[click image]Simply hosting [a No More Blood For Oil] message on one’s bumper was cause enough to remove two attendees at Bush’s 2005 speech at the Wings Over the Rockies Museum in Colorado. The White House had a policy of excluding those who did not agree with the president from his public appearances. It’s a policy a federal appeals court is upholding in a decision a dissenting judge decried as “simply astounding.”... to put it mildly....
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[click image]The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of three soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died Feb. 3 in Timagara, Pakistan, from wounds suffered when insurgents attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device.No. Really. Figure it out.
Killed were:
Sgt. 1st Class David J. Hartman, 27, of Okinawa, Japan.
He was assigned to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne), 95th
Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C.
Sgt. 1st Class Matthew S. Sluss-Tiller, 35, of Callettsburg, Ky.
He was assigned to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne), 95th
Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C.
Staff Sgt. Mark A. Stets, 39, of El Cajon, Calif.
He was assigned to the 8th Psychological Operations Battalion
(Airborne), 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg,
N.C.
[click image]We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side, and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other. Port of Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Our team was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble. There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnel house. The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money. The ones I ran into were either incompetents or outright anti American. Most are French or french speakers, worthless every damn one of them. While 1800 rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID (another organization full of little OBamites and communists that openly speak against Americana) These two organizations exemplified their parochialism by USAID, when in control of all inbound flights, had food and water flights stacked up all the way to Miami, yet allowed Geraldo Rivera, Anderson Cooper and a host of other left wing news puppies to land. Pulled all the security off the rescue teams so that Bill Clinton and his wife could have the grand tour, whilst we sat unable to get to people trapped in the rubble. Stacked enough food and water for the relief over at the side of the airfield then put a guard on it while we dehydrated and wouldn't release a drop of it to the rescuers. No shower facilities to decontaminate after digging or moving corpses all day, except for the FEMA teams who brought their own shower and decon equipment, as well as air conditioned tents. No latrine facilities, less digging a hole if you set up a shitter everyone was trying to use it. I watched a 25 year old Obamite with the USAID shrieking hysterically, berate a full bird colonel in the air force, because he countermanded her orders, whilst trying to unscrew the air pattern. "You don't know what your president wants! The military isn't in charge here we are!" If any of you are thinking of giving money to the Haitian relief, or to the UN don't waste your money. It will only go to further the goals of the French and the Liberal left. If we are a fair and even society, why is it that only white couples are adopting Haitian orphans. Where the hell is that vocal minority that is always screaming about the injustice of American society. Bad place, bad situation, but a perfect look at the new world order in action. New Orleans magnified a thousand times. Haiti doesn't need democracy, what Haiti needs is Papa Doc. That's not just my opinion , that is what virtually every Haitian we talked with said. "the French run, the UN treat us the same as when we were a colony", at least Papa Doc ran the country. Oh, and as a last slap in the face the last four of us had to take US AIRWAY's home from Phoenix . They slapped me with a 590 dollar baggage charge for the four of us. The girl at the counter was almost in tears because she couldn't give us a discount or she would lose her job.. Pass that on to the flying public.So this was my answer:
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[click image]Romania 'to host US missile shield'Add that to the dithering on the START treaty and his outrageous budget for developing new nukes and it has now become perfectly crystal clear that, here, in the one area where there was still a shred of hope Obama wouldn't opt to just get engraved in titanium what Bush left dangling, Obama means to continue threatening Russia. Obama has absolutely no intention of making this a safer, better world. He means to prevail in making it utterly unsafe and bad for living things.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 05, 2010
Romania has backed a US plan that would see interceptor missiles deployed in the country as part of a missile shield to protect Europe, its president has said.
Traian Basescu said on Thursday that the country's top defence body had agreed to be part of a system against "potential attacks with ballistic missiles or medium-range rockets".
The US military facilities, which would become operational by 2015, still require parliamentary approval before they can go ahead.
Basescu sought to assure Russia, which had previously condemned plans for a missile shield, that the proposed move was not a threat.
"The new system is not against Russia. I want to categorically stress this, Romania [will] not host a system against Russia, but against other threats," he said.
Russian reaction
Russia is adamant that nuclear arms should be deployed only in the territory of the states possessing such weapons.
US tactical nuclear arms should be withdrawn from Europe, Andrei Nesterenko, the Russian foreign ministry spokesman, said on Thursday.
"Issues of further nuclear disarmament, including tactical nuclear arms, should not be addressed as such, but only in close relation with other types of weapons, including conventional armed forces in Europe and the ballistic missile defence systems.
"In this context, withdrawal of American tactical weapons from Europe back to the United States would be welcome. It should be accompanied by complete and irreversible demolition of the entire infrastructures supporting the deployment of such weapons in Europe," he said.
The announcement of a planned missile defence in Romania comes months after Washington shelved a plan to place missile defence facilities in the Czech Republic and Poland - a move welcomed by Moscow.
Romania 'well-suited'
Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst, said Russia had feared that missiles placed in Poland could be used to attack Moscow with nuclear warheads.
"That was a bit far-fetched but that was believed in Moscow, he told Al Jazeera from the Russian capital.
"The missiles that apparently will, maybe, some day, be put into Romania will be smaller missiles and Romania is further from Moscow than Poland is.
"Russia's official position is that only that missile defence is good which is missile defence together with Russia, a joint control.
"But at least this will be seen as not as dangerous, most likely, as one with Poland, so I don't think that right now there will be that much fuss about it."
The US embassy in Bucharest said that Washington had "determined that Romania is well-suited for the location of this system to provide protection for European Nato allies".
'Iranian threat'
A plan unveiled last September by Barack Obama, the US president, includes land-and sea-based missile systems in and around the Gulf to defend against what it says is a growing Iranian missile threat.
The US offer was brought to Bucharest by Ellen Taucher, under-secretary of state for arms control who leads a team of American experts in Romania, Basescu said.
Teodor Baconschi, Romania's foreign minister, said the plan was first presented to Basescu during a visit by Joe Biden, the US vice-president, to Bucharest in October but was not made public.
"This became official today," Baconschi said.
In past years, Romania's parliament has solidly backed participation in US and Nato-led military ventures, including Romanian troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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[click image]'Race still an issue in Cuba'I'm so tired of the issue of racism. Nobody seems to realize that ceasing to speak of it and simply maintaining a zero tolerance attitude about it—not stopping to glorify yourself as not racist by bitching about it—ceasing to denigrate others as racist when you think you can make a case for it, hallucinatory or not—simply ousting perpetrators on both sides, making them pay heavy social and political and financial prices for this bullshit would be a much bigger help. You keep talking about it, incessantly bringing it up in relation to whomever it is you don't like for their real or imagined perfidies, yer actually giving grounds for others to make it seem as though the matter were not settled, as though racism is in some wise okay, or usable as an excuse. At some point you just have to shut up and perform....
By Patricia Grogg
1 February 2010
The elimination of racism remains unfinished business in Cuba today.
"We have to admit that the problem exists, determine its impact on the social model that we defend, and tackle it in depth," says Esteban Morales, an Afro-Cuban economist, political scientist and author of numerous articles and essays on the subject.
As a researcher at the University of Havana's Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States (CEHSEU), Morales could also be considered an expert on US affairs.
While he openly admits to the persistence of racism in Cuba, he takes issue with a statement recently issued by a group of 60 African-American artists and intellectuals accusing the Cuban government of Raúl Castro of persecuting and harassing black citizens based on the colour of their skin.
As far as Morales is concerned, accusations like these reflect a lack of awareness of the reality on the ground in Cuba, and "are trumped up as part of the same campaigns that US governments have always waged against the Cuban revolution".
"We talk about racism and say that we need to perfect guarantees of civil and democratic rights, but not only for blacks in Cuba—for society as whole. This is a struggle in which our allies include the country's highest political leadership," he says in this interview with IPS.
Question: Why has the Cuban revolution's social model not succeeded in eliminating the disadvantages faced by the black population?
Esteban Morales: Despite the radical nature of the process that got underway in 1959, the country's social policies failed to take skin colour into account. In terms of social policy, after the triumph of the revolution, all poor people were treated equally, without differentiating between whites and blacks. But this was something that needed to be done, because the colour of one's skin in Cuba is a significant variable in social differences.
White people came to Cuba by their own free will, as colonisers, with goals that they very often achieved. Black people were brought here by force and turned into slaves. These are very different starting points that cannot be forgotten or ignored, and that continue to have an impact today.
Despite the fact that everyone's living standards improved and black Cubans achieved a more favourable position over the last half century, the profound differences did not disappear entirely. During the special period [the economic crisis of the 1990s, following the collapse of the East European socialist bloc], we realised that those who were hit hardest by the crisis were in fact black Cubans, who had fewer possibilities of forging a livelihood.
Even in Cuba today, being poor and white is not the same as being poor and black.
And yet the Cuban government declared in 1962 that the problem of racism had been overcome.
That was a mistake, caused by idealism and wilfulness, and the pressures of political circumstances in those years. From that time on, there was a long period of silence on the subject, since talking about racial differences was seen as playing into the hands of the enemy. Anyone who insisted on bringing up the subject was considered racist and divisive.
The issue of racism re-emerged during the special period, and with the kind of virulence you would expect from a problem that was supposed to have been solved, but actually wasn't.
On more than one occasion you have said that in this country, people are educated "to be white". Do you think it would be fair to view this kind of contradiction as a form of "institutionalised" racism?
It is a certain kind of institutionalised racism, but not as a result of specific directives, or a conscious decision. It is more a result of flaws and errors in the educational process, in the teaching of history, in the racial representations in our books. It is a result of failing to address in the schools, in depth, the consequences of slavery, which are still felt today.
The problem is not with the institution of education, but rather with aspects and problems of social life, with dysfunctionalities and imperfections in our society. In Cuba there is still a lack of racial awareness. For whites, it isn't important because they have always been in power. But blacks need racial awareness in order to fight against racism and fight for their place in society.
Racial discrimination is a phenomenon that persists in people's minds, in the family, in personal relationships, sometimes in institutionalised groups, and this is something that cannot be easily resolved.
How would you propose to solve these shortcomings in the field of education?
The only way to remedy this is through strict vigilance to guarantee equal opportunities for all in employment, and especially in the new economy - in other words, in tourism and joint ventures with foreign capital - as well as in education, along with major cultural work.
Education should really not be biased towards any colour, but what is happening in practice is that our schoolchildren are being educated, for the most part, to think that it is better to be white and that it is a disadvantage to be black.
We have to deal with the problems of a Western bias in our education, and expand the teaching of history to include Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while addressing racial representation in our books. We have to take the discussion of racial discrimination into the schools, so that when kids go out into the streets and hear a racist remark, they will have a basis for challenging it.
What do you propose in social terms?
"We are all equal" was also a demagogic slogan of republicanism. Equality is the goal, the aspiration, while inequality and difference are what we stumble over every day.
We have to start by recognising the inequalities that exist in our society, despite all of the efforts that have been made to eliminate them, leading almost to the brink of egalitarianism. They are a legacy, but at the same time, they are a phenomenon that can be reproduced as a result of the dysfunctionalities of our social model, which needs to be perfected.
It is only by understanding these differences in depth and working on them that we can achieve genuine equality.
Do you think a specific policy for the black population is needed?
In Cuba there is a certain kind of affirmative action policy, although we don't call it that. After researching in depth the situation of families, the problems affecting children, the disabled, different social groups, we were led in practice to adopt affirmative action measures, because this is how we were able to reach the people who have historically been the least privileged and the most vulnerable.
There are phenomena that need to be remedied and this can only be done by addressing them separately, such as housing, employment, health. In all of these efforts, it is essential to take skin colour into account. The more research that is done, the more obvious it becomes that blacks are at the bottom, people of mixed-race backgrounds are generally in the middle, and whites are at the top.
Why isn't there more in-depth discussion, including coverage in the Cuban media, about this widely recognised issue?
There is growing debate at the intellectual and community levels, and in cultural centres, but it also needs to reach government bodies, and the country's political, social and grassroots organisations. This is what we are calling for, because more than 60 per cent of Cuba's population of 11.2 million people is not white [but instead either black or of mixed race] according to our studies.
Do you think it should form part of the political agenda as well?
Of course. The fact that President Raúl Castro referred to the issue in his December 20 address to parliament seems to imply that it could be on the agenda of the upcoming 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. And if it isn't, I think it should be.
In addition, there are two commissions studying different facets of the problem: one at the National Library and another at the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC). There should also be a commission to address this issue in parliament [National Assembly].
If the National Assembly specifically addresses the questions of religion, women or youth, then why not the issue of race? I believe it is of equal importance, but it has been dealt with less than any other.
Is there a danger that this discussion could be cut short out of fear that it could create internal divisions or be manipulated to be used against the revolution?
On the contrary, what is actually being used in the campaigns of our enemies is the fact that it has taken us so long to address the issue, and failing to discuss it is what could actually divide us.
What hurts us politically, from the point of view of our image abroad and inside the country, is the fact that our official discourse is out of sync with reality, because up until very recently we claimed that there were no racially related problems in Cuba.
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No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."
If in your travels you meet the Buddha, throw him through your tv set.
—Davis Fleetwood
I've found that culture, however useful and important, is neither the foundation nor the ceiling of human experience, even if it is commonly used for walls.
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States. —Hillary Clinton
