Stephen Lendman

This is the latest update since Haiti's cholera outbreak, previous articles accessed through the following links, including the most recent on Sunday's sham election, an exercise in imperial control: here, here, here, here and here

On November 24, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres - MSF) reported it continues increasing its efforts in response to Haiti's deepening crisis.

From October 22 to November 21, MSF teams treated 29,000 people in cholera treatment centers (CTCs), established in Port-au-Prince, Artibonite region (where the first outbreak occurred), North, and Northwest with a 2% or less case fatality rate.

A remarkable record showing that cholera is easily treated when done effectively in time. Otherwise, it's fatal, a major problem for growing numbers unable to access care, including because of heavy rain in some areas turning roads to mud.

On November 24, Al Jazeera headlined "UN revises Haiti cholera estimates," saying:

Officials say it's "spreading faster than originally estimated and could infect hundreds of thousands." A new World Health Organization (WHO) assessment estimates 200,000 cases in three months, 400,000 in a year. All 10 provinces are affected.

The UN's Haiti humanitarian coordinator, Nigel Fisher, expects

"literally hundreds of thousands of cases. The medical specialists all say that this cholera epidemic will continue through months and maybe a year at least...."

On November 25, Haiti Libre reported 27,933 confirmed cases, 1,523 official deaths, and too little capacity to handle growing needs, saying:

"The situation in Haiti is urgent and will get worse and worse in the coming weeks." In total, 36 CTCs operate with a 2,830 bed capacity, far below what's needed. The areas (departments) most affected are Artibonite, North, Northwest, West (including Port-au-Prince), and Northeast. Daily, dozens more cases are reported.

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Stephen Lendman

On November 23, Washington Post writers Jon Cohen and Ashley Halsey III headlined, "Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners," according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, even though "half of those polled say enhanced pat-down searches go too far."

A new Zogby (11/19 - 22) poll disagreed, saying:

At 61% opposed, "(i)t's clear (most) Americans are not happy with TSA and their enhanced security measures recently enacted. The airlines should not be happy with 48% of their frequent fliers seeking a different mode of transportation due to these enhancements."

Neither should passengers facing molestation and harm to their health. More on that below.

Calling enhanced screening a "virtual strip search," the ACLU also objected, saying:

"We need to act wisely. That means not trading away our privacy for ineffective (and overly intrusive) policies. Ultimately, it is up to the American people to figure out just how much privacy they want to abandon....The ACLU represents those who value privacy in this debate."

AP reported it already received over 600 complaints, passengers saying

"they were subjected to humiliating pat-downs at US airports, and the pace is accelerating, according to ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese."

He added:

"It really drives home how invasive it is and (harassing) they are....All of us have a right to travel without such crude invasions of our privacy....You shouldn't have to check your rights when you check your luggage."

Public outrage also makes headlines, passengers complaining about intrusive screening, especially being groped. The more often they fly and endure it, the louder perhaps disapproval will grow, especially for techniques some critics call ineffective.

Reports also call them heavy-handed. A Michigan bladder cancer survivor, wearing a body bag to collect urine, said its contents spilled on his clothing after a Detroit airport security agent patted him down aggressively. He called the experience "absolutely humiliat(ing). I couldn't even speak." Other accounts are also unsettling, and for what!

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Laurie Penny
New Statesman

"I didn't understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armed cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall."

It's the coldest day of the year, and I've just spent seven hours being kettled in Westminster. That sounds jolly, doesn't it? It sounds a bit like I went and had a lovely cup of tea with the Queen, rather than being trapped into a freezing pen of frightened teenagers and watching armed police kidney-punching children, six months into a government that ran an election campaign on a platform of fairness. So before we go any further, let's remind ourselves precisely what kettling is, and what it's for.

Take a protest, one whose premise is uncomfortable for the administration - say, yesterday's protest, with thousands of teenagers from all over London walking out of lessons and marching spontaneously on Westminster to voice their anger at government cuts to education funding which will prevent thousands from attending college and university. Toss in hundreds of police officers with riot shields, batons, dogs, armoured horses and meat wagons, then block the protesters into an area of open space with no toilets, food or shelter, for hours. If anyone tries to leave, shout at them and hit them with sticks. It doesn't sound like much, but it's effective.

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Hobbes
Scragged.com

"After nearly a decade, the TSA has yet to catch one single terrorist using any of their airport inspections - all the terrorists who've been caught, have been caught by intelligence agencies using surveillance and counterintelligence techniques, not goons with gloves and wands."

Are we a free people or are we not?

The recently-escalated battle between the American people and the TSA is far more important than it first appears. The final outcome of this argument will determine whether we still live in a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people", or whether we have become a soft tyranny where our democratic forms of elections and representatives have been reduced to a meaningless veneer as in the old Soviet Union or Red China.

The Consent of the Governed

If America has a single founding principle, it is this: no government has any authority to take any action without the consent of the governed. Our Founding Fathers did not object to the principle of paying taxes per se; they objected strongly to the idea of being forced to pay taxes to a government where they had no input. Freedom's cry was not "No taxation" then, and it isn't now; it was "No taxation without representation." The same goes for any other intrusive regulation.

The concept of "the consent of the governed" means more than just voting, however. A hundred years ago, Prohibition was enacted scrupulously according to democratic forms: Congress and then the required number of states passed a constitutional amendment allowing it, and then Congress and the President passed the Volstead Act enforcing it.

However, events quickly revealed that Prohibition did not have the consent of the governed, or at least a very sizable minority of them: whole sectors of American society insisted on having their booze no matter what the law said. The end result was vast wealth poured into crime syndicates; eventually Prohibition was repealed with the nation much the worse off for the experience.

There are many laws on the books today which do not really have the consent of the governed, but the government enforces them with a light touch so as not to provoke a backlash. Consider speed limits: almost everybody speeds, and the police almost never ticket people for going just a hair over. You usually have to be speeding by a good bit, and even then, getting caught is relatively rare. If the police seriously tried to ticket every single speeder, voters would demand that the limits be changed. -Or so we've always assumed - after all, government ultimately answers to the people, doesn't it?

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

"The ruling establishment and its military have no intention of leaving Afghanistan. They are determined to continue their bloody efforts to annihilate the Afghan resistance in order to secure Washington’s control of the country and further US designs on establishing hegemony in the oil-rich and strategically vital region of Central Asia."

Violence has reached record levels in Afghanistan, and the resistance to the US-led occupation is more widespread than ever, according to a report issued by the Pentagon.

The semiannual report, required by Congress, provides a grim assessment of the US war, now in its tenth year, giving the lie to rosy public statements issued by the Obama administration and senior military commanders.

The report, released this week, is titled, “Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” but its contents suggest that in doubling the number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan since taking office, President Barack Obama has only created a deeper quagmire for the US military.

With nearly 100,000 American soldiers and Marines and another 50,000 other NATO and foreign troops participating in the occupation, the report found that security conditions in 124 districts viewed by NATO as “key terrain” remained “relatively unchanged.”

The report states, “Progress across the country remains uneven, with modest gains in security, governance and development in operational priority areas.” It described progress as “slow and incremental.”

What has changed sharply, however, is the number of Afghans dying and the level of violence, which has risen in tandem with the increase in the number of foreign troops deployed in the country.

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Tom Eley
WSWS

US corporations took in $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, breaking records going back 60 years, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. It was the seventh consecutive quarter of profit growth at “some of the fastest rates in history” according to the New York Times.

If any more proof were needed, the third quarter profit record exposes the lie promoted by Democrats and Republicans alike that only the “free market” and private businesses can reverse the nation’s 9.6 percent unemployment rate. The corporations and banks are sitting on a cash horde in the trillions of dollars. This money is not being used to hire workers, but to line the pockets of the executives and top shareholders.

The profit bonanza that lasted from July through September eclipsed the old record of $1.655 trillion established in the third quarter of 2006—just as the money-mad speculation of the financial elite was hurtling the US and world economy toward the precipice of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The resulting financial crisis, which erupted in the autumn of 2008, threatened a total collapse of the global financial system. In response, the governments of the world, led by the US, used the disaster to hand over tens of trillions in public wealth to the very finance houses that triggered the crisis. This process continues, as demonstrated by the International Monetary Fund/European Union-dictated rescue of the Irish banks this week.

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Eric Blair
Activist Post

When most of us think about "lame duck" Congressional sessions we think of a "do-nothing" government. However, this so-called lame duck session appears to be a time where legislation that has the most restrictions to individual rights is being rammed through.

It seems the members of government who have been recently voted out of office are vying for corporate jobs by pushing such legislation as the Food Safety Modernization Act and the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) which are now on the fast track to becoming law. Both of these laws reek of tyranny for the citizens and a means of corporate consolidation for the big boys.

It seems whenever a piece of legislation has the word "safety" in it we can expect to lose our right to make our own decisions. For example, consumer protection groups pushed hard for the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008 after large numbers of Chinese-made toys and other products proved to have dangerously unhealthy toxins.

Consequently, the bill was passed with 407 Ayes, 0 Nays in the House. Only later did the public find out that the bill did more to regulate, tax, and impose fines on neighborhood garage sales than it did to stop dangerous Chinese imports. Clearly, the bill is used to clamp down on an individual's right to sell their used items without governmental oversight. In other words, the corporate-government will not allow any form of black market to threaten their cartel control of consumerism.

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Stephen Lendman

A fire at the UN building in Gaza City after Israeli strikes (Photograph:
Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty)

On October 18, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights offered an "Alternative Report" response to Israel's submission, sent to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

Submitting to the UN, Aharon Leshno Yaar, Israel's Permanent Representative to Geneva said "Israel was proud of its long-lasting recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family," omitting to explain he means only Jews, no others, especially Muslims. State belligerence for over six decades proves it. PCHR reviewed recent facts, documenting them in its report. Previous articles discussed them it detail, but they bear repeating. By so doing, peace and self-determination for a beleaguered people may come sooner.

Israeli Violations of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)

PCHR addressed each article, detailing Israel's noncompliance, presenting indisputable, convincing evidence. In its July 9, 2004 "Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that:

"In the exercise of the powers available to it on this basis, Israel is bound by (ICESCR provisions)." Throughout its history, however, Israel has grievously violated all international laws, committing crimes of war and against humanity repeatedly, the latter virtually daily in the Territories.

After its 2005 disengagement, Israel claims Gaza was no longer occupied. Therefore, it no longer had ICESCR or other treaty obligations. False on both counts, the ICJ stating that:

"the State's obligations under the Covenant apply to all territories and populations under its effective control."

Israel has controlled Gaza since 1967, today under a medieval siege, little changed after Israel's bogus June easing. The UN Security Council, General Assembly, Special Rapporteur (for Palestine), and the ICRC all said Israel has control. Therefore, it's bound by all international law provisions.

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Robert Bows

TSA fascist groping the crotch of an elderly man

"Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!" ~ Huey Long

"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

"Fascism ought to more properly be called corporatism since it is the merger of state and corporate power." ~ Benito Mussolini

The American brand of fascism

There are as many varieties of fascism as there are examples, beginning with Germany (Hitler) and Italy (Mussolini) during the period leading up to and including WWII, followed by Cuba (Batista), Spain (Franco), Paraguay (Stroessner), Nicaragua (Somoza), and Chile (Pinochet), et al.

The brand of fascism currently practiced in the United States by European and North American financiers and bankers-who control a major portion of the world's money supply, as well as the dominant military and intelligence apparatuses-has commonalities with many of its predecessors as well as a few important differences.

Commonalities include: control over the state by unelected persons ("the hidden government," as Teddy Roosevelt called them) or persons whose election is predetermined (through control of the currency, media, and voting process); use of intelligence and security forces to suppress opposition; abrogation of constitutional guarantees and international legal conventions; the justification of torture; and false flag events used to justify imperialism, to name a few.

As so eloquently expressed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials following World War II, we must hold such behavior accountable:

If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

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Stephen Lendman

Last March, North Korea was falsely blamed for sinking a South Korean ship, a topic an earlier article addressed, accessed through THIS link.

Seoul said there's "no other plausible explanation....The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that (a) torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine," even though none was detected in the area.

At the time, evidence suggested a false flag, manufactured to blame the North. The incident occurred near Baengnyeong Island opposite North Korea. US Navy Seals and four US ships were conducting joint exercises in the area. The torpedo used was German, not North Korean as claimed. Germany sells none to Pyongyang. Yet it was blamed for what it didn't do, what apparently was Pentagon-manufactured mischief.

What now? According to US media reports, North Korea incited the gravest incident since the Korean War armistice. For example, on November 23, New York Times writer Mark McDonald headlined, "Crisis Status in South Korea After North Shells Island," saying:

"The South Korean military went to "crisis status" on Tuesday (11/23) and threatened military strikes after the North fired dozens of shells at a South Korean island, killing two of the South's soldiers and setting off an exchange of fire in one the most serious clashes between the two sides in decades."

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Stephen Lendman

On November 28, first round legislative and presidential elections will be held. As a previous article explained, democracy will be absent because the nation's most popular party, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas, and 14 others are excluded, the system rigged to install Washington's favorites.

In a September 8, Miami Herald op-ed, Ira Kurzban, an immigration and employment law expert as well as
Aristide's former legal counsel headlined, "Unfair and undemocratic," saying:

"Imagine if (America's) Federal Election Commission disqualified the Democratic and Republican parties from the 2012 presidential election and declared that only candidates of minor parties could run."

"Yet (Haiti's November 28 elections) are just that - unfair, unconstitutional and undemocratic."

On November 10, Brian Concannon, Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, in the Boston Haitian Reporter headlined, "Haiti's Flawed Elections: They Told Us So," saying:

The November elections "may be the most important in Haitian history," voters to "choose the entire House of Deputies (its lower body) for four years, a President for five years, and one-third of the Senate for six years. These officials (will be responsible for) guiding Haiti's (post-quake) reconstruction for at least four years." What they accomplish "will shape Haitian society for decades." What they won't is deeply worrisome.

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Becky Akers
Lew Rockwell

Becky Akers: The TSA: Control, Humiliate, Intimidate -AUDIO

Almost overnight, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has gone from national joke to national nightmare. Passengers used to laugh when screeners so inept they missed 60—75% of the fake bombs undercover investigators smuggled past them nonetheless proclaimed themselves gods. No one's laughing now, though, as the TSA ogles us with carcinogenic technology and sexually assaults anyone who objects.

Over 300 of the agency's "naked" scanners lurk in 60-some airports nationwide, with more on the way; eventually, the agency will irradiate every passenger on every flight. These gizmos peer through clothing to photograph bodies in graphic detail. The TSA makes much of offering a "choice": if you dislike posing nude for the government, its perverts will grope you instead — "prob[ing]," "prodding" and pushing "up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance" (and they don't mean a slap in the face). You also suffer this indignity, even if you submit to the scan, should it reveal "anomalies" such as piercings or prostheses.

Are you still flying? Why? For your own protection and that of your children, for liberty's sake, stay on the ground until Congress abolishes the TSA. No destination on earth or convenience in reaching it, no vacation, Thanksgiving dinner, meeting or sales trip, is worth the degradation the TSA is dishing out.

Its new "pat down procedures... allow security officers to touch passengers of the same gender in sensitive areas such as the breasts and genitals..." These attacks have been "likened to 'foreplay' pat-downs... [screeners are] using the new front-of-the-hand, slide-down screening technique for ... over-the-clothes searches of passengers' breast and genital areas."

Such mass mauling is unprecedented. No regime anywhere at any time, however totalitarian or brutal, has ever routinely denuded and molested citizens.

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Stephen Lendman

Launched in March 2009, "The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTP) seeks to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the (way to settle) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Its mandate focuses on "the enunciation of law by authoritative bodies," including International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings and dozens of UN resolutions on Palestine with regard to binding international law.

RTP follows in the tradition of the BRussell Tribunal, named after noted philosopher, mathematician, and anti-war/anti-imperialism activist Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970). Established in 1967 to investigate Vietnam war crimes, RTP's mandate is similar, its Tribunals collecting and presenting indictable evidence against Israel, complicit states, and corporate war profiteers.

An earlier article on its Barcelona Session can be accessed through THIS link.

RTP's November 20-21 London Session

Before convening, RTP listed issues to be addressed, including:

(1) corporate involvement in Occupied Palestine, including illegal settlement activities;
(2) foreign banks and other financial institutions illegally financing and profiting from occupation and settlement activities;
(3) foreign and Israeli companies supplying products and services in Occupied Palestine; in addition, Israeli ones exporting agricultural produce and other products from settlements and West Bank industrial zones; and
(4) foreign corporations selling arms and "the infrastructure of war, occupation, colonisation, and repression" in Occupied Palestine; in addition, Israeli companies that export arms, munitions, repressive hardware or knowledge globally.

As in Barcelona, distinguished jurors were assembled, their names and credentials listed below. In addition, expert witnesses were invited to give testimony.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

A few days ago, British Chief of Defence Staff General Sir David Richards admitted that victory in Afghanistan is unachievable. "In conventional war,” said Richards, “defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation's capital."

It took a few years for British military elites to admit that the war in Afghanistan cannot lead anywhere : a valuable lesson to learn from mid to late 20th century warfare, is that conventional military might cannot easily defeat mass civilian resistance.

It is interesting to reflect too, that the Jewish state has exercised a ‘strategy’ of occupation for sixty two years -- and for some reason the penny has still failed to drop. The Israelis are still convinced that they can manage to knock down the resilient Palestinians using siege, indiscriminate killing, carpet bombardment and chemical warfare.

The results are pretty obvious: and bearing in mind that Israel considers itself to be a ‘Jews only democracy’, then every Jewish Israeli is complicit in a colossal war crime against a civilian population.

But it goes further: more and more Israeli soldiers of all ranks are directly involved in an endless list of crimes -- some stop pregnant women from receiving urgent medical attention , while others drop bombs on populated neighbourhoods. Some use children as human shields, while a few perform executions of peace activists. And others just feed the cannons with white phosphorus shells.
The perpetrators of these crimes are actually subject to universal jurisdiction laws. They can be detained everywhere around the world. They may end their life in jail.

A few brave Israelis must be very concerned with the moral condition of their state, because a few days ago, a document identifying 200 Israeli soldiers suspected of war crimes leaked out of Israel. It made it to the internet. The list included the names, ranks, military posts, pictures and addresses.

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Eric Margolis
Lew Rockwell

Foreign occupation soldiers from the U.S. search an Afghan citizen's
house during a home invasion in Nerkh district of Wardak province in
west of Kabul, Afghanistan, , May 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

"If the US loses the Afghan War, its reluctant allies would call into question the reason for the alliance. Europe would hasten building an integrated military independent of US control."

According to the US government, 41.8 million Americans now receive food stamps. Meanwhile, Washington is spending $7 billion monthly on its nine-year old occupation of Afghanistan, not to mention billions more on trying to build an obedient Afghan army and to pay of Pakistani politicians and general.

Last weekend, the US and its NATO allies met in Lisbon to try to hammer out a contradictory strategy that will keep western troops in Afghanistan indefinitely while assuaging public opinion in North America and Europe that wants the war to end. Most observers failed to note the historical irony that in the 1960’s and 70’s, Portugal had waged a long, debilitating colonial war to preserve its crumbling African empire that ended up nearly bankrupting the mother nation and ending for good its imperial pretensions.

All the platitudes, doubletalk, synthetic optimism and fudging at the NATO summit could not conceal the fact that for all their soldiers, fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and wizardly electronic gear, the western powers are being slowly beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

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