OBAMA MAY ACHIEVE DELEGATE COUNT TUESDAY

Senator was endorsed by former KKK member Senator Robert Byrd and investor Warren Buffet. Ex-Hillary Manager said to be in Talks with Obama Campaign.

Hillary asserts again, its not over yet.

ORIGINS OF THE WORD PLUNDER
FOOD STAMP USE WAY UP
THE LATEST FROM CHINA

Last night I went to see MONGOL, a film about the early life of Genghis Kahn produced by a Russian team. It was a film of great beauty and power but at the same time quite bloody, unlike our TV coverage of war that sanitizes it and substitute bs for the real pain people suffer.

At one point, after he and an army of warriors raided a village and massacred most of its defenders, there was a scene of them dividing up the spoils, which the film called “PLUNDER”—oddly the name of the new book I am finishing on the financial crisis.

The movie showed that his fairness in sharing the spoils converted many men to his side.

As Wikipedia reminds us, “He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia. After founding the Mongol Empire and being proclaimed “Genghis Khan”, he pursued an aggressive foreign policy by starting the Mongol invasions of East and Central Asia. During his life, the Mongol Empire eventually occupied most of Asia. “

For the record, I would say George Bush never knew Mr. Kahn nor was able to emulate his record of conquest.

GENOCIDE CASE IN SPAIN

MADRID (AFP) A Spanish court hearing a genocide case against seven top Chinese leaders, including former president Jiang Zemin and former prime minister Li Peng, heard testimony on Monday from three Tibetan monks.

Judge Ismael Moreno of the National Audience, Spain’s highest criminal court, questioned Palden Gyatso, Janpel Monlam and Bhagdro who spent time in prison in China for their “counter-revolutionary activities” in Tibet.

Remember: It was a Spanish Judge who first convicted Chile’s Pinochet.

MASSACRES IN KOREA: WE WERE INVOLVED!

We have all read the history of cruelty by dictators and military juntas including massacres of political opponents. Mostly, our media focuses on Stalin, Kim il Sung and Mao, although Hitler gets his comeuppance on holocaust remberance days. But here’s one report in which the United States is deeply involved and it has taken us over 60 years to find out about it.

AP: Thousands killed in 1950 by US’s Korean ally
By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG (Associated Press)

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea is investigating this and similar mass killings in South Korea in 1950-51. A chief investigator estimates up to 7,000 were killed at Daejeon, and tens of thousands elsewhere.

DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions - intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners - were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were “the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

TOLL OF DEAD AND MISSING IN CHINA NOW 70,000 (And Rising)

NEWS IN ENGLISH ABOUT CHINA FROM CHINA

WSJ: CHINA: FURY MOUNTING

WUFU, China — Seeing the rubble that until last week was the Fu Xing No. 2 Primary School here requires following a path marked by two rows of sobbing parents who stand shoulder to shoulder, holding framed pictures of their dead 10- to 13-year-old children.

Just eight of the more than 6,000 classrooms that collapsed in last week’s earthquake in China were in the white tiled primary school in Wufu.

But the school, located in the wheat-growing plains of Sichuan, is a prime example of the anger that is bubbling up over what many believe was shoddy construction that contributed to the deaths of thousands of children. The school now looks like a field of cornflakes compared with the minor damage sustained by most neighboring buildings in Wufu.

Parents here and elsewhere are blaming shoddy construction – and negligent government officials. The government has ordered a major investigation.

US PROVIDES “EYES”

WASHINGTON (AFP) The United States is providing China with satellite imagery of reservoirs, roads and bridges damaged in the earthquake that devastated southwestern Sichuan province, the Pentagon said.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is expected to provide the first of the unclassified imagery on Monday if weather permits, in what officials believed to be an unprecedented step.

“They have asked the United States for some imagery of damaged reservoirs, roads, and bridges and the National Geospatial-Intelligence agency (NGA) is providing resources to give them that type of support,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

BBC MAN COMPARES BURMA AND CHINA DISASTERS

The BBC’s Paul Danahar reported on the aftermath of the cyclone in Burma before flying to China to cover the Sichuan earthquake. Here he compares the two disasters, and the response from both governments.

It is the stench of death that distinguishes these two disasters.
It still blows across the vast flooded plains of the Irrawaddy delta.
It is not a faint smell that slowly creeps up on you. It just suddenly hits you in the face, filling your mouth and nose, smothering your senses.
And it assaults those in the delta even now, more than two weeks after the cyclone smashed into the coastline.

But in Sichuan province, in neighboring China, the air is still breathable. Death is being swept away.
Corpses are being collected and buried.
Families, where possible, are receiving the grim comfort of a body to grieve over; a ritual to mark the passing of a loved one; a point from which to try to rebuild what remains of their lives.
In Burma the bodies of many of those lost in the cyclone receive attention only from the birds.
Five days into the earthquake in China, the trucks of aid and relief supplies were too many to count.
At the same stage in Burma I counted only two.
That was during a whole day of travelling along the main highway into the delta from the former capital Rangoon.
Aid void
In Burma people sat in the wreckage of their homes.

Bloated, rotting corpses floated around the rivers and inlets. Often help was not on the way.

WEALTH AND POVERTY IN ISRAEL

Roni Ben Efrat on some facts about Israel rarely read in our press:

Israel is not a state of, by and for the Jewish people. It is rather a state of, by and for a sprinkling of families, 19 in all, whose income amounts to $70 billion—88% of the national budget.

This budget is a stumbling block to the poor. All levels of education have been devastated. On the books there is universal health care, but many can’t afford to buy medicines. Israel’s socio-economic inequality, as measured by the UN Development Program’s Gini Index (0.0 = perfect equality), has worsened steadily from 0.222 in 1982 to 0.392 in 2005, making it the most unequal of Western democracies with one exception: the United States (Gini = 0.408).

Poverty is no longer confined to the jobless. The government has lowered the unemployment rate, indeed, to 7.6%, but there is a trade-off: working people make up 37% of the nation’s poor. The country’s much vaunted economic growth is way off kilter. It is high in high-tech, which supports very few, but scarce in traditional industries and services, where most people work.

This steady impoverishment of the population has not just “happened.” It has happened because of laws and decisions that sold the country’s assets to the 19 families at bargain-basement prices, all in the name of the free market. As Weinroth said to Weitz: “Power is no longer a separate entity. Money is power. Money rules all, it flows through every hidden vein of the society.”

FRANCE ADMITS IT HAS TALKED TO HAMAS; MCCAIN TO BLAST OBAMA FOR BEING WILLING TO TALK WITH IRAN AND CUBA

Supreme Court Upholds Law Aimed at Child Pornography

The 7-2 ruling scathingly rejected contentions that a 2003 federal pornography law was so broadly written as to violate First Amendment rights.

The SWIFTBOATING HAS BEGUN

The hard right is now focusing and testing its message points and echo chamber as it prepares its ideological assault/smear campaign on Barack Obama. You know what to expect. And so does the Obama Campaign—an unending and repetitive assault implying or just asserting that he is, take your pick, a terrorist, a traitor or the devil incarnate.

Here is what one of their ads posing as a report looks and sounds like—offered not as a serious critique but rather as a negative critique that needs to be debunked.