John Pilger

Pentagon media propaganda: Green Beret handing a piece
of food to a child in Afghanistan.

"The Pentagon, says the Associated Press, spends $4.7 billion on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as “information dominance” and PR people are “information warriors”."

The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. “He had a choice,” said the journalist, “lethal injection or firing squad.” “Wow!” said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, teeth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac. This was followed by the war in Afghanistan presented by a correspondent sweating in a flak jacket. “Hey, it’s hot,” he said on the split screen. “Take care,” said the anchorwoman. “Coming up” was a reality show in which the camera watched a man serving solitary confinement in a prison’s “hell hole”.

The next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one of President Obama’s senior war-making officials. There was a long walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was blue and arctic cold, and windowless and featureless except for a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of authority. The last time I was in a room like this in the Pentagon a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now it is more than a million. “Stop tape!” he ordered.

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Stephen Lendman

This article updates an earlier one titled "The Struggle for Net Neutrality," accessed through THIS link.

First some background. As a candidate, Obama pledged support for "network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet." As president, he reneged across the board, including for Internet freedom and openness, Boston.com writer Joelle Tessler headlining, "FCC votes to reconsider broadband regulations," saying:

Federal regulators are "wading into a bitter policy dispute that could be tied up in Congress and the courts for years." At stake: a free, open, and affordable Internet, threatened by powerful phone and cable giants wanting to privatize and control it, have unregulated pricing power, and decide what's published at what speed or blocked.

On June 16, alternate regulatory paths were considered, including the one likely to prevail, favored by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski "to define broadband access as a telecommunications service subject to 'common carrier' obligations to treat all traffic equally."

At issue is a US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia April 2010 ruling that the agency exceeded its authority over phone and cable giants, casting doubt on the future of Net Neutrality.

On June 17, Washington Post writer Jia Lynn Yang headlined, "FCC votes to seek comment on its new legal strategy" to impose rules on Internet providers, saying:

"Currently, broadband is defined as an information service," outside FCC oversight. "Genachowski's plan is to shift (it) into the same classification as telephone service," authorizing more agency control than now, partially regulating providers, a "third way" applying some rules, not all, excluding the likelihood of universal, affordable access, the Net Neutrality gold standard, anything less called unacceptable.

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Ellen Brown

“You all are the house, you're the bookie. [Your clients] are booking their bets with you. I don't know why we need to dress it up. It's a bet.” ~ Senator Claire McCaskill, Senate Subcommittee investigating Goldman Sachs (Washington Post, April 27, 2010)

Ever since December 2008, the Federal Reserve has held short-term interest rates near zero. This was not only to try to stimulate the housing and credit markets but also to allow the federal government to increase its debt levels without increasing the interest tab picked up by the taxpayers. The total public U.S. debt increased by nearly 50% from 2006 to the end of 2009 (from about $8.5 trillion to $12.3 trillion), but the interest bill on the debt actually dropped (from $406 billion to $383 billion), because of this reduction in interest rates.

One of the dire unintended consequences of that maneuver, however, was that municipal governments across the country have been saddled with very costly bad derivatives bets. They were persuaded by their Wall Street advisers to buy municipal swaps to protect their loans against interest rates shooting up. Instead, rates proceeded to drop through the floor, a wholly unforeseeable and unnatural market condition caused by rate manipulations by the Fed. Instead of the banks bearing the losses in return for premiums paid by municipal governments, the governments have had to pay massive sums to the banks - to the point of pushing at least one county to the brink of bankruptcy (Jefferson County, Alabama).

Another unintended consequence of the plunge in interest rates has been that “savers” have been forced to become “speculators” or gamblers. When interest rates on safe corporate bonds were around 8%, a couple could aim for saving half a million dollars in their working careers and count on reaping $40,000 yearly in investment income, a sum that, along with social security, could make for a comfortable retirement. But very low interest rates on bonds have forced these once-prudent savers into the riskier and less predictable stock market, and the collapse of the stock market has forced them into even more speculative ventures in the form of derivatives, a glorified form of gambling. Pension funds, which have binding pension contracts entered into when interest was at much higher levels, need an 8% investment return to meet their commitments. In today’s market, they cannot make that sort of return without taking on higher risk, which means taking major losses when the risks materialize.

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David Walsh

The visit by MSNBC news program host Rachel Maddow to Afghanistan in early July was as revealing as it was repugnant. Maddow is a principal voice of the liberal-left in the American media mainstream. When her program first aired in September 2008, the press made much of the fact that the she was the first “openly gay anchor” to host a prime-time news program in the US.

Maddow spent several days in Afghanistan this month, interviewing American officers and soldiers, touring Kandahar and Kabul, discussing counter-insurgency strategy and the overall state of the US military occupation. Whatever misgivings she might have about the ultimate fate of the American and allied effort in Afghanistan, Maddow solidarized herself fully with the occupation and the US military, endorsing the bloody suppression of the insurgency.

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, there were those in the US and elsewhere who were deceived into thinking that the American invasion of Afghanistan had something to do with bringing terrorists and their Taliban sponsors to justice. Nine years of the conflict—with the location and fate of Osama bin Laden largely dropped and the number of Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan calculated, by US officials, to be between 50 and 100—have clarified the issues.

The US ruling elite seized on the 9/11 attacks and, in the name of the “war on terror,” stepped up its drive for global domination. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan never had anything to do with democracy, freeing the Afghan people from oppression, or safeguarding the US population from future terrorist attacks.

The massive military operation has everything to do with the vast energy reserves in the Caspian Sea region, oil pipeline routes, and the general determination of the US ruling elite to implant itself in the strategically critical Central Asian region, both in its own interests and to thwart those of its rivals in Europe, Russia, China and elsewhere.

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Alejandro Nadal
Translated by Supriyo Chatterjee

The Indian economy has maintained high levels of growth for several years and for many is an example worth following. It is even said that the experience of the subcontinent shows that neo-liberalism can certainly function. The reality is otherwise. The evolution of the Indian economy is a pathological process that feeds off social inequality and environmental destruction.

India maintained a modest growth after independence in 1947. The industrialisation project sustained a limited but stable expansion (4 per cent) from 1950 to 1980. Per capita income grew an annual average of 1.3 per cent in that period. The commercial balance was in permanent deficit and the economy was closed to commercial and capital flow.

The world debt crisis of the Eighties tied India to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and in the Nineties neo-liberal cuts were imposed, which represented a radical turn in the political economy. In the past 10 years, India has had on average an annual growth of 6.8 percent. The international press has presented this as an economic miracle. In these years inequality and poverty has worsened in India. Today, 42 per cent of the total population of that country (1,173 million) live on less that one dollar a day. Some 75 per cent of the population live on two dollars a day and the economic model is not going to overturn such an unequal structure.

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