Afghans say poverty, not Taliban, main cause of war
Jonathon Burch – Wed Nov 18
“ Half our people have been driven mad–always in fear.”
KABUL (Reuters) – Most Afghans see not Taliban militants but poverty, unemployment and government corruption as the main causes of war in their country, according to a report by a leading aid group released on Wednesday.
After three decades of war, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. It is also one of the most corrupt. Unemployment stands at 40 percent and more than half the country live below the poverty line.
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Retired military officers cash in as well-paid consultants
WASHINGTON — Six months after Marine Lt. Gen. Gary McKissock retired in 2002, he did what many other ex-military leaders do: He joined the board of directors of a defense contractor, a company doing business with his former service.
McKissock also had a second job. The Marines brought him back as an adviser, at double the rate of pay he made on active duty. Since 2005, the Marines have awarded McKissock contracts worth $1.2 million, in addition to his military pension of about $119,000 a year. McKissock is one of at least 158 retired admirals and generals the Pentagon has hired to offer advice under an unusual arrangement.
What would be the consequences of a second Islamic Emirate? My scenarios here are intended analytically, as a first-draft straw-man forecast:
The Nineties Afghan Civil War on Steroids
Momentum for a Taliban Revolution in Pakistan
Increased Islamist Violence Against India, Increasing the Likelihood of Indo-Pakistani War
Increased Al Qaeda Ambitions Against Britain and the United States
Phi Beta Iota: This is a classic status quo “Empire as Usua”l question. It is not only the wrong question, trying to answer it perpetuates the insanity that begot the problem in the first place. Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, is a very smart, very well-connected mandarin with The Washington Post as his home base. The question that We the People should be forcing the White House and Congress to answer is this:
What If We Stop Spending $1.3 Trillion a Year on War, and Instead
Spend At Least a Third of That on Peace?
We never ask a question we cannot answer. The answer is clear-cut: we create a prosperous world at peace.See the two graphics below the fold.
The Subprime Crisis and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11 2001_2612
The time has come for the public to do its own intelligence on treason and fraud. This second part of the report names many names, including Henry Kissinger. The two reports together, in our judgment, amply justify a public demand for a Grand Jury to indict all named individuals.
From a Source in Moscow (First Two Paragraphs Only)
Russian trade ministry officials are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that China is preparing to plunge the United States and European Union into the “dustbin of history” as major World economic powers over their, the West’s, deliberate collapsing of the present Global economic system in order to install their long sought after New World Order.
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China’s intent to carry out on their threat, these reports say, began this past week when, as perhaps best stated by one American financial analyst, China told the West to go “straight to hell” when the Chinese stated they would deliberately default on Trillions-of dollars in US backed debt security instruments called OTC because they were fraudulently created by Western bankers and as such are now considered an “act of war”.
Phi Beta Iota: a 59 page memorandum is rocketing around the Internet, entitled Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. Read the report, which includes very specific details and charts with head and shoulder photos. This material is substantiated not just by the sources cited in the endnotes, but by many other sources such as those reviewed at 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (23) and (indirectly) at Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback (145).
Obama's policies are making Democrats the party of Bloated Plutocracy.
November 8, 2009 OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
Frank Rich
The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it.
The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.
