is that society cannot afford to allow a tiny minority of the population to monopolize the wealth created by working people. Despite the insistent claims over the years about the death of the class struggle and the working class, the explosive events in France, as they so often have done throughout history, are a sign of what is coming throughout the world, and within the US itself.
If the ruling class in the United States really is afraid of its own people, then they may have to inflate the dollar even more to keep the U.S. public from mass bankruptcy. According to this scenario, the types of controls that have been working so well on the U.S. public are dependent for their efficacy on the general prosperity of the public. If, on the other hand, they are not afraid of the public, if they feel they have the situation well under control, then they may believe that their prospects of maintaining control will be even better under economic collapse. If that is the case, and I think it is, then we are in trouble.
Ron Jacobs, writing in Counterpunch about the differences between French and U.S. public opinion, identifies one of the best forms of control imposed on the U.S. public: the idea that no one can do anything to prevent corporate autocracy:
Where Capital is Not God
France Shows the WayBy Ron Jacobs
March 31, 2006Back in the 1990s, when I was part of a union organizing effort at the University of Vermont, one of the assumptions expressed by the school's administration was the inevitability of the university's continuing corporatization. This assumption was also shared by many of the workers that we were attempting to organize. Furthermore, the assumption was not one specific to the university. Indeed, it was actually usually expressed as part of a larger reality that assumed that the world was going to continue down a path that would result in the ultimate supremacy of the world's largest corporations and banks running everything. Most of these businesses were naturally US- owned, even if they had their offices overseas.
Now, the aspect of this whole series of assumptions that irked me the most wasn't that the corporations (and, locally, the university's administration and trustees) told us that this was a good thing. Nor was it that they acted like this scenario was a natural thing, because, according to the laws of capitalist accumulation, it was. No, what irked me the most (and still irks me) is the attempt to portray this form of monopoly capitalism and corporate takeover of every part of our lives as something over which no one has any control. This portrayal is so complete that most workers, especially in the US (where capitalism reigns supreme) honestly believe that there is nothing they can do but submit. When your company tells you that they are gutting your pension plan, you submit. When your medical premiums increase three hundred percent, you submit. When your pay is reduced in the name of making a concession, you submit. It's as if these attacks on your livelihood are not mere attempts by the owners and their executives to maintain their profit levels, but are instead edicts from heaven that no one dare not obey.
This consciousness exists not only in our work lives. It is also omnipresent in our government, where we elect men and women who gut the minimal economic protections that existed for the least among us so that we can provide tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the world. In addition, we ignore the obvious attempts to legalize every form of graft and corruption while we excuse those politicians who happen to be busted committing crimes of corruption that have yet to be legalized. It's as if we as a people have given up our lives to some omnipotent god and that god not only controls our social beings, he controls our entire selves. The false consciousness of capitalism has so thoroughly taken over our minds that we no longer have anything even approaching souls. Anybody that dares to point this out is immediately branded as someone who is, at best, not a team player and, at worst, an anarchist or a criminal. Or maybe even (god forbid) a terrorist!
Corporations, set up by conscious design as psychopaths are the perfect tool for the pathocracy. They keep people occupied, make them atomized and hopeless, all the while funneling wealth to the pathocrats. Jacobs continues,
France Shows the Way
In a recent Newsweek column economist Robert Samuelson mocked the protests by French workers and youth against the proposed youth employment law known as the CPE or (what the protesters prefer to call) the Kleenex law. Samuelson, who seems to accept the aforementioned supremacy of the neoliberal marketplace (and its inevitable victory over all), wrote: "the student protesters in France think that if they march long enough...they can make the future go away. No such luck." He continued, enumerating the various global capitalist arguments against the so-called welfare state and its economic inviability in today's modern world. According to this mindset. the decision by many governments to dismantle their systems of national health care, public education, subsidized housing, and old age security is not a matter of choice, but one of necessity. If such cuts are not made, say the cuts' proponents, there will be no future.
Of course, this is simply not true. What this mindset's adherents really mean is that maintaining the current systems of health, education and general welfare for the general population would require bucking the system of international capitalist accumulation and profiteering. It would mean that all of that money being made by so very few corporations and banks would have to be put back into the various national economies from which it has been taken. The entire international economic system of the past sixty years would have to be re-examined and redesigned. In short, new choices would have to be made. Choices that put people, not profit first. Choices that would provide decent work for all of those wishing to work. This is what the French youth and workers are telling their government and the corporations that it kowtows to. This is what the last decade of protests against the WTO and the rest of the international economic system have been about. Poverty and war are not inevitable. Indeed, they are part of the reason why people leave their countries in the southern hemisphere to work in the northern one. On the other side of that coin, they are also underneath the reason nativist elements want to send immigrants back to their home countries and lock down the borders. The economics of neo-imperialism force the logic of the dollar on them all., causing the breakup of families and the growth of unreasonable fears. Fears that serve the interests of the financial masters behind it all. While immigration is certainly part of the natural evolution of human history, the economics of global capital have certainly forced many to leave the places they prefer to live. A system that pur people first would either leave those people alone or create good jobs where they live, not where capital goes.
The protests against the job law, the WTO and IMF, and totalitarian immigration laws are the results of conscious choices made by a relatively small number of the earth's inhabitants. The protests in France are a wake up call to all of us. It's time we started making our own choices. Because they are bound by their need for profit, the masters of capital have proven that they are incapable of doing so. A French student in Paris stated the situation quite clearly: "You can't treat people like slaves. Giving all the power to the bosses is going too far." (Reuters 3/28/06)
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Another brick in the wall
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
04/02/06
If I were an Israeli I would have built a wall, but not as a way of stealing land
We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned. West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away. Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres. This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our journalists, "analysts" and "commentators". But it is a lie.
Only in paragraph two - or three or four - of the grovelling news reports from the Middle East do we read that Olmert's not very impressive election victory will allow him to "redraw" the "frontiers" of Israel, a decision described as "controversial" - the usual get-out clause of newspapers that wish to avoid the truth: that Israel is about to grab more land and claim it to be part of the state of Israel. Yes, true, the smaller and more vulnerable Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian-owned land may be abandoned - stand by for more of the grief and tears which we witnessed in Gaza. But the rest - the great semi-circle of concrete that runs around east Jerusalem, for example - will not be depopulated.
Let's start with the wall. It will soon run from top to bottom of the occupied Palestinian West Bank - and it is going to stay. It is higher, in the long sectors where it has been completed - east of Jerusalem, for example - than the Berlin Wall. Yet journalists go on calling it a "security barrier" or a "fence" - because the as yet uncompleted sectors of the wall are still coils of barbed wire.
This is part of the dream world that editors and reporters have constructed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It exists in the same Potemkin landscape that allows journalists to call the occupied Palestinian territory "disputed territory" - after then Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered his diplomats in the region to use this mendacious phrase - and to call Jewish colonies illegally built on Arab land "settlements" or - my favourites now - "Jewish neighbourhoods" or "outposts". It is the same stage set on which Israelis are killed by Palestinians - which they are - but on which Palestinians die in anonymous "clashes" (with whom - and killed by whom, exactly?)
And each of these little lies, of course, contains a kernel of truth. The occupied territories are "disputed" between Israelis and Palestinians, the first claiming that God gave them the land, the second producing land deeds to prove that the law entitles them to their own property. If illegal colonies such as Maale Adumim are built adjacent to Jerusalem - itself illegally annexed by Israel - then of course they are "neighbourhoods". And since the wall - which has gobbled up 10 per cent more Palestinian land for the Israelis - is to prevent suicide bombers (and has been fairly successful in doing so), it is a "security barrier". I seem to recall that the East Germans called the Berlin Wall - or "Berlin Fence" as I suppose we would have to call it if built by the Israelis - a "security barrier". Forget the illegality of occupation, then, and the illegality of stealing someone else's home and land, and the illegality of building a wall that thieves yet more property from the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine which the Palestinians are supposed to negotiate for.
Let me be frank: if I were an Israeli I too would have built a wall to prevent the suicide executioners of Islamic Jihad and, earlier, of Hamas. But I would have built it along the international frontier of Israel - not used the wall as a cheap method of stealing more land. Indeed, under UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is meant to be the foundation of any peace, the acquisition of land through war is stated to be illegal. The wall itself is illegal. The International Court also ruled it to be illegal. And Israel ignored this ruling. So, of course, did the US.
But now the burden of all this post-election theft is to be placed upon Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. This colourless, helpless man, who presided over the Palestinian Authority's continuing corruption, is supposed to persuade the new Hamas government to accept all of Israel's land-grabs, to pick up where the Oslo process left off (which still left Jerusalem in exclusively Israeli hands), and to abandon all violence - which means to surrender whenever Israeli troops raid refugee camps or cities in the West Bank.
The point is that Hamas members have been as assuredly elected representatives of the Palestinians as Mr Olmert and his forthcoming allies in government are representatives of Israelis. But this does not allow them to make any "controversial" plans to redraw their "border" with Israel, not even to insist that Israel withdraws - or redeploys - to its internationally recognised borders. (I'm talking about the pre-1967 frontier, not the 1948 one.) They cannot demand fulfilment of UN Resolution 242 because George Bush has already made it clear that the vast Jewish colonies east of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself, will remain in Israeli hands. Sure, 14 of the 24 Hamas ministers have been in Israeli prisons. But what are Palestinians supposed to think when they realise that 15 Israeli generals have been elected to the new Knesset, along with six secret service agents?
Yet even this is not the point. If the Israelis want Hamas to acknowledge the state of Israel, then Hamas should be expected to acknowledge the state of Israel that exists within its legal frontiers - not the illegal borders now being dreamt up by Olmert. We will have to abandon the idea that Ariel Sharon - an unindicted war criminal after his involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres - was really going to give up the major Jewish colonies built illegally on Arab land or the illegal annexation of Jerusalem. Certainly Olmert is not going to do that. He is going to create wider frontiers for Israel and steal - let's call a spade a spade - more Arab land in doing so. The US will go along with this next illegal land-grab. But will the EU? Will the UN? Will Russia? Will our own dear Tony Blair?
Israelis deserve peace and security as much as Palestinians. But "new" and expanded "controversial" Israeli frontiers will not bring peace or security to either.
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Dollars and (non)Cents
U.S. stocks close down on day, up on quarter
By Leslie Wines
Marketwatch.com
4:31 PM ET Mar 31, 2006
NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks closed lower Friday, although the major indices all posted strong quarterly gains, with the S&P 500 scoring its strongest first-quarter gain in seven years, after new data pointed toward a resilient economy.
Friday's losses were linked to end-of-quarter portfolio and index adjustments and did not mark a departure from the bullish sentiment seen in most of the quarter. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.03 point to 2.339.79. For the first quarter the Dow had its best first quarter since 2002, scoring a 3.7% quarterly gain. The Nasdaq Composite rose 6.1% during the priod, marking its best first quarter since 2000. The S&P 500 increased 3.7%, its best quarterly gain since the first quarter of 1999.
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GM to sell GMAC stake to Cerberus group
Reuters
April 3, 2006
NEW YORK - General Motors Corp. on Monday said it had agreed to sell a 51 percent stake in its financing arm, General Motors Acceptance Corp., to a consortium led by hedge fund Cerberus Capital Management LP for $14 billion, payable over three years.
The Cerberus-led investor group, which includes the private equity unit of Citigroup and Japan's Aozora Bank Ltd., had been viewed as the front-runner for the GMAC stake in what has been a complicated and drawn-out bidding process.
GM said GMAC will continue to be managed by its existing executive management following the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.
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Consortium launches its agreed $9 bln bid for VNU
By Nicola Leske
Reuters
Mon Apr 3, 6:25 AM ET
AMSTERDAM - A group of six private equity firms has officially launched its 7.5 billion euro ($9.1 billion) bid agreed last month for market research firm VNU NV
The acceptance period for the offer lasts from April 4 to May 5, VNU said in a statement on Monday, although many analysts say the bid is too low and might fail.
The Valcon Acquisition BV consortium -- AlpInvest Partners, The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Hellman & Friedman, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Thomas H. Lee Partners -- has bid 28.75 euros per share for the Netherlands-based company.
VNU's management has recommended that shareholders accept the offer, but several large stakeholders, including Fidelity International, have said that they will not accept any buyout offer at that price because it undervalues the company.
VNU began talking with interested buyers after it failed to convince shareholders Fidelity, Templeton Global Advisors and Knight Vinke -- which together control 40 percent -- of the merits of buying U.S. healthcare data firm IMS Health last year.
The offer is conditional on 95 percent approval and will be discussed on April 18 at the annual shareholders meeting. But Valcon can waive the 95 percent clause if less than 60 percent of shares are tendered and complete its purchase, according to the offer memorandum.
VNU said on March 8 it had considered selling the company in parts, which some investors still believe is the best option, but that it found no takers and that it would lose hundreds of millions of euros in tax benefits.
VNU reiterated in a letter to its shareholders, included in the memorandum, that no buyers were interested in its Media Measurement and Information unit or its Marketing Information division.
It said the price offered by the consortium was fair and cited two opinions written by VNU's financial advisers, investment banks Credit Suisse and Rothschild.
Credit Suisse values the firm at 29.60 euros per share on a stand-alone basis and between 25.90 and 29.35 euros in the case of a break-up. Rothschild sees a sum-of-the-parts valuation in a range of 26 to 29.50 euros and a range of 29.90 to 35.80 euros per share if VNU stays independent and restructures its units.
"The offer price exceeded both the high end of the range of the break-up private market analysis provided by NM Rothschild and the midpoint of the sum of the parts break-up analysis provided by Credit Suisse," VNU said.
HOLDOUTS
However, Fidelity, which owns around 15 percent of VNU, and Knight Vinke, have said they would not support the consortium's offer at the proposed price.
Analysts say it is unlikely that shareholders will be persuaded to support the bid.
"The fairness opinion, in which Rothschild arrives at a value of 35.80 euros, will raise questions to what extent the 28.75 euro bid is fair," Sander van Oort at F. van Lanschot Bankiers said.
"We believe an increasing proportion of shareholders will not tender their shares," he said, adding that a management crisis may emerge.
Chief Financial Officer Rob Ruijter said last week that some board members were prepared to resign if a buyout offer for the market research company was rejected by its shareholders.
The company is already searching for a new chief executive after shareholders rebelled against plans to buy healthcare data provider IMS Health for $7 billion last year, triggering the resignation of CEO Rob van den Bergh.
Van den Bergh joined VNU in 1980 and was named CEO in 2000.
VNU's share price has more than halved since 2000 and was up 0.5 percent at 26.96 euros by 0844 GMT on Monday. The DJ Stoxx European media index was unchanged.
VNU, based in the Dutch city of Haarlem, has transformed itself over the last 40 years from a small Dutch newspaper and magazine publisher into a U.S.-focused business information company that mainly sells data about consumer habits.
Comment: So, the Carlyle Group wants to acquire a US-focused Dutch company that mainly sells data about consumer habits after the company's plans to buy a healthcare data provider flopped...
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Experts See Danger in Rising Oil Prices
By BRAD FOSS
AP Business Writer
Sat Apr 1, 8:50 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Oil prices appear headed back toward $70 a barrel, a level not seen since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and sporadic shortages sent gasoline at the pump above $3 a gallon nationwide.
While last summer's price spike triggered outrage in Congress and hurt sport utility vehicle sales, it caused only a hiccup in motor-fuel consumption. And for now, with demand back on the rise, the economy seems capable of absorbing uncomfortably high prices.
Analysts warn, however, that consumers and businesses could be just one major supply disruption away from more serious financial consequences.
Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns, said the ramifications of $70 oil and $3-a-gallon gasoline would be "more mild" the second time around "because we're getting kind of used to it."
But while the gas-price sticker shock may be wearing off, Nomura Securities chief economist David Resler fears a more subtle fuel-related angst settling in among consumers.
"There is the pessimistic notion that this is not going to go away and that's going to have a more lasting impact on driving habits and behavior, I suspect, than we've seen so far," Resler said.
In that context, a hypothetical supply disruption that jolts oil prices to $80 or higher and keeps them there for an extended period - say, three months - could result in "a substantial falloff in discretionary spending" that snowballs into a serious slowdown.
Perhaps the top threat for the oil market is the standoff between the United Nations and Iran, OPEC's No. 2 producer, over Tehran's nuclear energy ambitions. Iran's foreign minister said Friday his country would not use oil as an economic weapon, and that helped ease prices, but analysts say they remain concerned about supplies from
Iraq, Russia, Venezuela and other places.
Unrest in Nigeria has taken more than 500,000 barrels per day of oil off the market, and more than 300,000 barrels per day of Gulf of Mexico output remains shut-in because of damage from last fall's hurricanes.
With global oil demand expected to average 85 million barrels per day in 2006, and excess production capacity limited to 2 million barrels per day, oil analyst Jamal Qureshi of PFC Energy in Washington said prices aren't likely to retreat anytime soon.
"The market is awakening to the scope of the risks," said Antoine Halff, director of global energy Fimat USA in New York.
Yet in spite of all the apprehension about oil supplies - or maybe because of it - U.S. inventories of crude are at a seven-year high of roughly 341 million barrels. That does not include the 685 million barrels in the country's strategic reserve, available in an emergency.
Some analysts point to this buildup of inventories as evidence the market is divorced from reality. IFR Energy Services' Tim Evans sees a "dangerous complacency about the downside potential for prices" - but many more say it is a reflection of unease about geopolitical uncertainties.
On Friday, light crude for May delivery settled at $66.63 a barrel, down 52 cents on the New York Mercantile Exchange. U.S. retail gasoline prices averaged $2.53 a gallon, or 37 cents higher than last year, according to Oil Price Information Service.
The potential exists for $3-a-gallon gasoline at some point this summer, analysts say, but that assumes out-of-the-ordinary disruptions to refining or distribution, or both. The Energy Department, meanwhile, is forecasting an average summertime price of $2.50.
Economists and oil-market experts say industry and homeowners may not like paying more for fuel but they are adapting, in large part because energy is a tiny piece of overall spending and, thanks to more efficient technology, an even smaller piece than it was during the energy crises of the 1970s.
The burden is most severe on low-income families and fuel-intensive businesses, though truckers, chemical manufacturers and, to a lesser extent, airlines have had success in passing along these costs.
Relatively low interest rates, which have made it easy to borrow money while helping to prop up the stock and housing markets, have reduced the impact of high oil prices on the economy.
Of course, the Federal Reserve has raised short-term rates 15 times since June 2004 to cool off the housing market and keep inflation in check, and this is likely to slow growth irrespective of energy prices.
BMO's Cooper said the Fed probably needs to raise interest rates again in May to slow economic growth because there are signs - rising airfares among them - that inflationary pressures are creeping up.
Brian Hicks, co-manager of US Global Investors' Global Resources Fund, a mutual fund heavily invested in energy, said a recession in the U.S. would likely reverberate across emerging-market economies and could quickly depress daily oil demand by 2 million barrels per day.
That dire scenario is not what Hicks or most other financial professionals are anticipating. Hicks forsees oil prices trading in a range of $55 to $65 through the end of the year, with consumption tapering off anywhere above $70 and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries curtailing production at around $50.
James Cordier, president of Liberty Trading in Tampa, Fla., believes oil prices will climb as long as the economies of the U.S., China and India continue to grow and that prices may need to hit $75 before there is any significant demand response.
"We are going to find out at what price level we start rationing demand," Cordier said. "That is what we have to do."
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Chavez seeks to peg oil at $50 a barrel
Mark Milner
The Guardian
Monday April 3, 2006
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is poised to launch a bid to transform the global politics of oil by seeking a deal with consumer countries which would lock in a price of $50 a barrel.
A long-term agreement at that price could allow Venezuela to count its huge deposits of heavy crude as part of its official reserves, which Caracas says would give it more oil than Saudi Arabia.
"We have the largest oil reserves in the world, we have oil for 200 years." Mr Chávez told the BBC's Newsnight programme in an interview to be broadcast tonight. "$50 a barrel - that's a fair price, not a high price."
The price proposed by Mr Chávez is about $15 a barrel below the current global level but a credible long-term agreement at about $50 a barrel could have huge implications for Venezuela's standing in the international oil community.
According to US sources, Venezuela holds 90% of the world's extra heavy crude oil - deposits which have to be turned into synthetic light crude before they can be refined and which only become economic to operate with the oil price at about $40 a barrel. Newsnight cites a report from the US Energy Information Administrator, Guy Caruso, suggesting Venezuela could have more than a trillion barrels of reserves.
A $50-a-barrel lock-in would open the way for Venezuela, already the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, to demand a huge increase in its official oil reserves - allowing it to demand a big increase in its production allowance within Opec.
Venezuela's oil minister Raphael Ramirez told Newsnight in a separate interview that his country plans to ask Opec to formally recognise the uprating of its reserves to 312bn barrels (compared to Saudi Arabia's 262bn) when Mr Chávez hosts a gathering of Opec delegates in Caracas next month.
Venezuela's ambitious strategy to boost its standing in the global pecking order of oil producers by increasing the extent of its officially recognised reserves is likely to face opposition. Some countries will oppose the idea of a fixed price for the global oil market at well below existing levels. Others are unlikely to be happy with any diminution of their influence over world oil prices in favour of Venezuela.
Caracas's hopes for an increase in its standing would be a far cry from the days when Mr Chávez came to power after years of quota-busting during which Venezuela helped to keep oil prices down. "Seven years ago Venezuela was a US oil colony," said Mr Chávez.
As he seeks to bolster his country's standing on the world stage, the Venezuelan president has also introduced radical changes to the domestic oil industry. Last Friday his government announced that 17 oil companies had agreed to changes which will see 32 operating agreements become 30 joint ventures that will give the government greater say over the country's oil industry.
The original deals were signed in the 1990s as part of a drive to attract more investment into the country's oil industry. However Mr Chávez said the deals gave foreign companies too much and the government too little. Under the new arrangements state-run Petroleos de Venezuela will hold 60% of the joint ventures. "Now we are associates and this commits us to much more ... it's no longer a contract for doing a service, it's a strategic alliance," Mr Chávez told the companies that signed up.
The new arrangements were not universally welcomed by the oil companies. Exxon Mobil and the Italian energy company Eni have refused to sign up to the new arrangements.
Mr Chávez, a former paratrooper who has survived several attempts to oust him and who faces re-election in December, regards Venezuela's oil revenues as crucial to his plans to fight poverty. Critics accuse him of squandering the country's oil wealth on improvised social programmes.
The Venezuelan president used the Newsnight interview to attack the role of the International Monetary Fund in Latin America, where it has a reputation for pushing market-based reforms as the price of its help to countries struggling with their finances.
The Chávez government has helped a number of countries, including buying Argentinian and Ecuadorean bonds, with Mr Chávez arguing that he would like to see the IMF replaced by an International Humanitarian Fund.
Hugo Chávez was born in 1954. The former paratroop colonel first came to prominence after a failed coup in 1992, for which he was jailed for two years. He was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, launching a social programme known as Bolivarianism, after the revolutionary Simón Bolívar, and reversing planned privatisations. In 2002 he survived a coup attempt and, two years later, a bid to unseat him in a referendum. He has close links with Cuba's Fidel Castro and has frequently clashed with the United States.
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Wolfowitz looks at opening World Bank Iraq office
By Lesley Wroughton
Reuters
Sun Apr 2, 2006 04:23 PM ET
WASHINGTON - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is considering expanding bank operations in Iraq, which would put his agency at the center of rebuilding from a war he helped plan as the Pentagon's former No. 2 official.
Senior bank officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no final decision had been made, said key donor countries including Britain, Japan, Germany and Denmark are pressuring Wolfowitz to establish a Baghdad office.
The development agency has not had a Iraq office since an August 19, 2003, bombing at U.N. headquarters in Iraq killed a bank employee. A consultant, with a staff of seven Iraqis, is paid by the World Bank looks after its affairs in Iraq.
No World Bank staff would be forced to accept an Iraq assignment, the officials said.
In recent weeks, Wolfowitz sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and he was now examining security matters and several reconstruction-related issues, officials said.
The possibility of a new World Bank office revives attention to Wolfowitz's role as an architect of the Iraq war. Many critics have accused the Bush administration and the Pentagon in particular of failing to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, as violence rages three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.
Michael O'Hanlon, a reconstruction expert at Washington's Brookings Institute, said Wolfowitz's history with Iraq "complicates everything."
"He is a very smart man," O'Hanlon said, "but he is also obviously very controversial in his basic support of the Iraq invasion."
Wolfowitz's predecessor as World Bank president, Jim Wolfensohn, resisted pressure from U.S. lawmakers to return bank reconstruction experts to Iraq after the 2003 bombing.
Comment: No wonder Wolfy was shuffled into the World Bank position...
Since the attack, the World Bank has operated from an office in neighboring Amman, Jordan. However, Iraqi officials have complained about the burden of traveling to Amman to consult with the World Bank. In December, Barham Salah, a Kurdish leader, wrote to Wolfowitz urging the bank's full engagement in rebuilding.
"Reconstruction is an important part of the World Bank's mission -- from Bosnia and Afghanistan to Liberia and Iraq," a senior World Bank official told Reuters. "The objectivity the World Bank brings is greatly valued by donors from around the world, as well as host governments."
U.N. representatives recently met Wolfowitz and urged the bank to help with Iraq's major problems of financial management and civil-service reform.
"There has been a need for the bank to be in Iraq," said James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand Corp.. He said, however, the violence in Iraq could limit bank activities.
Other analysts note that the U.S. State Department is winding down its $20 billion Iraq reconstruction program, which focused on large electricity and water projects that have failed to deliver desired results.
O'Hanlon said the bank could offer a "fresh set of eyes," act as an independent broker and generate much-needed employment for Iraqis.
Experts estimate the cost of resuming an expatriate mission in Baghdad at around $1 million a year. "It's not too soon to go into Iraq, but the security issue is extremely serious," a bank official working on reconstruction projects noted.
Others note that if the World Bank expands its presence in Iraq, more international agencies and donor countries would be encouraged to follow.
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France's Alcatel to buy Lucent for $13 bln
By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Michele Gershberg
Reuters
April 2, 2006
PARIS/NEW YORK - French telecoms equipment group Alcatel said on Sunday it had finalized a deal to buy Lucent Technologies for around $13 billion to strengthen its position in a consolidating market.
The transaction, which will see Alcatel shareholders have the lion's share of the new company, comes amid a wave of consolidation in the telecoms industry and will create a company with combined revenues of around 21 billion euros ($25 billion).
The companies said the deal would result in a 10 percent reduction in their combined global workforce.
"This is an industry where size and scale matter," Patricia Russo, who will be chief executive of the new group, said on a conference call.
The Alcatel/Lucent tie-up had been partly complicated by Alcatel's plans to increase its stake in French defense electronics group Thales -- a politically sensitive issue that has involved the German and French governments.
Alcatel said it would continue talks with Thales over possibly increasing its shareholding in the group. Alcatel now has a stake of around 9.5 percent in Thales, while the French government holds around 30 percent of Thales.
Alcatel and Lucent said the deal was a "merger of equals."
However, Alcatel shareholders will own around 60 percent of the new company, with Lucent shareholders owning the rest.
NEGOTIATING POWER
As part of the deal, Lucent shareholders will receive 0.1952 of an ADS (American Depositary Share) representing ordinary shares of Alcatel for every common share of Lucent that they currently hold.
This values Alcatel's takeover of Lucent at around $13.4 billion.
Alcatel Chairman and Chief Executive Serge Tchuruk will be non-executive chairman of the new Paris-headquartered company.
A tie-up between Alcatel and Lucent strengthens the ability of both companies to negotiate prices with their telephone company customers, who have led consolidation in the telecoms sector.
Alcatel said it expected its acquisition of Lucent to be accretive to earnings per share (EPS) in the first year.
The transaction terms were thrashed out with the backdrop of a complex battle for French company Thales.
Alcatel said it remained keen on increasing its stake in Thales.
Defense industry sources have said Alcatel hopes to fold its satellite activities into Thales in exchange for a bigger stake in the company. However, European planemaker EADS is also keen for a stake in Thales.
EADS tried to grab control of Thales in 2004 and media reports said French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed a three-way deal between EADS, Thales and Alcatel to create a leading European satellite firm.
Lucent said it would create a separate and independent unit to oversee its sensitive contracts with the US government.
Retired workers of Lucent had said that the U.S. government should not approve of the deal with Alcatel, but Lucent said the merger was not contingent on their approval.
Alcatel shares closed down 1.5 percent at 12.77 euros on Friday, while Lucent ended down 1.3 percent at $3.05.
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US Defence Work To Be Taken Out Of Alcatel-Lucent Merger
AFP
Apr 03, 2006
Washington - Sensitive defence work carried out for the US Defence Department by Lucent Technologies will be put into a separate US-controlled entity following its merger with Alcatel of France, the two said. It is one of a series of notable details of the deal announced by the two on Sunday that will create a 33 billion dollar internet equipment and technology giant.
Presented as a merger of equals, the operation is in effect an Alcatel takeover of Lucent. The French firm will have 60 percent of the capital in the new group which will have its headquarters in France.
But the two companies also said in their statement that they will have the same number of seats on the new company board, and Lucent's chief executive officer Patricia Russo will take up the same post in the new entity.
The move to take Lucent's defence activities out of the merger comes amid rising protectionist sentiment in Congress over US enterprises linked to national security.
"We intend to form a separate, independent US subsidiary holding certain contracts with US government agencies," Russo told a press conference.
"This subsidiary would be separately managed by a board, to be composed of three US citizens who will be acceptable to the US government.
"This is a structure which is routinely used to protect certain government programmes in the course of mergers that involve a non-US parties," she added.
The activities are concentrated at Lucent's Bell Laboratories, the oldest American electronics research centre, which was set up in 1925.
Bell Labs will keep its headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, also the site of the current Lucent head office, said Alcatel chairman and chief executive Serge Tchuruk.
Bell Labs carried out the first long distance transmission of a television programme in 1927 and aims to register at least two copyrights a day from its inventions.
The unit recently won an 11 million dollar contract from the US government to create a broadband communications network for the military.
Setting up the new entity around Bell Labs should mean the Lucent-Alcatel merger will get the green light from the US competition authorities -- and calm any criticism of the deal from Congress.
A law being considered by Congress would ban foreign government-controlled firms from taking stakes in US firms with activities in the US defence sector, unless those interests are put into separate US-controlled entities.
The law follows a major controversy after Dubai Ports World, which is controlled by the United Arab Emirates government, took over a British firm that manages terminal operations at six major US ports.
Alcatel's links with French defence equipment maker Thales could cause problems with the US authorities. Alcatel has a 9.5 percent stake in Thales, and the French state has 31.5 percent.
Thales is a major player in the European defence industry, with interests in systems for combat planes, warships and computer security.
Certain parts of the US media have recently been critical of the French government's opposition to moves to liberalise the European Union economy.
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O'Hare Set for Largest-Ever U.S. Expansion
By MIKE COLIAS
Associated Press
April 2, 2006
CHICAGO - After decades of debate and scrapped blueprints, crews are moving dirt and pouring concrete at O'Hare International Airport for the largest airport expansion in the nation's history.
The seven-year, $15 billion project is designed to eliminate most weather-related delays and erase O'Hare's reputation as the perennial knot in the nation's aviation system.
"It should make the intolerable delays a thing of the past," said Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation expert and economics professor at DePaul University.
Still, some aviation analysts question how quickly the plan will bring relief and whether it can live up to its billing when completed in 2013. Questions also loom over the project's financing, which relies partly on a shrinking pool of federal money and airlines that have been bleeding red ink for years.
And the project faces a fierce legal challenge by residents of two adjacent suburbs, where hundreds of homes and business are slated for removal and 1,300 graves are to be relocated.
"I can't imagine anything more sacrilegious than rolling pavement over pre-Civil War graves," said Bob Sell, a spokesman for St. Johannes Cemetery, where dozens of his relatives are buried.
Much of O'Hare's problem can be traced to its pretzel-like runway configuration, a remnant of its origin as a military airfield during the 1940s. The intersecting layout makes it tough to land planes in Chicago's frequent fog and wind.
"That airfield has probably the most complex geometry of any airfield in the United States ... and possibly the planet," said Mary Rose Loney, a Miami aviation consultant who was Chicago's aviation commissioner in the late 1990s.
Even in fair weather, the airport can be trouble. Since March 21, the Federal Aviation Administration has investigated three close calls on O'Hare's intersecting runways. In one, planes came within 100 feet of each other - the most serious near-crash on a U.S. runway in several years, the FAA said.
When visibility drops or wind gusts, air traffic controllers close one of the three arrival runways to eliminate the risk of collisions. The ensuing bottleneck means planeloads of passengers must wait on the ground in other cities for Chicago's weather to clear.
"O'Hare is so centrally located and has so much traffic that when things get out of whack, the whole system can be impeded very quickly," said Darryl Jenkins, a consultant to numerous airlines.
It's a phenomenon seen firsthand by Wayne Carpenter, a 37-year-old private-equity fund manager who has been flying out of O'Hare weekly since 1991.
"I avoid O'Hare at all costs when I'm flying across the country," he said. "It just seems like I don't see these kinds of delays anywhere else."
O'Hare ranked dead last in on-time performance among the busiest U.S. airports in 2004 - prompting the FAA to cap the number of landings there last year at 88 arrivals an hour between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., down from more than 120. That helped O'Hare's on-time performance a little, but it's only a temporary fix.
Work under way on the expansion's first phase is expected to cut delays by about two-thirds. The first step is a new runway on the airfield's northern edge that will keep three arrival runways open in bad weather. It's due to open at the end of 2008.
The project to untangle O'Hare will create a mostly parallel layout, rather than a crisscrossing tangle. The net result will be just one additional runway - eight instead of seven - but will greatly ease flight operations, planners say.
A new terminal and western access to the airport also are planned.
FAA officials say parallel runways are the ideal design. They point to the success of Dallas Fort-Worth and Denver airports, for example, which have the same number of runways as O'Hare but boast far better performance.
The average delay per aircraft at Dallas, for example, is about 10 minutes. At O'Hare, the average was approaching 20 minutes before limits in 2004, according to the FAA. O'Hare's expansion promises to chop that figure to 5 minutes.
But in the meantime, critics still have questions.
"Do you really have to tear up a lot of runways or do as grandiose a plan as is in play? I'm not sure you do," said Aaron Gellman, a professor at Northwestern University's Transportation Center.
Gellman says improvements to the region's air traffic control system, for example, could go a long way toward increasing O'Hare's capacity.
The project's well-organized, well-financed foes also argue the project will drive up prices for travelers and will not reduce delays because increased capacity will be absorbed with more flights.
"Be prepared for delays the likes of which you've never seen before, and be prepared to pay a whole lot more for your airline ticket," says Joe Karaganis, an attorney for the suburbs and cemetery.
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French PM admits error in handling CPE law
www.chinaview.cn 2006-04-02 06:32:49
PARIS, April 2 (Xinhua) -- French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said in a newspaper interview with the French weekend newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche published on Sunday that he made errors in his management of the controversial First Employment Contract (CPE) jo b law.
"We live at a time where there is a constant attempt to set some people against others. That is not my idea of politics and I refuse to get involved in this kind of game," he said.
"There is misunderstanding and incomprehension about the direction of my action. I profoundly regret it," he said.
He also said he did not feel he had been disavowed by French President Jacques Chirac and he was not "a man to give up".
On Friday Chirac signed the law and offered later two key modifications to the law: reducing a trial period from two years to one and requiring employers to provide an explanation in case of firing.
But the law was published Sunday in the Official Journal before it had any modified version.
French trade unions and student organizations rejected a compromise offered by Chirac and called for another round of national strikes and demonstrations for Tuesday.
The CPE law is aimed at reducing a high youth unemployment rate,which reaches as much as 23 percent among youths and up to 50 percent in some poor, heavily immigrant areas.
But opponents said it will erode hard-won labour rights and make it more difficult for youths to find long-term jobs and criticized that maneuver as "surrealistic" and "undemocratic".
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How to Start a World War
Government in secret talks about strike against Iran
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 02/04/2006)
The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran.
A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.
Tomorrow's meeting will be attended by Gen Sir Michael Walker, the chief of the defence staff, Lt Gen Andrew Ridgway, the chief of defence intelligence and Maj Gen Bill Rollo, the assistant chief of the general staff, together with officials from the Foreign Office and Downing Street.
The International Atomic Energy Authority, the nuclear watchdog, believes that much of Iran's programme is now devoted to uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, technologies that could provide material for nuclear bombs to be developed in the next three years.
The United States government is hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little international support. British military chiefs believe an attack would be limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants - a land assault is not being considered at the moment.
But confirmation that Britain has started contingency planning will undermine the claim last month by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that a military attack against Iran was "inconceivable".
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, insisted, during a visit to Blackburn yesterday, that all negotiating options - including the use of force - remained open in an attempt to resolve the crisis.
Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from US navy ships and submarines in the Gulf would, it is believed, target Iran's air defence systems at the nuclear installations.
That would enable attacks by B2 stealth bombers equipped with eight 4,500lb enhanced BLU-28 satellite-guided bunker-busting bombs, flying from Diego Garcia, the isolated US Navy base in the Indian Ocean, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Whiteman USAF base in Missouri.
It is understood that any direct British involvement in an attack would be limited but may extend to the use of the RAF's highly secret airborne early warning aircraft.
At the centre of the crisis is Washington's fear that an Iranian nuclear weapon could be used against Israel or US forces in the region, such as the American air base at Incirlik in Turkey.
The UN also believes that the production of a bomb could also lead to further destabilisation in the Middle East, which would result in Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia all developing nuclear weapons programmes.
A senior Foreign Office source said: "Monday's meeting will set out to address the consequences for Britain in the event of an attack against Iran. The CDS [chiefs of defence staff] will want to know what the impact will be on British interests in Iraq and Afghanistan which both border Iran. The CDS will then brief the Prime Minister and the Cabinet on their conclusions in the next few days.
"If Iran makes another strategic mistake, such as ignoring demands by the UN or future resolutions, then the thinking among the chiefs is that military action could be taken to bring an end to the crisis. The belief in some areas of Whitehall is that an attack is now all but inevitable.
There will be no invasion of Iran but the nuclear sites will be destroyed. This is not something that will happen imminently, maybe this year, maybe next year. Jack Straw is making exactly the same noises that the Government did in March 2003 when it spoke about the likelihood of a war in Iraq.
"Then the Government said the war was neither inevitable or imminent and then attacked."
The source said that the Israeli attack against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 proved that a limited operation was the best military option.
The Israeli air force launched raids against the plant, which intelligence suggested was being used to develop a nuclear bomb for use against Israel.
Military chiefs also plan tomorrow to discuss fears that an attack within Iran will "unhinge" southern Iraq - where British troops are based - an area mainly populated by Shia Muslims who have strong political and religious links to Iran.
They are concerned that this could delay any withdrawal of troops this year or next. There could also be consequences for British and US troops in Afghanistan, which borders Iran.
The MoD meeting will address the economic issues that could arise if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president - who became the subject of international condemnation last year when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" - cuts off oil supplies to the West in reprisal.
There are thought to be at least eight known sites within Iran involved in the production of nuclear materials, although it is generally accepted that there are many more secret installations.
Iran has successfully tested a Fajr-3 missile that can reach Israel, avoiding radar and hitting several targets using multiple warheads, its military has confirmed.
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Flashback: Who is the rogue state really?
By Asghar Bishbareh
Information Clearing House
20 Mar 06
A brief history of Iran since 16th century
Summary: Iran is one of the few countries in the world that has never become a colony of any of the imperialist powers. However, during the reign of Kajar dynasty from 1795 to 1925, Iran plunged into a deep crisis, and to some extent, colonial powers dominated Iran both economically and politically thanks to inept and corrupt monarchs. [...] In 1953, the U.S.'s CIA and UK's MI-6 staged the military coup and toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh's government, which by any Western standards was much more democratic than that of Americans under the Bush-Cheney administration. In fact, the anti-American revolution of 1979 was the direct consequences of US's policy of regime change in Iran in which US brought down the democratic government and restored the absolute monarchy.
In 1514, Ottoman Turks invaded Azerbaijan (northwest provinces of Iran) and by the treaty of Chaldran occupying some of the area until Nadir Shah expelled them in 18th century. In 1801, Rus-sians annexed Georgia. By the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkomanchai (1828), Russia deprived Iran of its Caucasian provinces, including the territory north of the Aras River, together with a strip of land along the Caspian Sea that is now part of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Russian expansion into Central Asia continued, and finally, by the conquest of Transcaspia in 1884, Iran lost Bukhara, Khiva, and Merv.
In 1920, the Soviet Union invaded Gilan, the coastal province on the west of the Caspian Sea, and set up an independent pro Russian state. During the World War II, (1941) although Iran had stayed neutral, allied forces led by the British and the former Soviet Union) attacked Iran occupying the southern and northern provinces respectively. Subsequently, British removed Reza Shah, the foun-der of the Pahlavi dynasty from power and replaced him with his son, Mohammed Reza Shah.
In 1953, the U.S.'s CIA and UK's MI-6 staged the military coup and toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh's government, which by any Western standards was much more democratic than that of Americans under the Bush -Cheney administration. In fact, the anti-American revolution of 1979 was the direct consequences of US's policy of regime change in Iran in which US brought down the democratic government and restored the absolute monarchy.
In spite of that, Bush-Cheney administration frantically pursuing the policy of regime change advocated by Israel, who has been exerting intense pressure through its U.S. supporters to launch war of aggression against Iran under the false justification of Iran's nuclear weapons program.
In 1980, the US and England in conjunction with their supinely obedient rulers, kings, emirs, and sheiks in the Persian Gulf encouraged Saddam to invade Iran, financed Iraq's war machine, and supplied Saddam with technical, logistics, intelligence, chemical and biological weapons.
To safeguard the great nation's territorial integrity and its sovereignty, Iran had no choice but to rebuild and modernize its defense forces. Despite its military might in the region and the geostrate-gic importance of Iran in the world, which stretches from Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, Iran has always played by the rule and abided by the international law and has never attempted to exploit or impose its will on the neighboring countries or any other sovereign nations for two centuries.
Iran even stayed away from reclaiming its lost territories, which was historically and legally part of the Persian Empire. For example, Bahrain Island is an archipelago consisting of about thirty-three islands situated midway in the Persian Gulf with historical connections to Iran. In the year 1521, the Portuguese colonial forces swept into the island ferociously beheading its king, and ruled the island up until 1602.
During the Safavids dynasty, in 1603, the Portuguese were expelled from the Persian Gulf, including Bahrain by the Iranians naval forces. As a part of Persian Empire, since then the island adminis-tered and governed by the Iranians until 1783, and subsequently, the island occupied and run by the British until 1971. Before the British's withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Iranian parlia-ment in November 1957 unanimously passed a legislation decreeing Bahrain, as the 14th Province of Iran. However, because of the peaceful and non-confrontational manners of Iranians in nature, the issue was referred to the UN for peaceful solution.
The UN held a referendum in the island for independence or reunification with Iran. Since the out-come of the referendum favored independence, Iran accepted the outcome immediately. As a result, the UN decided to allow the Bahrainis to form an independent state. Based on the UN decision and backed by Iran, Bahrain, with 70% of Shiite population declared its independence on August 15, 1971.
Ironically, the same very island is now turned out to be a launching pad for the US Fifth Fleet Head-quarters. From whence they break into the neighboring countries terrorizing and attacking the sov-ereign nations based on the fabrication of lies and deceptions in order to steal their natural re-sources, which is the reminiscent of Hulagu Khan's Mongol forces in Baghada and Kublai Khan's armada in the Mediterranean Sea.
Even though British ended its physical presence in the Persian Gulf's sheikhdoms, its influence re-mained strong in the region. Nonetheless, right after the former protector's withdrawals, US took over the region and became the new protector of the states. In 1981, six Persian Gulf Arab states, which are comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emir-ates, created the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf (CCG), formerly named Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC).
Qatar is the largest staging post for the U.S. imperial forces in the region, and became the Central Command Headquarters for the US military aggressions against the entire Middle East, and from whence they have already invaded two sovereign nations namely Afghanistan and Iraq based on the hit list, that Israeli mentor had handed Bush even before 9/11. It appears that, the hit list also in-cludes Iran and Syria for Bush-Blair future adventures.
In the recent meeting, the GCC Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Bin Hamad Al Attiyah hypocriti-cally expressed his concern over Iran's civilian nuclear program and declaring that it posed what he called a threat to member countries of the GCC, U.S., and NATO. This statement emanating from a council that has provided the colonial powers and foreign aggressors with the launching pad in their soils to destroy and occupy their Arab brothers homeland in Iraq in the past three years, and now, allowing foreign invaders to do the same to Iran.
UAE, which is another member of the GCC, who obtained the rights to self-governance from England just in 1971 (35 years ago), misleadingly, repeated his claims over the three Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. Since they have never been masters of their own destinies in the past, therefore, it fol-lows that their foreign protectors need new bases in the region for possible unprovoked confrontation with Iran or as a part of their psychological warfare against Iran designed to destabilize the region. Moreover, in order to create tension in the region, US and England encouraging the states of the GCC to use a bogus name for the "Persian Gulf", which is the only common and internationally recognized term that accepted by the UN.
Election Process in Iran and the US & a tale of the two presidents
Had not been for the Supreme Court (his daddy's old friends') decision in Florida 2000 campaign, Bush would not be able to assume his dictatorial powers by rigging the 2004 election in Ohio in which, thousands of black voters were disfranchised, and foreign observers were barred from over-seeing the election process.
Ahmadinejad and Bush speak for the two different constituencies. While the neocons' cabal has backed Bush's rise to power to represent the corporations like Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, and Halliburton, on the contrary, working class, unemployed, the rural, urban, and religious poor voted for Dr. Ahmadinejad.
During the eight-year imposed war of Iraq against Iran, Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran served voluntarily deep inside the enemy's territory. On the other hand, during the patriotic Viet-nam War, George W. Bush, joined the near home Champaign division of National Guards in Texas architected by his daddy and went AWOL for an entire year to escape the war. Furthermore, at the defining moment and at the time of needs, the self declared war president, along with his VP, Che-ney, who is the real president did not raise up from their nuclear proof bunkers for couple of days. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina events were the examples.
Bush's media trying to portray Ahmadinejad as an absolute dictator, while in fact, he does not enjoy the same power as George W. Bush does. Ahmadinejad is not even the commander-in-chief. Meaning that he cannot declare war, and unlike the US weak Congress who made Bush an emperor by giving him carte blanche, the real power in Iran rests with the parliament (Majlis), the parliament that in the past, impeached one president and many cabinet ministers of governments.
Even Senator, Hillary Clinton, who has backed Iraqi invasion and now supporting Bush policy of confrontation with Iran, recently, said that Bush treated the Senate like a plantation. The strange thing is that the failure in Iraq is now apparent to a large majority of American people, yet the Con-gress is acquiescing to Bush's call for a needless and dangerous confrontation with Iran.
Ahmadinejad was struggling to have his cabinet ministers approved by the parliament. For example, his nominees for the ministry of oil were rejected twice by the parliament, and the process has al-ready begun to impeach his transportation minister over the crash of airplane. On the contrary, Bush has the absolute power to appoint anyone for any posts or offices he wants. He openly, by-passes the congress and the court. For example, John Bolton was appointed by Bush as the US Am-bassador to the UN without even the Congress approval. Simply he exercised his executive power.
John Bolton the one who once said that the UN did not exist without the US. Another way of describ-ing Bolton's comment is that the UN is nothing but the US rubber stamp. In fact, the UN and its subsidiaries like IAEA is a tool used by the US to advance its policy. He is now sitting in the UN and coercing the Security Council to issue a strongly worded "presidential statement against Iran provid-ing the US with a pretext for intervention if Iran continues to enrich uranium.
During the initial confirmation debate of John Bolton in the Senate in 2004, senior Sen. Joseph Bi-den said that sending Bolton to the UN was like sending a bull to the china market.
Bush's Patriot Act, which is now almost the law of the land is in fact, reversed the concept of pre-sumption of innocence into presumption of guilt in the US making Bush an absolute king empower-ing his modern inquisitors to invade the citizens' privacy arresting them even without search war-rants. The reason for this gross erosion of civil liberties is the security of state, which is a term that has been used by all dictators including Hitler. US needs an enemy, if does not exist, the ruling party can create even an imaginary one. During the Cold War, bogyman was the Soviet Union then Sad-dam, now Iran has become Bush's new bogyman.
Exercising his executive power, Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Consequently, Civil rights leaders are now monitored. Antiwar groups are under surveil-lance. Domestic phones are tapped. Mails are opened and emails are monitored. The FBI is conduct-ing warrantless "black bag" break-ins of private residences and offices, while US government agen-cies have been barred from using persistent cookies since 2000 because of privacy concerns. Police are to be given sweeping powers to arrest people for every offence, including the minor traffic infrac-tions and misdemeanors.
In the first round of Iranian presidential elections in which 62 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots for seven candidates with diverse political inclinations. The electoral process in Iran was much more democratic than that of the U.S. two-party system of presidential election of 2004 in which each candidate from either party won about 25% of the popular votes (the turn out was about 50% and that in the US, there is no run-off election). This means that about 75% of population did not vote for Bush's reelection. Yet, Bush and his neocons cabal call it democracy.
Therefore, Bush is in no position at this point in time, to question even the outcome of elections in banana republic however, on the eve of the election in Iran, he hypocritically said that the electoral process in Iran ignores the basic requirements of democracy.
Some pundits believe that the intellectually challenged president was cherry- picked and indoctri-nated into the doctrine of Hegelian Dialectic by the illuminati to establish the world new order. They led him to believe that Bush has a heavenly mandate to meddle in the business of every sovereign nation. And therefore, should any of the sovereign states dare not to acquiesces supinely to the US unilateralist and imperial global hegemony, Bush has the divine rights to invade and occupy them by force under the pretext of what he calls WMD, Human Rights abuse, and supporting terrorism.
Despite the fact that there is no a real and visible enemy armed with conventional or non-conventional weapons who wants to attack US and that according to their own investigations, no single state or country directly or indirectly involved in the 9/11 tragedy except, a dozen or few more stateless terrorists, who used the civilian aircrafts as the weapons. However, paranoid war president and the commander-in- chief, George. W. Bush, gripped with hysteria, like Don Quixote de la Man-cha, the hero character of Cervantes, imagines himself as a gallant warrior who is at war with ghosts and giants. Yet, the GOP calls him wartime president.
Bush and his war party keep comparing their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the World War II, in which Stalin defeated the army of the Third Reich. On the contrary, neither, Iraq nor Afghanistan had the real combat armies. The Iranians had almost destroyed the Iraqi army during the eight- years war, and the remnants of its military forces were decimated during the first Persian Gulf War. As for Afghanistan, its army was made of almost militia type forces with antiquated weapons lacking air force and mechanized ground forces. Yet, the occupation forces are bogged-down in both coun-tries. However, it is noteworthy that without Iran, the US could never have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. They know that launching war of aggression against Iran would mean they would be driven out of those two countries."
Unlike the parliamentary democracy, the US president is not directly elected by the popular votes, rather based on the America's 18th century constitution; the powerful Electoral College elects the president. This flawed method of voting system opens the entire election process to all sorts of ir-regularities. When voters cast their ballots, they are actually electing the 538 members of the Elec-toral College, the ones who will really cast votes for the president.
States get one electoral vote for each of 100 senators and one electoral vote per US representative, which are 435, plus three electoral votes for the District of Columbia. It is noteworthy that the larg-est state like California with the population of about 36 million has two senators (the same number of senators for the smaller states), i.e., the state of Wyoming with a population of about half a million has two senators also.
Holy Warriors in the US & Secular Europe
In his first term, during an interview, Bush said that Iran had a history of brutality. Since he doesn't know the history and according to Michael Moore, he does not read the newspapers, or the books rather than the religious ones and so much so, he does not know even the difference between the myth and the recorded history, it follows that Bush's statement must come from the Book of Daniel. 9: 6, which says that Darius, the King of Persia arrested Daniel the Prophet and threw him into the pit of lions. Lumping Iran into the "axis of evil", he has also repeatedly marked Iran as a real threat to the Middle East. It seems that these statements emanating from the Book of Ezekiel 38:5-6, prophesizing that Iran and Armenia from far off lands in the north, are going to gather their forces to attack Israel.
According to the Guardian, a former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath recalled that Bush confessed, God, apparently addressing the president each time as "George", had told him, "Go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. Go and end the tyranny in Iraq.
There is no shortage of modern Nostradamus, prophecy gurus, and end time specialists in and around the White House. Among the most flamboyant Armageddon experts and wizards are Hal Lindsey and Pat Robertson. The former claims that he has been in communication with God since he was a child. The latter declared that during the election times God spoke to him pledging that George W. Bush would win the election. Both neocons, are extremely far right fanatics and very in-fluential figures, who are umbilically connected to the White House, and usually, what they preach reflecting the Bush's administration viewpoints.
Pat Robertson, who lives like a king, has invested millions of dollars in stock markets; and according to the ABC News, some believe that he is running a questionable charity organization called Opera-tion Blessing. A super rich Social Darwinist who believes that under-privileged Americans have the liberty to live under the bridge. He also accepts as true that all Muslims are Arabs, including the Iranians. Advocating hatred against the other faiths and philosophies, Robertson, on his private TV show, issued a fatwa (religious edict) ordering CIA to assassinate the Venezuelan democratically elected and popular socialist President, Hugo Chavez who is a critic of Bush's foreign policy.
Recently, he also suggested that Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine punishment for pulling Israel out of Gaza. God considers this land to be his," Robertson said on his TV program The 700 Club. "You read the Bible and he says 'This is my land,' and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, 'No, this is mine.'" He also said, however, that in the Bible, the prophet Joel "makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who 'divide my land.'"
Bush's former grand inquisitor, John Ashcroft once claimed, "In America, there was no king but Je-sus"? And that the Pentagon's new special ops units' commanding officer, Lt. Gen. William Boykin claimed that "the US Army was the house of God and Muslims the agent of Satan".
According to the Independent, Tony Blair proclaimed that God would judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally, George W. Bush. Contradicting warn-ings from advisers not to mix politics and religion, the Prime Minister said that his interest in poli-tics sprang from his Christianity and its "values and philosophy" had guided him in public life.
The irony here is that Bush and his like-minded advisers and groupthink, which are entirely fanatic extremists, have launched the medieval times style crusade against the other religions' extremists.
It is not coincidence that the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is one of the Bush few exponents in Europe and his troops have already joined the Iraqi crusade, defended the far right- neo-conservative Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, who originally published 12 satirical and racist cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The cultural editor of the Danish newspaper is Flemming Rose who has a close ties with far right neocons circle in US, including Daniel Pipes, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. The same paper that is now defending the freedom of press, refused to publish satirical cartoon of Christ in 2003.
The EU countries keep claiming that they are secular; however, their claim has proved to be other-wise as their national flags echoing the religious symbolism. Furthermore, the foundation of the EU is based on the Christian values. On November 1, 1993, which falls on All Saints Day, at Maastricht, the Netherlands, the 12 members of the formerly named EEC officially ratified and changed it to EC, and subsequently transformed into EU. The festival of All Saints, also sometimes known as "All Hallows," or "Hallowmas," is a feast celebrated in their honour. All Saints is also a Christian formula invoking all the faithful saints and martyrs, known or unknown. The Roman Catholic holiday (Festum omnium sanctorum) falls on November 1.
Crusaders in Iraq
As the Venezuelan writer, Fernando Baez eloquently articulates, what is happening in Iraq today is the largest cultural catastrophe since the Mongols forced entry into Baghdad in 13 century.
According to wikipedia.org, in 1258, the Mongols laid siege to the city and constructed a palisade and a ditch. Siege equipment was erected as well. The bombardment began on January, 1258 and by February 4, a breach was made. By february 5, the Mongols controlled a stretch of the wall. Al-Musta'sim tried to negotiate, but was refused.
On February 10, Baghdad surrendered, after the Caliph Al-Musta'sim came out of the city and gave himself up, at which point he was executed, by wrapping him in a rug and having him either "beaten to a pulp" or trampled by horses. The Mongols swept into the city on February 19, 1258, which began a week of massacre, looting, and fire.
Paradoxically, the brutal assault against the cradle of civilization this time around, planned and executed - not by the Mongols rather by the forces of American modern King George II who shame-lessly portrays himself as the great leader of the civilized world. The brutal invasion of Iraq took place on March 19, 2003, with indiscriminate carpet bombings. The occupation forces used bunker busters and "MOAB" bombs, which apparently, stands for "The Mother of All Bombs, aka the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb."
However, the real hidden meaning of the "MOAB" goes far deeper than what the US military appar-ently illustrates it as "the mother of all bombs". MOAB is a symbolism and a biblical name repre-senting the Crusade. According to Genesis: 30-38, Moab was the son of Abraham's nephew Lot and the name of a place named after him (the land of "MOAB") in Jerusalem. When the Crudaders occupied the area, the castle they built to defend the eastern part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was called Krak des Moabites. The name also signifying the covenant, and appears in the Scriptures many times (Genesis: 30-38; Deuteronomy 29:1; Ruth1:1, 22; 2 Kings 1:1; 2 Chronicles 20:22; Daniel 11:41).
The salvo of shock and awe inflicting bombs that went down in Baghdad resulted in mass destruc-tion and devastation of cultural and religious artifacts, which belong to the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon where according to recorded history, is the birthplace of civilization.
According to Baez over one million books, 10 million documents, and 14,000 archaeological artifacts have been lost in the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Among the world precious books that were burnt in the Baghdad National Library included the early editions of Arabian Nights, the treatises of the two Iran's great mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyam and philosopher, scientist, and medical writer, Avicena, aka Abu Ali Sina, and the dissertation of distin-guished Arab- Spanish philosopher, Averroes, aka Ibn Rushdi.
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Rice said that before mushroom of cloud appeared on Washington DC, the US had to stop Iraq. At the same time, on the other side of Atlantic, notorious Tony "B.Liar" of England claimed that Saddam had capacity to nuke London within 48 hours.
England has the history of brutal colonial tactics of the "divide and rule", and its prime minister, Tony Blair who pursuing the same old dirty trick, claimed that if the occupation forces leave Iraq, there would be civil war, which is nothing but a shell game because the root cause of violence and insurgency in Iraq is the foreign occupation. It is noteworthy that in the 1920s when the British had installed her puppet king and prime minister like Faisal and Noori Said in Iraq whose regime would not last a day without the imperial forces bayonets, then British prime minister at the House of Commons was saying the same things as Blair does today.
American style liberty & freedom of press
Bush also considers himself as the flag bearer of democracy on the face of the planet who supports and disseminates freedom, and liberty. Therefore, any independent nation who disagrees with the Bush's foreign policy is subject to liberation and regime change. Just the way US liberated Guan-tanamo from Cuba and turned it into the concentration camps, which Amnesty International calls it Gulag of modern time. Just the way US liberated Iraqi oil pipelines. Just the way, the Bush – Che-ney's administration liberated the undemocratic Abu-Ghraib Prison from Saddam Hussein, the dic-tator, and turned it into a democratic torturing chamber, where, the insurgents are systematically tortured and abused democratically by the US occupation forces.
Like the Stalin's purges, the Republican presidents in the past, used the doctrine of McCarthyism to remove their critics or opposition groups from the offices, restricting the freedom of speech and erod-ing the civil liberties. During the WW II, American citizens of German and Japanese origins were rounded up and lucked up in the camps until the end of the war.
Despite its glamorous PR campaign and empty slogans designed targeting the international audi-ences, not only the US has never been interested in democracy, but also, it has used all its political and military might to bring down the democratic states and backing the brutal tyrants especially, in the Middle East and Latin America.
According to Robert Fisk, who is a distinguished journalist and an author, during the US invasion both in Iraq and Afghanistan, journalists were the prime targets, including the Western and Arab journalists i.e., Aljazeera offices were bombed twice in Baghdad. British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported that Bush told UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at a White House summit on 16 April 2004 that he wanted to bomb Aljazeera's headquarters in Qatar.
In response to the bribery scandal of Iraqis media by the US to write the favourable stories about the war in Iraq, War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who speaks and acts like Joseph Goebbels, recently admitted that they were doing just the PR campaigns and claiming that they had every right to do so. Rumsfeld has also admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.
According to Doug Thomson, the Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue, Pentagon orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the
United States on holiday leave with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public. The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed "Operation Home front", ordered military person-nel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.
During the election campaign in Lebanon, Bush proudly said, "Freedom is on the march in the Mid-dle East." On the contrary, some voters in northern Lebanon were reportedly bribed to cast their bal-lots for the U.S.-backed anti-Syrian faction.
Foreign nationals are being kidnapped and flown from country to country by the CIA planes under the false suspicion of so-called renditions. Recently, the head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe reported that there was evidence pointing to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the United States, and that European governments were aware of it.
History of the U