America ’s road to Kabul goes through Moscow

We will be asked to extend the duration of our commitment in Afghanistan and we will be pressured to commit more troops to the quagmire that is Afghanistan. We will like in Vietnam era receive home our troops as damaged goods but this time it will be worse. This time our troops will come home with damage that will spread. It was only a couple of weeks ago that those men poisoned by Agent Orange were allowed to present their case in court. In the future there will be men and women who will die with strange diseases and the will give birth to children so deformed they will make you shudder and it will never stop. DU Depleted Uranium is used by the tonnes and it will come home with our troops.

Despite talk of change and both Obama’s and Vice President Joe Biden’s professed distaste and distrust for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, it appears that Obama is committed to continuing Bush’s ill-conceived policy of bombing both Afghanistan and Pakistan, supporting a puppet regime and expecting the starving shell-shocked natives to be thankful.

Last month, Defence Secretary Robert Gates stated, “If we have evidence that the drug labs and drug lords are supporting the Taliban, then they’re fair game.

With regards to the opium production I would like to share with you the following: In the year 2001, the year the Taliban ruled there was a little glitch in the production of opium. The usual war lords terrorising the local Afghan population could not get them to plant their usual Opium crops and the Taliban had the population plant grain. Makes sense I guess. Islam prohibits drugs and the Afghans needed food. This is how it shows in this little graph.

Opium Production in Afghanistan

What’s funny is that as soon as the Taliban was beaten the l Warlord scum where back in power, supported by their US masters and the CIA and guess what? Opium was back with a vengeance.

Did the US soldiers and the NATO do something about it? Well, judging but the photo of the soldiers happily walking through some Opium fields and there are many more of these they didn’t. In fact most of the opium crops were grown in the US and NATO dominated areas.

But then something happened. The Taliban got back on it’s feet and what’s more they are supported by the local population who’s doing what? Growing opium to sell to the infidels and to fund the Taliban. So now the shoe is on the other foot. The CIA is losing income and the Taliban is getting the revenue. They like the CIA don’t give a flying fuck about decadent Westerners getting hooked on Opium and if that’s the way to make money for weapons than so be it.

So now Gates is telling us that we have to bomb the opium fields to kingdom come and they will.

US soldiers inspecting Afghan opium fields

They will bomb the shit out of perfectly good soil with DU munition and contaminate the soil for the next 4.5 billion years meaning that either the Afghans will eat toxic grain or the West will shoot up toxic “Horse” depending who rules in that godforsaken sandpit.

The new president is discovering that America ’s road to Kabul goes through Moscow ,

As Obama prepares to transfer troops from Iraq to Afghanistan , Al-Qaeda and other jihadists are also “transferring” there according to Afghan Defence Minister General Abdul Rahim Wardak, giving the country the dubious distinction of remaining the centre of the “war on terror”. Throwing down the gauntlet to Obama, the Taliban successfully closed the Khyber Pass yet again last week by blowing up a bridge, torching 10 supply trucks for good measure. The Pakistan army responded by bombing an insurgent base, killing 52 suspected militants. The Taliban have killed nearly two dozen suspected US spies in recent months, all of them in the border region where American drone aircraft have carried out a series of missile strikes.

Newly installed officials describe the situation on the ground in Afghanistan as far more precarious than they had anticipated, with US government departments poorly organised to implement the plan he presented last week to his National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Special envoy to Afghanistan-Pakistan Richard Holbrooke said it is “an extraordinarily dysfunctional situation in which the very objectives have to be reviewed.” Obama reacted by delaying the deployment of any further troops until defence chiefs presented a coherent “endgame”, though he can hardly afford to wait 60 days for the results of his “Afpak” policy review. After only a few weeks in office, Obama has painted himself into a corner on this, the stoney cornerstone of his foreign policy.

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The Tunnels of Gaza

While Tzipi and Bibi are slogging it out in the Israeli elections on programs of the destruction and mass murder of the original inhabitants of the land they and their ancestors stole the Palestinians in the Gaza strip are trying to survive the best they can while they await their fate. If Bibi get’s in the get slaughtered. If Tzipi get’s in they get slaughtered too and still they fight to survive.

Resistance takes as many forms as life itself dictates.

Life in Gaza could not be more impossible. Its tunnels are a symbol of resistance.

Eighteen months ago, outraged when the Palestinians voted for the militant leadership of Hamas in democratic elections, Israel imposed a total lockdown on the entire population of Gaza.

But the entire people were determined to continue to resist. They found a way to circumvent total starvation.

The Israeli blockade led to a new economic structure, an underground economy. The besieged Palestinians have dug more than 1,000 tunnels under the totally sealed border.

Many thousands of Palestinians are now employed in digging, smuggling or transporting, and reselling essential goods. Smuggling constitutes approximately 90 percent of economic activity in Gaza, Gazan economist Omar Shaban told The Guardian. (Oct. 22, 2008)

The tunnels demonstrate the great ingenuity and enormous determination of the entire population and its leadership.

Because millions of Palestinians have been forced into refugee status outside of historic Palestine, large extended families on both sides of the border help arrange the buying and shipping of goods or send funds so family members locked in Gaza can buy essential supplies.

The tunnels connect the Egyptian town of Rafah with the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name inside Gaza. They have become a fantastic, life-sustaining network of corridors dug through sandy soil. Tunnels are typically three-tenths of a mile long, approximately 45 to 50 feet deep. They cost from $50,000 to $90,000 and require several months of intense labor to dig.

They pass under the Philadelphi buffer zone—a border strip of land put under Israeli military control by the 1993 Oslo accords.

The Israeli siege of Gaza, followed by 23 days of systematic bombing and invasion, has created massive destruction and scarcity. Food processing plants, chicken farms, grain warehouses, U.N. food stocks, almost all the remaining infrastructure, and 230 small factories were destroyed. Now hundreds of trucks packed with essential supplies from international and humanitarian agencies sit outside the strip, refused entry to Gaza by Israeli guards. As soon as the Israeli bombing ended, work on the tunnels resumed.

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Millions of job losses threaten to trigger social unrest in China

just imagine you earn the NZ minimum wage, soon to be $ 12.50. You return from where you work to your family for christmas and while yu are hoome you get a phone call. You don’;t need to come back for your job because there is no job anymore. Why? Because the rest of the world doen’t want the cheap crap your boss had you make anymore. Overnight your rural family looses 65% of it’s income. What you gonna do? Oh, I forgot; you find out that the “financial stimulus” only goes to industries close to the elite and your not alone, there is 50 million of you, all hungry and very angry! Are you going to wait until your family starves? No I didn’t think so. Can it happen here? Well, let’s put it tihis way; the Government isn’t bringing those project forward for nothing. Is that going to be enough. In a word NO! In the very near future we will see hyperinflation making those hardearned $ 12.50 worth about oh, nothing. Google Weimar and find out. And perhaps if you can handle bad news you might want to watch Money as Debt. Yep your got it right “banks have been printing money out of thin air since we left the gold standard in the 70ties and we are at the point of no return. Our fiat money system is collapsing and hter is nothing that can stop it.

The Chinese government is facing a massive unemployment crisis, far worse than in the late 1990s, when lay-offs of more than 30 million workers from state enterprises led to a wave of militant protests. This time, the growing army of unemployed mainly consists of internal migrant workers from the countryside, who have been hit hard by plunging export orders in the urban manufacturing centres and the collapse of the construction boom.

Some 25 to 26 million migrant workers lost their jobs last year, Chen Xiwen, director of the official Central Rural Work Leading Group told a press conference last week. More than 130 million migrant workers were employed in the cities, with another 80 million in township enterprises.

Even though millions of workers were instructed not to return to the cities from the recent Chinese New Year holiday, because their work had dried up, many still made the journey, only to find themselves not wanted. Their anger and frustration are the makings of a social time bomb, because 65 percent of the average rural family’s cash income is derived from members working in the cities, according to research by the Chinese central bank.

Academic studies have predicted staggering job losses in the new Year of the Ox. Professor Yu Qiao at the prestigious Tsinghua University recently warned: “It’s expected that 40 to 50 million or more migrant workers may lose their jobs in urban areas if the global economy keeps shrinking this year.” This figure does not include the millions of unemployed urban workers.

Yu continued: “Jobless migrant workers on this mass scale implies a severe political and social problem. Any minor mishandling may trigger a strong backlash and could even result in social turbulence.”

Yu criticised the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s 4 trillion yuan stimulus package for focussing on capital-intensive industries that have close connections to the CCP leadership. He said the package would provide some boost to GDP growth, but do little to ease unemployment, as small businesses, which provide the bulk of jobs, were being ignored. Yu also warned that the package would give a short-term boost to the construction sector, but cause overcapacity for years to come.

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Doesn’t this make you cry?

I know we all think that we are so important and when a few hundred of us die the worlds is to small for our grief and I do feel for those who lost loved ones believe me but when it really comes down to it I weep for the wholesale destruction we perpetrate on the rest of the planet and humans be tossed.

Although I think this fire fighter’s kind of cute.

DNA bill breaches BORA

This from no left turn. What get’s me is the fact that people seem surprised that National would allow such an act. Of course they do. We are at the beginning of the end of the Western Civilisation as we know it. Our consumerism and easy times are over. In the near future we will see a lot of angry people demonstrating and that is something they will not allow. The final fleecing of the sheeple has begun  and they will see it through.

The government’s bill allowing DNA to be taken from anyone arrested breaches the Bill of Rights Act [PDF].

The Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill would allow police to forcibly take DNA from anyone arrested or intended to be charged with a “relevant offence” without having to first apply to a judge. The list of offences police consider “relevant” – currently rape, murder, child abuse, serious assaults and burglary – will be initially expanded to include firearms offences, ordinary assault, “threatening acts”, receiving stolen property, killing someone with a car, peeping or peering, cruelty to a child (so smackers are in) and cruelty to animals (yes, really). Eventually it will be expanded to include any imprisonable offence – which means (for example) disorderly behaviour (a standard charge for protestors), breaching the RMA, and blasphemous libel. The relevance of DNA to these sorts of offences can charitably be described as “tenuous”, but that’s not the point. The police want to go fishing, and so are looking for any excuse to take your data and stick it in their database.

The problem, as the Attorney-General points out – is that this is a gross violation of the right against unreasonable search and seizure. Our entire legal tradition is predicated on the idea that if the police want to invade your privacy by e.g. searching you or your house, they must have specific and reasonable grounds which apply particularly to you; they can’t just strip search you for the hell of it or kick in your door at random. They have to have something specific pointing specifically at you, suggesting they will find the evidence they are looking for.

This bill throws all that out the window. It makes the mere fact of suspicion itself (rather than the grounds for suspicion) enough to take evidence and conduct searches which may have no connection to the original offence. And it does this for a particularly invasive form of search. Taking a DNA sample is not like taking a fingerprint (something which can be done to anyone arrested). It yields far more – and far more private – information, and uses far more invasive methods. It requires them to stick needles into you. That should require a very high threshold. Instead, the police want to do it to anyone who comes into their hands as a routine procedure.

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David Miliband: Nato troops stuck in an Afghanistan ‘stalemate’

Britain and her Nato allies in Afghanistan are stuck in a stalemate with the Taleban, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, admitted yesterday.

His pessimistic view of military progress in Afghanistan coincided with a new poll of Afghans which reveals that confidence in the future is significantly lower than it was three years ago.

The poll of 1,500 people in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, commissioned by the BBC and two other international broadcasters, found that only 40 per cent of Afghans still believed their country was heading in the right direction, compared with 77 per cent in 2005. Mr Miliband said the figures were realistic.

In other findings, 59 per cent supported the continuing presence of British forces in the country, and 63 per cent supported the role of the Americans.

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US warns of battle worse than Iraq in Afghanistan

Funny how we won this one  oh, 7 years ago eh?

MUNICH, Germany (AFP) – The United States warned its allies Sunday that fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan could prove tougher than in Iraq and appealed, along with Britain, for more troops and equipment.

US ambassador Richard Holbrooke insisted that a new approach was required to turn the strife-torn country around, involving all of Afghanistan’s neighbours and in particular Pakistan.

“It is like no other problem we have confronted, and in my view it’s going to be much tougher than Iraq,” he said at an international security conference in Germany. “It is going to be a long, difficult struggle.”

Holbrooke, who is to embark on a regional tour soon, said that the administration of President Barack Obama was reviewing the best way to tackle the Taliban-led insurgency.

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BBC reports of arsonists fire in Australia

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Will Muslims be blamed for the Australian Bush fires.

As the sites of the disastrous fires in Australia are treated as crime scenes and Australians are looking for answers rumours are beginning to circle the Blogosphere and for the first time our MSM is prodding victims of these horrific fires to tell us what they would like to see happen if arsonists where to be caught. Even before the first fires where doused we where told that many of them had been started on purpose and PM Rudd equalled the arsonists with mass murders. That is unprecedented and set’s a very dangerous tone in the aftermath of the most terrible bushfires ever recorded in Australia.

The BBC reported that half of the 10.000 to 20.000 fires are deliberate according to a new report and mentions a new “shadowy” enemy within.

Bush fires have happened naturally, through ignorance and carelessness and to be sure through arson. That bush fires happen in February is pretty predictable. It is after all the hottest and driest month of the year but to point at possible arson right from the start is unusual.

However in light of the fact that 5 months before the fires happened a Fairfax owned Internet News outlet called “the Age” announced in a that September 7 2008 article that United States “Intelligence channels”  had identified a “Jihadist” website which called for the destruction of Australia’s forests and cities through bush fires perhaps we should keep an eye on the developments in the news on this subject in the next couple of weeks.

According to this graph released by the Australian Institute of Criminology more than 64 % of all bush fires between January 2002 and 2004  where deliberate.

Origin of bushfires between200 2 and 2004

For a Newspaper article to come out in which the writer states unequivocally that there is intelligence linking Extreme Australian Muslims to Bush fires 5 months before the worst Bush fires ever happen is suspect to say the least and nothing less than spectacular.

If there was such a connection I would presume that the Australian Government would have taken every precaution to prevents such an attack. It seems no such measures were taken.

In fact even the name and the method to be used where mentioned in the same newspaper article. The groups name was the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network and the method to be used was sulphuric acid and petrol and the idea came from imprisoned Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Suri.

That is a lot of detailed information. So why did nobody act on this information?

Could it be we are watching another  false flag attack develop?

Let me remind you that the US wants to double the troops in Afghanistan, that Prime Minister Rudd was elected on a program of retreat of the Australian troops in Afghanistan and that a renewed fervour is needed in both Australia and New Zealand to keep us towing the line and stay involved in the Illegal wars of Aggression the US has dragged us into and that Obama was expected to deal with some pretty hairy situations around about now.

Abortion to blame for fires says Pastor

FFS. Somebody stick some sticky tape over the man’s mouth already.

The Catch the Fire Ministries has tried to blame the bush fires disaster on laws decriminalising abortion in Victoria.

The evangelical church’s leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with “a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

Pastor Nalliah said he was helping to co-ordinate fire relief, including providing trucks to distribute clothes and food and giving his own blood, but he said he must tell “the truth”.

Asked by the Sydney Morning Herald if he did not believe most Australians would regard his remarks as being in appallingly bad taste, he said today: “I must tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”

He said it was no use “molly-coddling” Australians.

Asked if he believed in a God who would take vengeance by killing so many people indiscriminately – even those who opposed abortion, Mr Nalliah referred to 2 Chronicles 7:14 to vouch for his assertion that God could withdraw his protection from a nation.

“The Bible is very clear,” he said. “If you walk out of God’s protection and turn your back on Him, you are an open target for the devil to destroy.”

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US military officials threatened to “ruin” the AP if it covered the war in Iraq in unflattering ways

In an important speech delivered at the University of Kansas, Associated Press head Tom Curley charged that the Bush Pentagon had systematically targeted and mistreated journalists as a part of a propaganda program developed by Donald Rumsfeld. He called on President Obama to end this approach.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because “we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable.” Much like in Vietnam, “civilian policymakers and soldiers alike have cracked down on independent reporting from the battlefield” when the news has been unflattering, Curley said. “Top commanders have told me that if I stood and the AP stood by its journalistic principles, the AP and I would be ruined.”

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Homeowner group protests ‘predator’ CEOs outside their mansions

John Key anyone?

If these activists are as dedicated as they are desperate, expect this to become a trend.

Monday, a group of 350 to 400 at-risk homeowners, organized by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, staged a series of protests outside the mansions of wealthy bankers in a moneyed Connecticut neighborhood.

“Called the ‘Predators Tour’ these actions were the start of NACA’s ‘accountability campaign,’ an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks,” reported the Stamford Times.

“Sporting bright yellow shirts that read, ‘Stop Loan Sharks,’ protesters demanded more accountability from the CEOs of the financial institutions responsible for the millions of unaffordable mortgages in the state and across America,” reported NBC New York in an article titled, “Grab Your Torch and Pitchfork.”

Protesters also gathered outside the mansions of William Frey, the CEO at Greenwich Financial Services, and John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley.

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UN moves to charge Israel with war crimes

The United Nations moves to set up a commission to look into Israeli war crimes and respond to its human rights violations in Gaza.

After the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) compound became the target of GPS-guided Israeli mortars on January 15, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned “in the strongest terms this outrageous attack” and called for an inquiry into suspected Israeli war crimes.

“I strongly demand a thorough investigation and punishment for those responsible,” he told reporters in Beirut after the attack.

Japanese Ambassador Yukio Takasu, who currently holds the presidency of the Security Council, said late on Monday that Ban had told a closed-door briefing in the council that the UN had set up a commission as a preliminary step to look into Israeli damage to UN premises.

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Obama signals he isn’t interested in ‘truth commission’ to investigate Bush abuses

Hmm, now wasn’t Obama the guy that promised us transparency and integrity in Government?

President Barack Obama gave a cool welcome at his Monday night press conference to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) call for a “truth commission” to probe alleged abuses under George W. Bush, offering a fresh signal that the new president may not be interested in investigating President Bush.

Obama claimed at the first press conference of his presidency that he had not seen the proposal from Sen. Leahy and would have a look at it — “but my general orientation is to say let’s get it right moving forward.”

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WTO chief warns of looming political unrest

BERLIN (AFP) – The global economic crisis could trigger political unrest equal to that seen during the 1930s, the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said in a German newspaper interview Saturday.

“The crisis today is spreading even faster (than the Great Depression) and affects more countries at the same time,” Pascal Lamy told the Die Welt newspaper.

Questioned about the risks of political instability, Lamy — who wraps up his four-year term as WTO director-general in September — responded that that was “the main danger”.

“This crisis weighs heavily on politics and puts peace in danger,” he said.

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Breitbart.tv » Raw: LuThe new CCTV building burns like a torch

The New and soon to be opened CCTV building erupted into flames during a fireworks display. According to the NIST report with regards to the WTC 7 building which collapsed in 6.5 seconds after it had only a few office fires into its own footprint this building should have collapsed into a pyroclastic flow in mere seconds.

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Ship of Fools

By Paul Craig Roberts

February 09, 2009 “Information Clearinghouse” — -Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that “during the Clinton Administration, ‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had–were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December.”

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data from a government that lies to us every time it opens its mouth, the US unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

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Senate approves Obama’s massive bailout plan; Dow plunges

So much for that plan. How ever with over 700.000 jobs disappearing in January 2009 alone I can’t say I’m surprised.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan has passed in the US Senate this morning (NZ time) and is on its way to difficult House-Senate negotiations.

Market reaction was swift on Wall St, with the key Dow Jones index plunging more than 300 points in the early afternoon.

Just three Republicans helped pass the stimulus plan on a 61-37 vote and they’re already signaling they’ll play hardball to preserve more than US$108 billion in spending cuts made last week in Senate dealmaking.

Obama wants to restore cuts in funds for school construction jobs and help for cash-starved states.

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Exit polls suggest Israel taking center line

There is nothing center about Tzipy Livny. Tzipy Livny is a hardcore Zionist and a second generation Zionist Terrorist. She is the child of two Irgun terrorists and just a few weeks ago she declared her self at peace with the wilful destruction of Gaza and the death of almost 400 innocent children.

JERUSALEM (CNN) — Early exit polls showed a surprise narrow lead for the centrist Kadima party as voting ended in Israel’s elections Tuesday, Israeli television networks reported.

Kadima leader Tzipi Livni casts her ballot in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Tuesday.

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Kadima, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, appeared to have an edge over the conservative Likud bloc led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman and Israeli political analysts warned that exit polls had been wrong in past elections.

Pre-election opinion polls had suggested that right-wing parties may benefit from Israel’s recent military campaign in Gaza.

It was Livni’s inability to form a ruling coalition last year that prompted Tuesday’s vote.

Kadima’s partner in the current coalition, the Labor Party, appeared to be running fourth in Tuesday’s elections, with the exit polls indicating that the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party is in third place.

No single party is expected to win an overall majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, so whoever wins the most seats still faces the challenge of building a governing coalition.

Livni took control of Kadima in September, when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stepped down as the party leader amid several corruption investigations.

Livni has given herself a tough war image. Her television advertising focuses on the military assault and statements about not allowing the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas to decide Israel’s fate.

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Ed Balls: minister fears rise of fascism amid economic gloom

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Ed Balls fears rise of fascism amid economic gloom Photo: Julian Simmonds

Adolf Hitler takes the salute as thousands of policemen goose-step past his rostrum. Photo: GETTY

Ed Balls, the Children’s and Schools Secretary, said the downturn was likely to be the most serious for 100 years, and his comments appeared to raise the prospect of a return to the Far Right politics of the 1930s and the rise of Facism.

His warning, in a speech to activists at the weekend, came after a trade union baron warned that far right parties were trying to hijack the campaign for “British jobs for British workers”.

The row over foreign workers has gathered momentum in recent weeks and Mr Balls seemed to suggest the recession could trigger a return to the Far Right politics that prospered in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He told Labour’s Yorkshire conference: “The economy is going to define our politics in this region and in Britain in the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the next 15 years.

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The 11th of every month Special

Today I will submit posts relating to the events of 911 next month 7.5 years ago.
You will find them under this post as I collect them.

Workers rebel in East Europe

As our bankster PM prepares to gut our welfare system the workers in East Europe show how it’s done when push comes to shove as it inevitably will. Remember, no matter what financial speculators and parasites such as John Key tell us it is you and me people who create real wealth in the real world with our hands and our wits which are the salt of the earth. John Key has never earned an honest crust in his live. He would know how to go about it if his live depended on it.

Thousands of demonstrators in Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria have attacked government buildings and called on their governments to resign as unemployment soars in Eastern Europe.

Living standards in these countries were always below those for many countries in the imperialist West. But during the existence of the USSR and the socialist bloc, workers in these countries enjoyed secure jobs and guaranteed access to education, health care and retirement benefits.

Police attack demonstrators in front of Latvia’s Parliament building in Riga Jan. 13. Experts predict a regional increase of 15 million to 18 million unemployed in the coming months, with no relief as jobs for immigrants disappear in Western Europe and the United States.

Neil Shearing at Capital Economics in London says that “Unemployment in the Baltic countries could spike to more than 15 percent. Industry has absolutely collapsed because of shrinking demand” in Western Europe and the U.S. He continues, “The recession will essentially engulf the entire economy of the region.” (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Jan. 29)

The world capitalist economy is collapsing. The rightist pro-capitalist regimes that have been ruling these countries since the early 1990s are imposing severe cuts on the remaining social safety-net programs. As a result, workers are rising up in protest.

In front of Lithuania’s Parliament in Vilnius Jan. 16. On Jan. 16, more than 10,000 people converged on Riga’s 13th-century cathedral and then marched on parliament to protest the Latvian government’s economic program. The Latvian central bank governor has pronounced the economy “clinically dead.” (The Age, Australia, Feb. 1)

On the next day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Enraged throngs of thousands gathered outside parliament chanting, “Thieves, thieves!” (World Press, Jan. 30) Their anger was directed at the government, which had passed IMF-prescribed “market reforms.” This resulted in corruption, drastic cuts in government spending for social services, inflation, tax hikes and now a huge jump in unemployment.

While youths hurled cobblestones at government buildings and shop windows, doctors, police, farmers and workers protested against poor pay and the government austerity policy.

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Palestinian despair deepens ahead of elections

Ayub Srour wants Likud leader and long-time hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu to win. “At least he’s honest. He says he’ll expel us, and he will expel us. He says he’s slaughter us, and he will slaughter us.”

My eyes stung, I was coughing, my nose was running. Along with cameraman David Hawley and freelance producer Kareem Khadder, I had just been tear-gassed — not for the first time last Friday — during a day-long clash between Palestinian kids and Israeli soldiers in the West Bank town of Na’alin, on the West Bank.

An Israeli soldier confronts Palestinian protesters during a demonstration Friday in the West Bank village of Jayyus.

We had gone there to gauge the Palestinian view of Tuesday’s Israeli elections. Na’alin, and many other towns and villages like it in the West Bank, are in the forefront of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Here, it all comes down to the most basic element in the century-old conflict: control of the land.

Na’alin is an old town, with factories and workshops, surrounded by olive groves. But in recent years neighboring Israeli settlements, built since the June 1967 war, have increasingly encroached on Na’alin’s farmland, and Israel, on grounds of security, has built its security barrier around the town.

As a result, Na’alin residents say they have lost access to much of their land, their water sources, in short their livelihood. Beginning two years ago, every Friday they hold protests against Israel’s settlement expansion and barrier building.

Most Na’alin residents are not ideological hotheads; before the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September 2000, many worked in Israel. Most are still fluent in Hebrew and do business with Israelis looking for a good deal on car repairs and other services.

For that reason I thought Na’alin would be a good place to see what Palestinians were thinking. What I heard was universal pessimism.

No one I spoke with expressed the slightest hope that any of the leading candidates –Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, Israel Beitenu’s Avigdor Lieberman and Labour’s Ehud Barak — would do anything to remove the settlements that are slowly closing in on Na’alin.

As we sheltered from the tear gas behind a house, Na’alin resident Hani Khawaja told me, “I don’t expect anything to come out of the elections that will please the Palestinians. Just killings, expulsions and land confiscations.”

Another man, Ayub Srour, had a slightly different approach. He prefers Israeli leaders to be honest about their intentions, and not raise hopes only to dash them later. He wants Likud leader and long-time hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu to win. “At least he’s honest. He says he’ll expel us, and he will expel us. He says he’s slaughter us, and he will slaughter us.”

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Gitmo: Conditions worsening since election

What strikes me a so sad is the fact that these poor souls are hungerstriking because of hope.
That’s what Obama gave these people. He told them about the “audacity of hope”.  Well they are hoping and they are giving it their all. They are dying of hunger in the hopes of finally being heard and freed. What makes this so very, very sad is that Obama surrounded by the same criminals which gave us the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who will continue their destructive rampage in the next four years will do nothing to save these poor buggers. Absolutely nothing at all.

The Obama Administration has made the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility a high priority. One of Obama’s first executive orders, two days after inauguration, was that Guantanamo be closed within the year. Human rights activists are applauding the order, as well as his promise that all American-led torture will cease. With new leadership, many are optimistic that the methods American forces use to gather intelligence during conflict will be dramatically changed.

But surprisingly, in Guantanamo’s eleventh hour, conditions are deteriorating due to a massive hunger strike. Lt. Col. Yvonne-Bradley, a lawyer of detainee Binyam Mohamed, revealed to The Observer’s Mark Townsend and Paul Harris that 50 out of 260 prisoners within Guantanamo are on strike. 20 of those are unhealthy enough to be listed as “critical.” The Joint Task Force in charge of Guantanamo has not commented on the hunger strike.

“Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell. Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten. Binyam has seen this and has not witnessed this before. Guantanamo Bay is in the grip of a mass hunger strike and the numbers are growing; things are worsening,” Bradley said.

Lt. Col. Bradley is in London to demand the release of her client, a UK resident, and to obtain disclosure of secret documents that reveal Britain’s complicity in Mohamed’s imprisonment and torture. Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and taken to a “Morocco torture prison.” There, he was told that the MI5 was working with the CIA to bring down Al Qaeda. 2 years later he was moved to a similar prison in Kabul, and finally ended up at Guantanamo in May 2005. While in detention, he was interviewed by an MI5 officer known only as “Witness B.” Selected journal entries recording his experience in each prison can be found here.

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Gaza Massacre Foretold in 2005: What May Come After the Evacuation of Jewish Settlers from the Gaza Strip

Well they weren’t far wrong where they?

We feel that it is urgent and necessary to raise the alarm regarding what may come during and after evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967, in the event that the evacuation is implemented.

We held back on getting this statement published and circulated, seeking additional feedback from our peers. The publication in Ha’aretz (22 June 2005) quoting statements by General (Reserves) Eival Giladi, the head of the Coordination and Strategy team of the Prime Minister’s Office, motivated us not to delay publication and circulation any further. Confirming our worst fears, General (Res.) Eival Giladi went on record in print and on television to the effect that “Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire while the disengagement is being implemented” and that “If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting danger to surrounding people.”

We believe that one primary, unstated motive for the determination of the government of the State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif (Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be to keep them out of harm’s way when the Israeli government and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine refugees.

The scenario could be similar to what has already happened in the past – a tactic that Ariel Sharon has used many times in his military career – i.e., utilizing provocation in order to launch massive attacks.

Following this pattern, we believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz are considering to utilize provocation for vicious attacks in the near future on the approximately one and a half million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: a possible combination of intensified state terror and mass killing. The Israeli army is not likely to risk the kind of casualties to its soldiers that would be involved in employing ground troops on a large scale in the Gaza Strip. With General Dan Halutz as Chief of Staff they don’t need to. It was General Dan Halutz, in his capacity as Commander of the Israeli Air Force, who authorized the bombing of a civilian Gaza City quarter with a bomb weighing one ton, and then went on record as saying that he sleeps well and that the only thing he feels when dropping a bomb is a slight bump of the aircraft.

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Israeli university welcomes ‘war crimes’ colonel

NAZARETH. The Israeli government has moved quickly to quash protests over the appointment of the army’s senior adviser on international law to a teaching post at Tel Aviv University. Col Pnina Sharvit-Baruch is thought to have provided legal cover for war crimes during the recent Gaza offensive.

Government officials fear that recent media revelations relating to Col Sharvit-Baruch’s role in the Gaza operation may assist human rights groups seeking to bring Israeli soldiers to trial abroad.

A Spanish judge began investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza under the country’s “universal jurisdiction” laws this month, and a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague is considering a Palestinian group’s petition to indict Israeli commanders.

Meanwhile, the furore — by highlighting the close ties between the army and Israeli universities — is adding weight to a growing campaign in Europe and the US to impose an academic boycott on Israel, say activists.

Tel Aviv University’s decision to hire Col Sharvit-Baruch to teach international law prompted protests from staff after the local media published details of the military planning for the Gaza offensive.

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Christian Support for Killing Iraqis

While today the NZ papers announced that New Zealand might have to extend the stay of it’s troops in the DU contaminated sandpit that is Afghanistan and predictably no one asks the pertinent questions such as: Why does the US need to double it’s forces in Afghanistan if they announced a month after they invaded Afghanistan that they had won? Why are we  still there and why have we not found Osama bin Laden since that was the reason why we went in there in the first place? Why do the Afghans resist us if we went in there to liberate them from the Taliban?
Why do girls still get Acid thrown in their faces when they try to get an education?
Why has to opium production gone from zero to the biggest Opium production ever if we had control over the Afghan country side? Why did the US attack Iraq if none of the 911-2001 hijackers came from Iraq? Why are we using DU in both Iraq and Afghanistan if we came to “liberate” them? To name a few.

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Among the things about the Iraq War that I have never been able to understand is how American Christians have been able, in good conscience, to support this war. After all, no one can deny that neither Iraq nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States. That makes the United States the aggressor — the attacker — in this particular conflict. How could American Christians support the killing of Iraqis in such a war of aggression? How could they reconcile this with God’s sacred commandment, Thou shalt not murder.

One possibility is that Americans initially viewed the Iraq War as one of self-defense. Placing their trust in their president and vice-president, they came to the conclusion that Iraq was about to unleash WMDs on American cities. Therefore, they concluded, America had the right to defend itself from this imminent attack, much as an individual has the moral right to use deadly force to defend his life from someone who is trying to murder him.

But once the WMDs failed to materialize, American Christians did not seem to engage in any remorse or regret over all the Iraqis who had been killed in the invasion. It was all marked up as simply an honest mistake. At the same time, hardly anyone called for a formal investigation into whether the president and the vice president had intentionally misled Americans into supporting the war based on bogus exaggerations of the WMD threat.

Yes, I am emotional about torture.

Last week the response to the angry outburst of two Maori protesters the day before Waitangi day was marginalised by remarks about the appropriateness of emotionality and especially the show of negative emotions was permissible in modern society. The verdict amongst our MSM outlets was unanimous. One behaves in public. How does one behave in public? The Pakeha way. One is polite, one pretends that all are friends even if it is a proven fact that one is not and one pretends to be together for the occasion to forge enduring relationships even if one doesn’t.

Any break in that protocol is deemed inappropriate and can therefore be ridiculed and marginalised. Case closed.

This is how George “Buff”Hoon attempts to use this technique when called to task over his involvement of suppressing the details of torture of a man who has been languishing in the Guantanamo bay torture black hole for 6 years.

Shami Chakrabarti thank you for your courage to speak out and to defend your integrity and righteous anger which shines through magnificently when you rightfully address the hideous hypocrisy of our leaders.

SIS file on MP “an affront to our parliamentary system” – Locke

GREEN MP Keith Locke is upset that the SIS continued to keep a file on him even after he became an MP. Locke, a former far-left Marxist campaigner, found that the spies had watched him since he was 11 years old and kept his file open after he was elected to parliament in 1999. “Monitoring a sitting MP, purely because of the views he espouses, is an affront to our parliamentary system,” Locke told the Sunday Star-Times. Locke’s personal file includes an SIS report from 2003 criticising the MP’s proposed visit to Sri Lanka, where he was to visit both sides involved in the civil war, including areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Some governments have deemed the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organisation. “It would suggest a level of naivety if Locke did not consider that the organisation and payment for this trip to war-affected areas in the north and east of Sri Lanka was not in some way connected with the LTTE,” says the report.

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The American ruling class

While the Royal bank of Schotland is proposing tho pay out bonnusses to the value of US$ 3 billion after it had received a bailout of US$ 30 billion just months ago just to stay afloat and it appears that almost 10.000 Banksters have charged hookers to their business accounts to the value of thousands of dollars an hour Obama (Remember? The guy that promised you change) purported to set a cap on the bonusses to be received by CEO’s of banks who receive bailouts. A good thing I hear you think. Yes, it would be if it weren’t just another piece of shite with mansize loopholes.

On Wednesday President Barack Obama announced measures that purport to restrict executive compensation to $500,000 at financial institutions receiving billions in government assistance. The figure does not include stock options, which could be redeemed after financial firms pay back loans from the federal government. Nor does it apply to the original recipients of tens of billions in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money.

The measures are essentially a public relations exercise. Their aim is to provide political cover for a new and even larger Wall Street bailout, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will unveil next week.

Yet the discussion that has emerged in the wake of Obama’s announcement sheds light on the domination of government by a tiny financial elite and the increasingly threadbare pretense of democracy in the US. This financial aristocracy, the episode reveals, is a power to be approached on bended knee.

The media have responded to Obama’s proposal of a $500,000 limit on executive compensation, which would affect only a handful of firms, as though this were a severe and astonishing punishment. Yet the figure represents approximately 12 times the annual salary of the typical worker. To the majority of the population, a salary of a half million dollars is a staggering amount of money.

Obama’s servility before the financial aristocracy was summed up by the reassurances he gave it in announcing his limits on executive pay. “This is America,” Obama said. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.”

Such a vision of America is at odds with both its present circumstances and its history, which has been characterized by deep democratic and egalitarian traditions that date back to before the Jeffersonian democracy of the early Republic. And while liberals are busy attempting to equate Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the latter, in the midst of the Great Depression, attempted to capitalize on the tremendous contempt for the rich in the population at large by regularly issuing bromides against the “money changers.”

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