HUNGER NOW AN EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA, PALESTINE CONSIDERS A UDI, SCARY FLU IN UKRAINE

November 16th, 2009 - by: danny

GUTSY OR PROVOCATIVE? OBAMA DOES RAISE HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA

AP reports: “BEIJING — President Barack Obama is pushing China on human rights, telling President Hu Jintao the U.S. believes all men and woman have “certain fundamental rights.”

Obama met with his counterpart during two meetings Tuesday and pushed for improved treatment of Chinese ethnic and religious minorities. Obama said they agreed to continue the discussion in a session scheduled for early next year.”

BBC: China has tried to neutralise US President Barack Obama’s attempt to speak directly to ordinary Chinese people. Officials have used their control of the media to make sure citizens receive only a censored version of the US president’s comments.

NC: THE TENSION IN US-CHINA RELATIONS: SHOULD AMERICA KOWTOW?

“China’s top banking regulator issued a sharp critique of U.S. financial management only hours before President Barack Obama commenced his first visit to the Asian giant, highlighting economic and trade tensions that threaten to overshadow the trip.”

According to Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, a weak U.S. dollar and low U.S. interest rates had led to “massive speculation” that was inflating asset bubbles around the world. It has created “unavoidable risks for the recovery of the global economy, especially emerging economies,” Mr. Liu said. The situation is “seriously impacting global asset prices and encouraging speculation in stock and property markets.”

Well, “them’s fightin’ words”, as we say over here. And of course, the President and his advisors are supposed to accept this criticism mildly because in the words of the NY Times, the US has assumed “the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.”

The Times actually does believe this to be true. They refer to China’s role as America’s largest “creditor” as a “stark fact”. They do not seem to understand that simply because a country issuing debt which it creates, it does not depend on bond holders to “fund” anything. Bonds are simply a savings alternative to cash offered by the monetary authorities, as we shall seek to illustrate below.

It is less clear to us whether the Chinese actually believe this guff, or simply articulate it for public consumption. China has made a choice: for a variety of reasons, it has adopted an export-oriented growth strategy, and largely achieved this through closely managing its currency, the remnimbi, against the dollar.

FT: LITTLE PROGRESS: The US and China pledged to intensify co-operation on the economy, climate change and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons after several hours of talks on Tuesday between Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao, but little concrete progress was made on the issues that divide them

OBAMA’S CHOICE
HUNGER PERVASIVE IN AMERICA
WHAT CAN THE UN DO ABOUT PALESTINIAN SELF-DETERMINATION?

And so a friend calls and ask what he should say to those who insist the financial crisis all over because the market is up and the stats seem positive?

For starters, pass on this story–a product of the growing gap in America between the 1% doing well and the rest of us.

Report: More Americans going hungry

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a new report released Monday.

THE CHOICE: WILLIAM RIVERS PITT ON TRUTHOUT ON OBAMA’S DECISION TO ESCALATE OR NOT

His essay begins with this quote from Rudyard Kipling: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

Chris Hedges, ICH: Opium, Rape and the American Way

The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terro r and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.

“We need to tear the mask off of the fundamentalist warlords who after the tragedy of 9/11 replaced the Taliban,” Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament two years ago for denouncing government corruption and the Western occupation, told me during her visit to New York last week. “They used the mask of democracy to take power. They continue this deception. These warlords are mentally the same as the Taliban. The only change is physical. These warlords during the civil war in Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 killed 65,000 innocent people. They have committed human rights violations, like the Taliban, against women and many others.”

JUAN COLE: PALESTINIANS CONSIDERING UNILATERAL INDEPENDENCE

European Jews were made stateless by Nazi decree… Palestinians made stateless by Israeli occupation
Juan Cole – Informed Comment

“The Palestinian leadership is making medium-term preparations to go to the United Nations to ask for a declaration of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.”

[SNIP]

“The Palestinians are the most oppressed people in the world. There are other peoples who feel that they have the wrong citizenship and would like to secede, but at least they have a government and rights within that government’s framework. They have someone to give them a passport, which Palestinians do not. There are other peoples that are in conflict and being killed in fair numbers. A not insignificant number of Palestinians has been killed by the Israelis, whether through often indiscriminate and disproportionate violence or through food and services blockades (a lot of Gazan children are stunted owing to the bad nutrition caused by the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an illegal collective punishment of noncombatants,including children.) But of course there are other groups that are killed in larger numbers. But I would argue that the psychological toll taken by the imposition of statelessness on a people is more debilitating than the knowledge that some of the group has been killed by oppressors.”

JAKE LYNCH, Sydney: The same dreary old pattern prevails: the UN General Assembly votes to refer the Goldstone Report on war crimes in Gaza to the Security Council, but the US leads its allies — including Australia — into the minority ‘no’ lobby, presaging a veto and Israel’s familiar get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to violations of international law.

Even Mahmoud Abbas has had enough: Hillary Clinton’s desperation to praise Israeli undertakings on settlements — meaningless as they were — apparently convinced this most patient of leaders that waiting any longer, for US-brokered mediation to deliver justice for the Palestinians, was futile.

There is another possibility, that the UN General Assembly itself could seize the initiative, with the famous Uniting for Peace resolution, devised with the explicit aim of taking responsibility for international peace and security when vetoes by members of the ‘Permanent 5′ thwart the will of the international community, as here.

And change is in the air, post-Abbas: a prospect encapsulated in the warning issued by the imprisoned leader, Marwan Barghouti — now being talked up as a candidate for the succession — at his trial in 2003: if an independent Palestinian state cannot be established on the borders of 1967, there will have to be “one state for two peoples” instead.

And that would drain any remaining legitimacy from the institutionalisation of Jewish supremacy.

Should Palestine Declare Itself a State?

By Max Fisher

“It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States.”

Akiva Eldar, ICH: Would Israel Accept A State-and-a-half Solution?

Netanyahu wants to meet with the Palestinian leader and is worried that Abbas will retire and go home. For 16 years, the soft murmur of the “peace process” that has been leading nowhere has drowned out the roar of the bulldozers that are deepening the occupation. What will the Israeli government do if the day after Abbas resigns the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah decides to disperse and dissolve the Palestinian Authority?

ICH BIN EIN BIL’INER” Bil’in Remembers Berlin

On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, two hundred internationals traveled from the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Belgium to join the weekly peaceful demonstration in Bil’in against Israel’s wall.

WATCH, REAL NEWS: Gideon Levy, Israel in Coma: addicted to Occupation

THAT EPIDEMIC IN THE UKRAINE: MORE ON THE MYSTERY

Ukraine Flu Outbreak: Virus Is a Mixture of H1N1 and Parainfluenza, Causes Cardiopulmonary Failure
Interview with Dr. Victor Bachinsky

SUPREME COURT TO NATIVE AMERICANS: DON’T BOTHER US: Supreme Court declines to take Redskins’ naming case

Native American activists had claimed that team’s nickname is so offensive that it does not deserve trademark protection.

Republicans heading for a bloodbath in Florida [and beyond]

The News Dissector