It is very moving and impressive to watch tens of thousands of Pakistanis singing harmoniously in support of deposed President Imran Kahn Saturday night, whilst holding torches. The Pakistanis are not dupes. Similar protests occurred all over Pakistan.
On the most recent hourly Iranian PressTV news bulletin, it was reported that a Pakistani supreme court has ruled as unconstitutional Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's order to dissolve parliament and call new elections.
Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan will remain in office after the no-confidence motion to be voted on today was rejected.
This song is sung in Bengali, which is a language from Bangladesh. It was a theme song for World Population Day 2013. I liked the tune and found the singers appealing. I wondered what the words were and obtained a translation through a friend in India. See inside.
"We are in adolesence and early marriage leads to death during pregnancy and child birth.
Now is the time to lead a happy and care free life
My life belongs only to me and I have to take care of my education and also protect my dreams and fulfill them.
People may say many things but I don't mind.. I have my independent goals...
I have to fly like a free bird in the sky"
(Repeat)
A political analyst says the West is hypocritically recruiting the same thugs it supposedly waged the bloody and costly ‘war on terror’ against a decade ago, to topple the Syrian government today.
Originally published on PressTV on 20 August
by Finian Cunningham
A political analyst says the West is hypocritically recruiting the same thugs it supposedly waged the bloody and costly ‘war on terror’ against a decade ago, to topple the Syrian government today.
“In asserting their geopolitical objective over Syria, the Western governments are openly deploying terrorists and killers who supposedly were the reason why Western governments spent trillions of dollars fighting foreign wars, invading and occupying sovereign countries, destroying millions of innocent lives, incarcerating and torturing thousands, and turning over democratic societies into draconian police states,” Finian Cunningham wrote in an article on Press TV website.
Cunningham said the reports and videos showing the Western-backed mercenaries of the so-called Free Syrian Army bolstered by al-Qaeda brigades and other terrorists have been greeted with “barely veiled glee” in Washington and the European capitals.
“The ‘terror’ that Washington and other Western governments have promoted as the defining existential threat to democratic civilization over the past 10 years, has suddenly and seamlessly morphed into ‘war with terror’ when it comes to Syria.”
However, Cunningham said, for “those with eyes,” the mask of Western pretence at defending international law and human rights, has now been ripped off.
“The face revealed is a grotesque, salivating monster, whose motives are evidently selfish elite power and domination in the strategic Middle East region. And this objective is to be achieved by any means necessary -- foremost by the collusion with bloodthirsty killers.”
In the 1980s, the United States assisted the so-called Mujahedeen militants in Afghanistan to fight the forces of the former Soviet Union. The al-Qaeda later emerged from the same group that had years earlier received US weapons and training.
Just over a decade later, the US attacked Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime, which it accused of harboring al-Qaeda.
Political observers say the US favors the presence of al-Qaeda militants and other extremists in Syria to help the country’s armed insurgents overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
According to chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Rogers, as many as a quarter of the many insurgent groups in Syria see themselves as al-Qaeda offshoots.
Cunningham said the current situation in Syria reveals “a descent into barbarism and an open embrace of international lawlessness” by the same governments that appoint themselves to lecture the rest of the world on the principles of democracy and human rights.
“Forget the fancy titles, manners and clothes - ongoing violence in Syria shows that the foreign policy of these [Western] powers is being conducted by terrorists and thugs in high offices.”
HMV/PKH/SS
Madeline Weld wrote,
"The population was 60 M when I was there in the 1960s (my dad was a diplomat), 180 M now and headed for 335 M by 2050. Two-thirds of the country is less than 30 years old, fewer than 30 million of 70 million kids between 5 and 19 in school, and a female illiteracy rate of 60% (male 32%), desired family size 4.1, 22% of married women use birth control and only half of the non-users would like to use it in the future."
Would you give money to a drunken panhandler or a drug addict? Would you continue to feed a man who has sired 6 kids despite having no means to support them? Is open-ended charity a virtue---or a vice?
If your object is to actually solve the problem of poverty, then you must focus on the consequences of your charity. But if your object is to perpetuate and worsen the problem and inflict misery and hunger upon the next generation in even greater proportions, then by all means, wear a blindfold and keep on giving. Keep giving to Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Phillipines, Haiti and Central Africa. Follow Sir Bob Geldoff's example and feed a young generation of potential people-breeders in the mid 1980s and then see Ethiopia double its population in 25 years with three times as many people stalked by hunger now as then. After all, this is really about White Guilt and salving a Christian conscience, isn't it? It is not about addressing root causes but feeling good about yourself. If you may not get a knighthood out of it, but maybe you'll collect enough brownie points with the Big Guy in the Sky. That way, you can sit back into your 4 bedroom home with its two car garage and feel that you have paid your dues. Congratulations, you are a Good Person. You are off the hook.
Moral of the story? I can live a middle class lifestyle with all of its entitlements- the two kids, the Mexican vacations, the cottage in the country--as long as I have paid my indulgence and been granted dispensation for my charitable donations and cosmetic green living habits, habits that don't represent any real sacrifice or challenge to my middle class station. Lenin said it more than a century ago. Philanthropy is just a cheap ticket to heavenly bliss for the bourgeoisie, a class that will never threaten to undermine its privilege with fundamental structural change to society. Bill Gates has challenged the world's billioniares to match his ambition and donate half their wealth to charity. A bold and magnaminous gesture to be sure. Now, let's see him challenge billionaires to give up the system of economic growth that allowed them to generate that wealth at the cost of our life support system and the well-being of so many who cling to it. Don't hold your breath. Charity is a small premium to pay to keep us in the cockpit. So let's keep our guilt-trip alive. Ready? Now repeat after me:
" We're white and we're guilty. We're the irresponsible consumers on a oil-fueled binge who have imposed climate change on the hapless billions who must survive on $2 a day.We're the junior partners of global corporations who have fattened our portfolios with the dividends and profits made from their despoilation of the developing world. One quarter of the world's natural capital has been liquidated with little recompense to those who live at the scene of the crime. Most of the wealth has flowed north. Yep, we're guilty as hell." Alternatively, "Here in Canada, where charity is bred in our bone, we must set those optics aside, give as best we can, and therefore provide the Taliban and al-Qaida no room to take credit."
But throwing money at the symptoms of overpopulation---mass starvation and displacement---will not cure it but promote it. And neither will opening our borders to what can only be a fraction of those affected. There is not a shortage of food, water and housing but as Garrett Hardin would say, a longage of people. Few ever ask, "Why have so many people chosen to live on a flood plain?" And even fewer people ask, "Why is there no room to live elsewhere?". If making foreign aid conditional on family planning is playing God, is not growing misery by unconditional aid not also playing God---but on a much more grandiose and egregious scale?
Overpopulation is one problem that where, ultimately, the ball is their court as well as ours. There is enough guilt and irresponisbility to go around, and it is high time that those who are breeding themselves into an even deeper hole shared a slice of it. Habitat destruction, deforestation, poaching, pollution from cook-stoves and the reckless fecundity that drives much of it--- is not all down to us and our corporate proxies. In its quest for a subsistence, humanity's bottom billion has accounted for much environmental damage, even enough perhaps to offset our sins of emission. If they are to free themselves of this vicious downward cycle, it is imperative that they take charge of their numbers----and it is imperative that they not be encouraged to avoid doing so.
As they say in the Self-Help business, to be helped, you must first be willing to help yourself. Birth control begins at home. Need help in that? Then my wallet's open.
Tim Murray
This article by Paul Craig Roberts was originally published as "Astonishing Incongruities - Is It Time to Bail Out of the US?" on 28 Jan 09 by Information Clearing House.
January 28, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California's bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.
Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
California is often identified as the world's eighth largest economy, and it is broke.
A person might think that California's plight would introduce some realism into Washington, DC, but it has not. President Obama is taking steps to intensify the war in Afghanistan and, perhaps, to expand it to Pakistan.
Obama has retained the Republican warmongers in the Pentagon, and the US continues to illegally bomb Pakistan and to murder its civilians. At the World Economic Forum at Davos this week, Pakistan's prime minister, Y. R. Gilani, said that the American attacks on Pakistan are counterproductive and done without Pakistan's permission. In an interview with CNN, Gilani said: "I want to put on record that we do not have any agreement between the government of the United States and the government of Pakistan."
How long before Washington will be printing money?
On January 28 Obama announced his $825 billion bailout plan. This comes on top of President Bush's $700 billion bailout of just a few months ago.
Obama says his plan will be more transparent than Bush's and will do more good for the economy.
As large as the bailouts are--a total of $1.5 trillion in four months--the amount is small in relation to the reported size of troubled assets that are in the tens of trillions of dollars. How do we know that by June there won't be another bailout, say $950 billion?
Where will the money come from?
Obama's bailout plan, added to the FY 2009 budget deficit he has inherited from Bush, opens a gaping expenditure hole of about $3 trillion.
Who is going to purchase $3 trillion of US Treasury bonds?
Not the US consumer. The consumer is out of work and out of money. Private sector credit market debt is 174% of GDP. The personal savings rate is 2 percent. Ten percent of households are in foreclosure or arrears. Household debt-service ratio is at an all-time high. Household net worth has declined at a record rate. Housing inventories are at record highs.
Not America's foreign creditors. At best, the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis can recycle their trade surpluses with the US into Treasury bonds, but the combined surplus does not approach the size of the US budget deficit.
Perhaps another drop in the stock market will drive Americans' remaining wealth into "safe" US Treasury bonds.
If not, there's only the printing press.
The printing press would turn a deflationary depression into an inflationary depression. Unemployment combined with rising prices would be a killer.
Inflation would kill the dollar as well, leaving the US unable to pay for its imports.
All the Obama regime sees is a "credit problem." But the crisis goes far beyond banks' bad investments. The United States is busted. Many of the state governments are busted. Homeowners are busted. Consumers are busted. Jobs are busted. Companies are busted.
And Obama thinks he has the money to fight wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Except for the superrich and those banksters and CEOs who stole wealth from investors and shareholders, Americans have suffered enormous losses in wealth and income.
The stock market decline has destroyed about 45% of their IRAs, 401Ks, and other equity investments. On top of this comes the decline in home prices, lost jobs and health care, lost customers. The realized gains in mutual funds and investment partnerships, on which Americans paid taxes, have been wiped out.
The government should give those taxes back.
Americans who have seen their retirement savings devastated by complicity of government regulators and lawmakers with financial gangsters should not have to pay
any income tax when they draw on their pensions.
The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington "protected" us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the US economy collapsed.
The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington "protected" us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the US economy collapsed.
How can President Obama even think about fighting wars half way around the world while California cannot pay its bills, while Americans are being turned out of their homes, while, as Business Week reports, retirees will work throughout their retirement (which assumes that there will be jobs), while careers are being destroyed and stores and factories shuttered.
Americans are facing tremendous unemployment and hardship. Obama doesn't have another dollar to spend on Bush's wars.
Taxpayers are busted. They cannot stand another day of being milked by the military-security complex. The US government is paying private mercenaries more by the day than the monthly checks it is providing to Social Security retirees.
This is insanity.
The banksters robbed us twice. First it was our home and stock values. Then the government rewarded the banksters for their misdeeds by bailing out the banksters, not their victims, and putting the cost on the taxpayers' books.
The banksters robbed us twice. First it was our home and stock values. Then the government rewarded the banksters for their misdeeds by bailing out the banksters, not their victims, and putting the cost on the taxpayers' books.
The government has also robbed the taxpayers of $3 trillion dollars to fight its wars. About $600 billion are out of pocket costs, and the rest is on the taxpayers' books.
When foreign creditors look at the debt piled on the taxpayers' books, they don't see a good credit risk.
Washington is so accustomed to ripping off the taxpayers for the benefit of special interests that the practice is now in the DNA. While bailouts are being piled upon bailouts, wars are being piled upon wars.
Before Obama gets in any deeper, he must ask his economic team where the money is coming from. When he finds out, he needs to tell the rest of us.
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