Stephen Lendman

Long-time economic, political and market analyst Bob Chapman publishes the International Forecaster, offering incisive analysis absent through mainstream sources, especially important now given America's deepening economic crisis getting harder to conceal as evidence mounts.

His August 25 issue says the following:

"Twenty countries (including America) are headed into bankruptcy and more will follow. That brings up the subject of state debt in the US. America has been in an inflationary depression for 18 months. States have been cutting back for two years," but still face huge budget gaps required to be closed....2011 will be a terrible year (with) 80% of states expect(ing) deficits of more than $200 billion. 2012 looks even worse." Most worrisome, "there is no recovery and there never has been....the US economy and financial system is comatose." The worst is yet to come and will hit hard on arrival.

On August 24, economist David Rosenberg said, "Now (I'll) tell you why this is a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession," what he's been repeating for months unlike few others, corporate analysts claiming the fall 2007 downturn "ended sometime last year." Not so, it's deepened, growing evidence providing more clarity.

Offering a historical perspective, Rosenberg said the Great Depression wasn't marked by declining GDP each quarter. The 1929 - 33 recession lasted four years, followed by recovery and another "deep downturn" in 1937 - 38.

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Mizuho Aoki

"In recent years, the number of elderly who live alone buried under a mountain of garbage has surged. Some have dementia and some are physically unable to take out the garbage. It is these people who are the ones most likely to die alone."

Yoshinori Ishimi could hear a high-pitched whine coming from the apartment in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, he was about to enter. When he went inside, he saw black "mini-twister" clouds of flies.

The last tenant had been a 60-year-old divorced man whose body was not found until a month after he had died.

"Every time I encounter such scenes, I hesitate to step inside. But someone has to clean up these flats . . . and be professional about it," said Ishimi of Anshin Net, a cleaning service that is part of R-Cube Co. in Ota Ward, Tokyo.

The Nerima man's case was not unique, and such unnoticed departures are only expected to increase.

According to a report by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the number of single-person households is expected to rise from 14.46 million in 2005 to 18.24 million in 2030, or nearly 40 percent of all households.

With the growing number of single households in this graying nation, businesses specializing in dealing in what has been dubbed "lonely death" have become a fixture.

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Steven Salaita
Foreign Policy Journal

Eden Abergil displays emotional shallownes and a shocking lack of em-
pathy. This is what we find in sociopaths and people with a narcissistic
personality. Her condition would appear to be prevalent in Israeli society.

Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 400 Palestinian children. In May 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla's Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled "IDF [Israeli army] -- the best time of my life."

While Abergil's pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality -- Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt -- all three actions are intimately connected. First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil's photos are nonviolent. As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence. There is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Ritz Carlton.

More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. What is noteworthy about Israel's three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities. In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism -- that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel.

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Bouthaina Shaaban
Middle East Monitor

Prof. Bouthaina Shaaban

The noise made by the publication of photos on Facebook by Israeli soldier, Abergil Eden, showing off her being a jailer of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian civilians, shows once again that there is a new kind of Western wars against Muslim nations. These wars started when Europe waged its wars to occupy Palestine under the slogan of 'regaining the holy land' and culminated with settler colonialism waged under the slogan of returning to the 'promised land'. In an article about the subject, Dan Murphy writes, "Israeli soldier Facebook photos: Youth culture and rules of war collide" (Christian Science Monitor, 17 August 2010). In a subtitle, the article stresses that the photos violated Israeli army and international rules concerning taking photographs of prisoners.

The soldier did not seem to know what is wrong with posting these photographs; something also done by other Israeli soldiers, while international war circles found that the 'incident' highlights the difficulties faced by western armies – always in the act of aggression – in 'controlling the flow of photos and information in the age of YouTube, Wikileeks and digital cameras. This 'incident' brings to mind the scandal of publishing photos of torturing Iraqi civilians by the soldiers of 'American democracy' in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and tens of other secret prisons in which the murderers of the 'free world' practice all kinds of torture against kidnapped 'suspected' innocent people.

Wikipedia recently published thousands of documents about the acts of genocide committed by NATO forces against unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and the consequences of such acts on decisions taken by the Pentagon, the White House and the Congress. The Guardian published an op-ed entitled "Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups" (18 August 2010) about Two Israeli groups which set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to 'show the other side' over borders and culture. This means that Israel, as usual, wants to control the news about Israeli crimes of torture, assassination and oppression against Palestinian civilians so that the world finds it difficult to know about what Israel is doing in terms of ethnic cleansing, displacement, house demolishing, murder, torture and humiliating the native population. The reason is that the open information space, despite Zionist attempts to control it, has started to expose their crimes in Palestine and also expose the false official western position regarding them.

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