Stephen Lendman

Cleante Calixe, 45 years old, and her 3 year old daughter survived the earth-
quake that devastated Haiti on January 12th but they lost their house in
Kafoufey when it collapsed. (minustah.org) (flickr)

Haiti remains in emergency. For growing numbers, aid is "too little, too late." It presents an enormous challenge for those who care, to "do better, in order to support the possibility of hope, the possibility of recovery, and the opportunity to build back better."

"They're pitted against an indifferent government, woefully little aid, and conditions unacceptable for anyone, including inadequate food, poor sanitation, little safe drinking water, weather-beaten makeshift shelters, too little of everything needed, no resolution of their homelessness, and the world community turning a blind eye to their plight."

Nine months after the January 12 earthquake, Haitians still have little relief. Over one and a half million left homeless continue struggling to survive, despite billions in aid raised or pledged. It's for development, predatory NGOs, not them. That's the problem, and they suffering as a result, little media attention paid to their plight.

On September 15, Los Angeles Times writer Joe Mozingo headlined, "No plan in sight for Haiti's homeless," saying:

Where to put them is contentious, reconstruction "hang(ing) on the potentially explosive issue" of who owns the land. For example, pre-quake, tenant farmers used to plant corn and sugar cane on a wealthy family's 20-acre parcel "below the city's main transmission lines of the Delmas 33 road."

"Now an estimated 25,000 people call it home," living in one of many temporary camps, poorly protected against heavy rain, severe weather or hurricanes. When security men try to evict them, they're chased off with "rocks, sticks and machetes."

"It's not like we're comfortable here," says Katlyne Camean. "Last night when it rained, I filled three buckets of water from my house. But no one is telling us where they want us to go. I don't want to go somewhere worse."

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Ellen Brown
The Web of Debt

The stock market shot up on September 13, after new banking regulations were announced called Basel III. Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief. The megabanks, propped up by generous taxpayer bailouts, would have no trouble meeting the new capital requirements, which were lower than expected and would not be fully implemented until 2019. Only the local commercial banks, the ones already struggling to meet capital requirements, would be seriously challenged by the new rules. Unfortunately, these are the banks that make most of the loans to local businesses, which do most of the hiring and producing in the real economy. The Basel III capital requirements were ostensibly designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 banking collapse, but the new rules fail to address its real cause.

Why Basel III Misses the Mark

Two years after the 2008 bailout, the economy continues to struggle with a lack of credit, the hallmark of recessions and depressions. Credit (or debt) is issued by banks and is the source of virtually all money today. When credit is not available, there is insufficient money to buy goods or pay salaries, so workers get laid off and businesses shut down, in a vicious spiral of debt and depression.

We are still trapped in that spiral today, despite massive “quantitative easing” (essentially money-printing) by the Federal Reserve. The money supply has continued to shrink in 2010 at an alarming rate. In an article in The Financial Times titled “US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard quoted Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research, who warned:

“The plunge in M3 [the largest measure of the money supply] has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly.”

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Kourosh Ziabari

Those who regularly follow the developments of Iran might have come across to the website of

"United Against Nuclear Iran", a "non-partisan, non-profit advocacy organization" that seeks to "prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons".

UANI has compiled an elaborate list of the foreign companies and firms which do business with Iran and calls on its readers and visitors to send condemnatory letters and complaints to these companies so as to persuade them to withdraw their capitals and resources from Iran and stop doing business with a country which the United States and its European allies consider to be an emerging nuclear threat in the Middle East.

Interestingly, UANI has listed each and every foreign company which is active in Iran, from the food production companies to internet service providers, medicine manufacturers, industrial conglomerates, news agencies, transportation infrastructure providers and private consortiums, and its objective is to convince these companies to put an end to their activities in Iran.

UANI runs a divestment campaign which contains pressuring foreign corporations to stop conducting business with Iran. So far, it has succeeded in pulling out General Electric, Caterpillar and Ingersoll Rand from Iran's market.

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Muzaffar Iqbal
Opinion Maker

"All that the American Muslims are able to do in this post-9/11 era is to simply live on the edge and fight for what should already be their right as citizens of a country where the rule of law is supposedly exemplary, where democracy has reached its perfection, as some people claim, where equal opportunities are supposed to be the norm. But one cannot expect this in an era of platitudes, where one incident can lead to a complete reorientation of state policies, and imaginary fears can lead the most powerful military power on earth to spend astronomical amounts of money on erecting a security apparatus that has eroded the notions of freedom and dignity."

The little stuntman from Gainesville, Florida, lived through his limelight of a few days, like the annoying fly which flutters around one’s face before its inevitable disappearance in the dustbin. America has moved on to a post-September 11, 2010 low season, although the next hype may be just around the corner.

Forgotten under the darkness of the limelight focusing on the little pastor are historical realities of American Muslims and their equally historical future. From the sea-farers of the pre-Columbus era to the hordes of African slaves, and from the largely ignored “pure-blooded” Americans to the not-so-pure emigrant community now living under anxieties of a bleak future dawning on them and their progeny in the land of their dreams, the spectrum of American Muslims spans generations just as it spans the extraordinary large range of their spiritual, emotional, psychological, social, and economic states.

Even though there are no accurate statistics of how many Muslims are present in the United States of America, the 2010 estimate of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), fixing that number at 7 million, is not unreasonable. Numbers are, however, not so important in an era when a pastor tending to a flock of less than 30 souls can grab world attention with a little stunt. What is important, however, is the future of these and new Muslims in the land of honey and flowing rivers where they live side by side with Daniel Pipes, Steven Emersons and Robert Spencers, who can always spin a tale of a growing radical Islamist Wahhabi influence in America and strike massive fears in the heart of American soul now yearning for nothing, waiting for nothing.

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Max Blumenthal & Joseph Dana
Alternet

The Wehrmacht oath reads as follows:

I swear by God this holy oath, that I want to offer unconditional obedience to the Fuhrer of the German Empire and people, Adolf Hitler, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, and be prepared as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath at any time.

And here is the oath of loyalty to the Jewish state that our interview subjects read on camera:

I swear by Hashem [the Jewish God] that I want to offer unconditional loyalty to the Jewish state of Israel, to its leaders and the commanders of its Jewish army. I am prepared as a loyal supporter of the Jewish state to risk my life for this oath at any time.

The Israeli Knesset is debating a bill proposed by David Rotem of the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu party that would require all Israeli citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state." This bill is targeted at increasing pressure on the 20 percent of Israelis who are Palestinian citizens, while forcing the ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority who reject the legitimacy of any state not based on Jewish biblical law to accept Zionism. If passed in its proposed form, citizens unwilling to take the loyalty oath would be at risk of losing citizenship.

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