Kevin Barrett: US ‘Aid’ Destroys Egypt’s Economy, Democracy

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

US ‘Aid’ Destroys Egypt’s Economy, Democracy

American President Obama says he deplores the Egyptian junta’s decision to massacre peaceful protesters and declare martial law.

If he deplores it so much, why is he paying for it?

It is no secret that Egyptian strongman el-Sisi and the soldiers he is sending to slaughter protesters are on the US payroll.

According to official estimates, US taxpayers give the Egyptian military 1.3 billion dollars per year in direct military aid. When various forms of indirect aid are taken into account, including money from US puppet states in the Persian Gulf, the real annual total is in the billions.

This lavish US funding has allowed Egypt’s military to balloon into a monster that controls between one-quarter and one-third of the Egyptian economy. That is why Egypt is economically moribund.

Military spending kills economies, as shown by Dr. Robert Reuschlein of RealEconomy.com. Money wasted on militaries, which are non-productive organizations, is stolen from the productive sector. In societies with large militaries, the best scientists, engineers, and other experts stop producing valuable goods and services, and spend their lives figuring out how to destroy things and kill people. And poorer people, instead of becoming productive citizens, are trained to mindlessly obey orders and kill on command. Many of them suffer severe psychological damage that renders them non-productive.

In Egypt, the military’s economic hegemony creates even more problems.

Egypt has inherited a millennia-old authoritarian bureaucratic tradition. Pharaohs, emirs, presidents-for-life, and generals serve as dictators, and their bureaucratic lackeys have the high-status, high-paying jobs. Productive people are considered mere peasants and tradesmen, inferior in status to the bureaucrats.

British colonialism, which imposed a new layer of foreign bureaucracy, worsened the problem. Bright young Egyptians were trained to believe they were owed government jobs when they graduated from college. Widespread belief that “the government owes me a high-paying non-productive job” persists in Egypt. And the military officers and their cronies are the biggest and most bloated parasites.

Continue reading “Kevin Barrett: US ‘Aid’ Destroys Egypt’s Economy, Democracy”

2013/08/192013/08/19

David Swanson: Leah Bolger on Waging Peace

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Waging Peace

By Leah Bolger, WarIsACrime.org

Pauling Lecture, Oregon State University, Power Point

Good evening. I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak with you this evening—it is such a pleasure to be here.

When I received the letter from Professor Clinton congratulating me on being nominated as the 30^th person to receive the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Lectureship for World Peace, I was stunned! After I went to the website and read the names of the 29 others who had given this lecture in years past, I became increasingly filled with a sense of honor, humility and gratitude that I had been chosen to follow in the footsteps of such notable intellectuals and activists as ***John Kenneth Galbraith, William Sloane Coffin, Noam Chomsky, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Grace Lee Boggs, not to mention the 8 Nobel Laureates: ***Linus Pauling, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Mairead Maguire, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Rigoberta Menchu, and Jody Williams. And now my name was going to be added to this prestigious list. I started feeling a strong sense of burden and responsibility to live up to the honor that had been given me. What could I possibly tell an audience that would be worthy of this lectureship? Even calling it a “lecture” gave me a sense of responsibility that I have not felt with any other speech or presentation that I have given. Although I enjoy telling people that by serving 20 years on Active Duty in the Navy, I am now able to live off of my military pension and work as a full-time volunteer peace activist, I have only been an “activist” for the past 6 years or so—a relative novice compared to so many others who have dedicated their lives to peace and justice. And so, I went very quickly from feeling elated that I had been chosen to give this lecture, to feeling a bit inadequate and unsure of what to say.

But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that perhaps I had been chosen to give this lecture precisely because I was not a big name celebrity, or a Nobel Laureate. Maybe I had been chosen because I am like so many of us—just someone who is outraged by injustice, and plugging along in the trenches, trying to exact change on the issues we believe in. Maybe I could use this opportunity to speak with you, not to “lecture” you, but perhaps to encourage and motivate you to realize the power of our potential as activists. The fact is that you don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to make a difference. The work of most activists will never be recognized outside of their own communities, but we must remember that the power of activism is about all of us contributing a little. These little contributions, when coupled with the actions of others, multiply in their power exponentially.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Leah Bolger on Waging Peace”

2013/08/19

Del Spurlock: Open Civics — Crafting Responses to Terror II

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Crafting Responses to Terror II

Current events are an essential tool for learning civics. So today we are going to stay on track with our objectives for a national service with three events of the last few days. The first event was President Obama’s speech to the Convention of the Disabled American Veterans. You can watch it on the White House website, or, you can read the major points at this Stars and Stripes article.

There is nothing objectionable in the President’s remarks. His Administration’s commitment to our soldier/veterans is demonstrably more deeply felt and resourced than that of Mr. W. Bush and Mr. Clinton. In structuring greater transition services for our veterans, his Administration approaches President Reagan’s vision and commitment, abandoned during the first Bush Administration. Nevertheless, the President’s approach amounts to little more than a hardy salute and severance for our veterans. As we have discussed, our military will be shrinking in favor of freeing the Defense budget for buying new hardware, meaning more young people will be entering a shrinking labor market to compete with departing soldiers and laid-off veterans; the long term costs of treating and sustaining our wounded veterans and their families remain unaddressed; and the military structure and the cause for which they had fought are now known by our veterans to be corrupt.

These are continuing psychological and emotional burdens that must be shouldered by our veterans throughout their lives. These are matters unaddressed by the President, as is the potential of our veterans to be valued as the precious national assets we identified last week:

Continue reading “Del Spurlock: Open Civics — Crafting Responses to Terror II”

2013/08/18

Berto Jongman: Al Jazeera on Deadly Contagions Across Arabia for Lack of Infrastructure — Could This Be Part of “The Plan”?

07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, Government, Ineptitude

Arab revolutions: Ignoring a potential catastrophe

As infrastructure deteriorates throughout the region, deadly contagions are a new cause for concern, writes scientist.

Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, is Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, President, Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and Fellow in Disease and Poverty, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Recent conflicts in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East may have sufficiently destabilised national and international public health control measures to a point where several tropical diseases have either emerged and are sickening large populations in the region.

The most dramatic example is currently happening in Syria, where cutaneous leishmaniasis, a disfiguring parasitic skin disease transmitted by sandflies and also known as “Aleppo Evil”, is now affecting tens of thousands of innocent civilians both within the country and among refugees fleeing across the border to Lebanon or Turkey. But this disease is also flourishing in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq where breakdowns in public health have allowed sandflies to breed and transmit disease.

Several mosquito-transmitted virus infections have also become important public health problems in the region. According to recent estimates 6 million cases of dengue fever occurred in Egypt in 2010 – more than 7 percent of that country’s population, while almost 14 million cases occurred that year in Pakistan. Dengue has also emerged in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen, while in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Rift valley fever has also appeared – the first time this mosquito-transmitted viral infection has been seen outside of Africa. There is concern that such viral infections could affect pilgrims entering Saudi Arabia during the Hajj this coming fall, as could the new MERS coronavirus, or the recently discovered Alkhurma hemorrhagic virus. Both viruses were first discovered in Saudi Arabia.

Read full article.

2013/08/182013/08/18

SchwartzReport: Rolling Back the Insanely Criminal Militarization of US Local Police Forces

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement

I got an email this morning from a reader who told me about a police break-in near her home which she witnessed that she described as “a dawn assault by Nazis.” One of the unintended consequences of the insane wars of Dick Cheney and the Neocons, is the dispersal of vast quantities of military supplies to American police departments so that more and more they resemble not law-enforcement but special ops. The tendency ha! s always been present. People become police because they like being armed and in authority. The positive is being a person respected for being of service to their community. But lurking beneath that, in some, is something darker. And the militarization of the police feeds that. This is a major trend in the U.S., and not a happy one.

Why Are SWAT Teams Answering Routine Police Calls?
S. E. SMITH – Truthout

Here is a reasonable approach to reversing the trend of militarizing the police. Can we muster sufficient political will amongst citizens to demand it? We'll see.

Drawing Down: How To Roll Back Police Militarization In America
RADLEY BALKO, Senior Writer and Investigative Reporter – The Huffington Post

2013/08/162013/08/16

Penguin: 4th Media on Fukushima – NIGHTMARE Gets Worse!

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

The News is Bad: The Fukushima Nightmare Gets Worse

Just when it seemed things might be under control at Fukushima, we find they are worse than ever.

Immeasurably worse.

Massive quantities of radioactive liquids are now flowing through the shattered reactor site into the Pacific Ocean. And their make-up is far more lethal than the “mere” tritium that has dominated the headlines to date.

Tepco, the owner/operator–and one of the world’s biggest and most technologically advanced electric utilities–has all but admitted it cannot control the situation. Its shoddy performance has prompted former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Dale Klein to charge: “You don’t what you are doing.”

The Japanese government is stepping in. But there is no guarantee–or even likelihood–it will do any better.

In fact, there is no certainty as to what’s causing this out-of-control flow of death and destruction.

Some 16 months after three of the six reactors exploded at the Fukushima Daichi site, nobody can offer a definitive explanation of what is happening there or how to deal with it.

Continue reading “Penguin: 4th Media on Fukushima – NIGHTMARE Gets Worse!”

2013/08/162013/08/16