Chris Floyd

Barack Obama has come out swinging following his party's rout in Massachusetts, vowing to "fight Wall Street" with a "populist" proposal whose main thrust seems to be the reinstatement of some of the common-sense regulations imposed almost 80 years ago to separate banks and investment firms. (I say "seems to be," because one can only guess what, if anything, Obama really intends to do about the matter. For despite the usual elevated rhetoric, he is, as usual, "leaving crucial details to be hashed out by Congress," as the NY Times reports. And we know how populist those paladins can be when they get down to hashing out crucial details.)

Of course, those old regulations were repealed by the bipartisan free-market extremists of the Clinton Era -- many of whom are now once more in charge of national economic policy, such as Obama's main economic adviser, Larry Summers. And the fact that Obama is just now vaguely proposing such a move, a year after taking office -- and after engineering the transfer to trillions of dollars in cash, credit guarantees, bailouts and other forms of baksheesh to Wall Street -- cannot but evoke three little words that nonetheless speak volumes: horse, barn, door.

And even in the highly hypothetical likelihood that Obama was actually serious about "reining in the banks" -- that is, serious enough to actually have his staff draw up the crucial details themselves before handing the "fight" over to the banks' own bagmen in Congress -- it would be a moot point anyway, given the Supreme Court's promulgation of its Corporate Enabling Act this week. Although their ruling to remove the few existing -- and pathetic -- restraints on Big Money's domination of the electoral process is indeed bad news, one must also admire the Court's frankness in allowing this domination to step forth and stand out boldly, nakedly, no longer having to hide itself in dirty dodges and furtive tricks. (For more on the ramifications of the ruling, see this piece from Christopher Ketcham at Counterpunch.)

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Marco Villa

President Barack Obama’s President Envoy to the Middle East (and former Senator Majority Leader) George Mitchell has for months been attempting to restart peace negotiations between the occupying Israelis and the occupied Palestinians. His efforts have been blocked by an intransigent and far-right Israeli government that only recently (and belatedly and with extreme caveats) accepted that idea of a two-state solution and which has successfully resisted months of U.S. pressure to unequivocally cease all illegal settlements projects on occupied Palestinian land. With nearly a year on the job, Mitchell can claim no breakthrough, and the only thing close to a accomplishment is an Israeli commitment to “freeze” settlement construction for 10-months. But this is an empty pledge. The so-called “freeze” will not apply to occupied Arab East Jerusalem which Palestinians aspire as their future capital, and on the occupied West Bank the “freeze” will include any infrastructure Israel deems vital (schools, post offices, synagogues, ect...), a term that is so ambiguous that it can include anything construction; over 3,000 housing units in the WestBank will be allowed to continue, and at the end of the 10-month hollow grace period according to the Israeli minister minister Benny Begin colonization will resume at a rate “faster and more than before”.

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Patrick Mac Manus

Terrorlovene antaster de demokratiske rettigheder og retten til politiske aktiviteter, fastslog eksperter på onsdagens høring, som samlede 80 mennesker

Kan en lov, som er vedtaget af Folketinget være antidemokratisk?

Ja, lyder det korte, men præcise svar fra tidligere justitsminister og nuværende formand for Retssikkerhedsfonden, juraprofessor Ole Espersen.

Han var en af paneldeltagerne i onsdagens høring om terrorlovenes konsekvenser for de politiske rettigheder. Høringen var arrangeret af foreningen Oprør. Foreningens talsperson Patrick Mac Manus er anklaget for at have støttet den palæstinensiske befrielsesorganisation PFLP og colombianske FARC med i alt 100.000 kroner.

80 spørgelystne tilhørere tog imod Oprørs invitation og fyldte godt op i baghuset til Verdenskulturcentret på Nørrebro i København. I ekspertpanelet sad udover Ole Espersen også advokat Hanne Reumert og jurist Peter Vedel Kessing fra Institut for Menneskerettigheder.

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Craig Murray

I was a British Ambassador at the time of the events covered by the Iraq Inquiry. I know many of the witnesses and a great deal of the background. I can therefore see right through the smooth presentation. Jack Straw was the smoothest of all - but he told lie after lie.

Straw's biggest and most important lie goes right to the heart of the question of whether the war was legal. Did UN Security Council Resolution 1441 provide a legal basis for the invasion, or would a second resolution specifically authorising military action have been required? The UK certainly put a massive amount of diplomatic effort into obtaining a second resolution. Here is Straw's argument that the invasion was legal without a second resolution:

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Then you make a point very strongly in your statement and this has been confirmed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock that you did not believe that military action thereafter, in the event of noncompliance, would depend on a second resolution. It would be desirable but it wasn't dependent on that. We are not, today, going into the legal arguments on that. Sir Jeremy's basic contention was that he had got the Americans and British into a comparable position as before Desert Fox in December 1998. So I think that's quite important, that your understanding, at least of the position, was that it wasn't absolutely essential to have a second resolution.

RT HON JACK STRAW: I was not in any doubt about that and neither was Jeremy Greenstock, and for very good reasons, which is that there had been talk by the French and Germans of a draft which would have required a second resolution, but they never tabled it. We tabled a draft, which, as I set out in this memorandum, and which Sir Jeremy Greenstock confirms in his memorandum, was aimed to be selfcontained, in the sense that, if very important conditions were met through failures by the Saddam regime, that of itself would provide sufficient authority for military action, and no doubt the next time we will get into the wording of the resolution, which, as I say in this memorandum, I can virtually recite in my sleep, but there are reasons why in OP12 we use the language that we do, and serious consequences are mentioned in OP13 and so on. For sure, we wanted a second resolution after that and well, again, I set out

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: We will come on to that in a moment.

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43198/100121pm-straw.pdf

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Sherwood Ross

U.S. television networks have given the public a sanitized, largely bloodless view of the war in Iraq, an academic authority on communications writes.

"The contrast between what Americans saw on the news and what European and pan-Arab audiences saw is striking. Foreign news bureaus showed far more blood and gore than American stations showed. The foreign media were delivering audiences the true face of the war," writes Michelle Pulaski, an assistant professor at Pace University, New York.

"BBC Television (British Broadcasting Co.) and American stations often covered the same stories but with stark contrasts," Pulaski wrote, using the example of a "friendly fire" episode on an Iraq battlefield. "Immediately following the event, BBC television broadcast live from the scene with a detailed report of the horror including the blood-stained road, mangled vehicles, and the number of casualties. Several hours later CNN had very little to report on the event and only mentioned that a friendly fire incident had occurred, and there was no word on U.S. casualties. This example represents a trend of sanitized, relatively gore-free broadcasting that was seen throughout U.S. war coverage." -"The American people did not see the bodies of dead American soldiers, and few Iraqi casualties were aired," Pulaski added.

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