Stephen Lendman

The Banco Central de Venezuela's web site (Venezuela's Central Bank) relates BCV history from its September 8, 1939 inception. At the time, conservative forces feared monetary instability under uncontrolled Central Bank spending. As a result, opponents (unsuccessfully) said giving it exclusive money creation power was unconstitutional.

Thereafter BCV reforms occurred in 1943, 1960, 1974, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1992, 2001, and most recently making banking a "public service" in 2010. More on that below.

In 1992, legislation established "administrative autonomy," in part transforming the bank into a "public legal entity. Until then, (it was solely) corporate in nature." Thereafter, Venezuela's president appointed "a collegiate body of seven members, a president and six directors," requiring two-thirds Senate approval for a six-year term. Its mandate is "monetary stability, economic balance and well-ordered economic development."

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Thomas H. Douglass

An international team of scientists made headlines at the end of last year when they used genetic evidence to show that an ancient people, once living in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, were distant cousins of the Neanderthals and contributed to the modern human genome before their extinction.

The discovery is a triumph of modern genomics and decades of publicly funded science research in the United States and elsewhere, which has led to the sequencing of the human genome and promises to revolutionize our understanding of evolution, disease, and global genetic diversity.

While geneticists and paleontologists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, at Harvard and at MIT spearheaded the work, there were also substantial contributions by scientists throughout the United States, Spain, Canada, Russia, and China. Ancient DNA specialist Svaante Pääbo, alongside evolutionary biologists and geneticists David Reich, Richard Green and Johannes Krause, were among the researchers leading the work.

Denisova cave is located in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, and has been an important site of human occupation for over 250,000 years. Early humans often sought out caves as sources of shelter and protection as they dispersed, repeatedly, from Africa into Eurasia and beyond. Like a number of other sites, Denisova cave is important because stone tool technology suggests that different peoples occupied the site at different times toward the end of the Pleistocene age (2.6 million to 10,000 years ago), as modern Homo sapiens began to disperse from Africa and generally replace other, older populations.

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Sholto Byrnes
NewStatesman

Does Saudi Arabia deserve thanks for taking in dictators such as Tunisia's ousted president?

Having fled from the country he ruled for 23 years, ex-President Zine el-Abidin Ben Ali has landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the government has "welcomed" him "due to the current extraordinary circumstances" in Tunisia. He has had an entirely different reception from bloggers in the kingdom and the region, however, varying from calls for demonstrations outside Saudi embassies in Arab countries by those who want Ben Ali swiftly brought to justice, to those noting that Jeddah has of late "been plagued by torrential rain, overflowing sewage, insects and now the Tunisian ex-president".

In some ways it is not the most obvious refuge for Ben Ali. He may have been a brother Arab leader, but he will be expected to take a very different attitude to the religion of which he is nominally a member in his new home. The Financial Times reports that "Saudi Islamists pointed to Mr Ben Ali's secular policies which they said marginalised Islam. One said on his Twitter feed that the harshest punishment against Ben Ali, who banned "the call for prayer, Koran, and the veil is to be surrounded by veiled and munaqabat [face-covered] women and the sound of recital of Koran."

However, after several other countries including France refused to take him in, Ben Ali may have had little choice. The Arab Network for Human Rights Information now warns that Saudi Arabia is becoming a "refuge for dictators", having granted entry to Uganda's Idi Amin and Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif in the past.

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Jim Cason
Other Words

Remote control killings by unmanned drones in Pakistan aren't making our country more secure.

The failure of the U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan to contain the anti-government insurgency has led the Obama administration to expand the undeclared war in Pakistan. According to the Long War Journal, the number of U.S. attacks in Pakistan, using unmanned Predator drones, has gone from five in 2007 to 117 in 2010.

Government officials here in Washington say privately that they expect the covert war to expand even further this year. Yet Congress and the public have undertaken no significant examination of this new war's consequences.

Members of Congress have almost daily reminders of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the form of the dead and wounded U.S. soldiers that return to this country. Lawmakers travel regularly to attend funerals of the fallen.

The U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan produce many casualties, but none of those killed are citizens of our country. The pilots operating the remote-controlled drones used to launch missile attacks in Pakistan usually sit behind computer screens far from the battlefield. For policymakers in Washington, this is a war without cost or hometown casualties.

The English language press in Pakistan often relays reports of civilians killed in these attacks. But those reports rarely make headlines in the United States. The only ongoing reminder of this war is the occasional headline that suggests the United States has successfully killed another al-Qaeda militant. For most Americans, that's justification enough for this new war by assassination.

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Stephen Lendman

[American economic experts see some parallels between the nation’s current housing-driven slump and Japan’s economic crisis of the 1990s. In June 1998, two traders at a Tokyo brokerage rested on a day the dollar reached a seven-year high against the yen. Toshiyuki Aizawa/Reuters]

An except from Franck Biancheri's new book titled, "World Crisis: The Path to the World Afterwards" states:

"The (current) financial and economic crisis....marks the end of the world order established after 1945." In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and since fall 2007, we've "witness(ed) the accelerated decomposition of the 'Western pillar' with" America advancing disintegration.

After decades "spent living in the myth of an 'ended history' in which" Western ideology was triumphant, "it is almost impossible to imagine 'a world after' " without Washington/Wall Street dominance, "where 'Anglo-American' would not necessarily mean 'modern,' and where the dollar would no longer be king."

Neither our media or leaders "imagine the unimaginable." They're "too busy trying to make us 'forget the unforgettable,' in particular, the socio-economic consequences of the crisis throughout the world." It creates problems and "unprecedented opportunit(ies) to rebuild a 'world after,' provided" challenges can be seized and dangers avoided. One thing's certain. New world ways will supersede one olds, for better or worse. Buckle up. Things may get bumpy along the way.

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Stephen Lendman

Reportedly, 19th century Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once remarked: "Poor Mexico, So far from God, So close to the United States." His proximity comment applies to Lebanon. Bordering Israel, it experienced decades of belligerent interventions as early as 1954 when Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion proposed supporting the establishment of a Maronite-dominated Christian mini-state.

In 1978, Israel attacked Lebanon and occupied the country up to the Litani River before withdrawing under US pressure, letting UN Blue Helmets (UNIFIL) replace its own forces.

Earlier, during Lebanon's 1975-76 civil war, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly spent $150 million equipping and training right-wing Maronite Phalange fighters. In September 1982, during Israel's invasion, they massacred thousands of Palestinian Sabra and Shatila camp residents, an appalling atrocity Israeli forces permitted when Ariel Sharon was defense minister.

On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, slaughtering around 18,000 Palestinians, then occupied South Lebanon until withdrawing in May 2000. It still illegally holds Sheba Farms, the 14-square mile water-rich land near Syria's Golan, also illegally occupied since 1967 as well as Ghajar, a Lebanese village bordering Golan.

In July 2006, Israel again attacked, killing over 1,000, injuring thousands more, displacing about one-fourth of the country's four million people, besides inflicting the same mass destruction it did to Gaza during Cast Lead.

Earlier in December 1968, Israeli forces attacked Beirut International Airport, destroying 13 Middle East Airlines planes in response to an alleged Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attack on an Israeli airliner in Athens.

Later in 1993, Israel launched a week-long offensive against Hezbollah, allegedly in response to rockets launched against an Israeli village. During the operation, heavy Israeli bombing caused massive destruction and displaced around 300,000 Lebanese. It was a prelude to a similar 1996 attack, again against Hezbollah, during which up to 500,000 Lebanese were displaced.

An early 2007 American University of Beirut study documented 6,672 Israeli terrorist acts against Lebanon and Palestine alone from 1967 - 2007, plus thousands more since then.

"Poor Lebanon" indeed, its plight journalist Robert Fisk described in his book, "Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon." As Israel's northern neighbor, it's constantly under threat, especially with Hezbollah a political force, well armed to react in self-defense.

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Stephen Lendman

Numerous previous articles explained Israel's extremism, notably under Netanyahu exceeding the worst of Ariel Sharon. Both men, of course, are war criminals by any standard. So are complicit Knesset members - roguish, racist and hard-line, comprising a voting majority that co-opt a weak-kneed opposition going along most often to get along.

Access several relevant previous articles through these links here, here and here.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyep Recep Erdogan agrees. On January 13, Haaretz Service headlined, "Turkey PM: Netanyahu has worst government in history of Israel," saying:

Erdogan told Al Jazeera that close Israeli/Turkish ties faltered following Cast Lead and "spiraled to an unprecedented low" after Israeli commandos attacked a Turkish-flagged Freedom Flotilla ship in international waters bound for Gaza last May. Nine Turkish citizens aboard were murdered. Erdogan demanded an apology. Israel refused, the Prime Minister telling Al Jazeera:

"As long as Netanyahu does not change his policies, he cannot expect us to change ours." He added that Turkey won't renew any previously signed accords, and won't consider renewed relations until Israel accedes to its demands. He also called Foreign Minister/Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman Israel's "greatest problem," a "despicable" man Israel should "get rid" of. "It is up to them, not us. If they don't, Israel's problems will only get worse."

Erdogan also supports Hamas, saying:

"Hamas is not a terrorist organization. They are people defending their land. It is a movement that entered the elections and won," adding that conflict resolution is impossible without them.

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Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem

I was really planning to write an article entitled "the lying woman from Washington " in which I wanted to expose the utter hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton's recent call for political reforms in the Arab world. After all, the United States has always been the main impeder of democracy in the Arab region as it has constantly and consistently embraced criminal and tyrannical regimes from Casablanca to Bahrain.

However, the dramatic events in Tunisia seem to be taking a certain unexpected turn which no serious observer can treat with indifference.

In Tunisia things seem to be sufficiently clear. The people of this north African country are simply rising up against a thuggish, rotten and despicable dictator who has come to consider Tunisia , its people and resources a kind of farm for himself and his family.

To maintain this state of affair, he built a vast net of secret police apparatus, including death squads whose main job is to witch-hunt, abduct, brutalize and even liquidate all those who dared show a gesture of dissatisfaction with the hateful regime. The regime also deployed tens of thousands of informers and secret agents in every corner and cranny of the country, sowing mistrust, suspicion and fear.

As to the West, which keeps babbling about democracy and human rights, it watched Tunisia descend into the abyss in terms of human dignity, human rights and civil liberties.

A classical dictator of Nicaragua's Anastasio Sammoza's or Iran's Shah's type, Zein el Abidine ben Ali has effectively transformed Tunisia into a huge prison maintained by terror and secret police. In doing so, he encouraged all sorts of corruption, including embezzlement of public resources, nepotism, bribery, graft, cronyism and abuse of power. The entire country reached the verge of collapse.

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Khalid Amayreh

When Israeli President Shimon President was pressed by some human rights organizations to stop the practice of "administrative detention" of Palestinian intellectuals, he claimed that "Palestinians who don't hurl fire bombs and who don't shoot have nothing to fear." Peres were lying through his teeth as usual because nearly all victims of administrative detention have not indulged in any illegal activity.

Administrative detention is very much like taking hostages. One is snatched from his home and family by the Israeli occupation army (and now by the Palestinian Authority-PA- forces) and kept behind bars for months or years without charge or trial). I remember one of these seemingly perpetual detainees, Mustafa Shawar of Hebron telling me that he begged the Israeli military judge to inform him why he was being kept in jail.

"I told him I need to know the violation I committed so that I won't do it again after I am released from here. But the Judge wouldn't tell me because of unspecified security reasons."

The truth of the matter is that there are no real violations and no security reasons barring the so-called judge from revealing the reasons for a given Palestinian's arrest and incarceration.

The real reason is the sadistic Israeli urge to torment and harm Palestinians. Israelis do feel good watching Palestinians suffer, just as the Nazis felt good watching Jews suffer and die throughout Europe during and prior to the Second World War.

Israelis often like to brag about having a country of "law and order" But the question that begs itself is what sort of law and order does Israel have and according to which it acts and behaves?

Even the Third Reich, from its beginning to end, was in a certain sense based on law and order.

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Stephen Lendman

[Photo: War criminal Ehud Barak & his satrap, Salam Fayyad, shaking hands before meeting at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Incidentally, the original King David Hotel was bombed by Jewish terrorists in 1946. 91 people were killed and 46 were injured. (Mustafa Abu Dayeh, Pool/Palestinian Prime Minister's Office)]

"As prime minister, Fayyad's future depends on satisfying two masters, Israel and Washington, their divide and conquer agenda, solidifying occupation, continuing settlement expansions, entirely Judaizing Jerusalem, dominating the West Bank's economy, and containing all opposition factions."

His resumé includes a University of Texas economics Ph.D., a teaching position at Jordan's Yarmouk University, and economic research at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. From 1987 - 1995, he also served as a World Bank and IMF official, and until 2001, was IMF's man in Palestine, serving as Yasser Arafat's finance minister.

In Palestine's 2006 legislative elections, his Third Way party got 2.4% of the votes, a clear renunciation. Yet after Fatah's coup d'etat co-opted the PLO, PA and West Bank, President Mahmoud Abbas illegitimately appointed him prime minister.

The New York Times calls him "a political independent who gained the confidence of the West and is largely respected in Israel." In fact, he's a political opportunist, Israel's man in Palestine. Also Washington's. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nathan J. Brown calls him "indispensable to US diplomacy....confusing a useful individual with sound policy." He's mainly improved security, providing enforcer services for Israel against his own people.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

"Must an evil state create gas chambers and concentration camps before it is regarded as truly evil? How about raining down white phosphorus on civilian neighbourhoods? Or dropping 1-ton bombs on civilian homes to exterminate entire families as a deterrent? Or dropping two to three million cluster bomblets which will kill and maim as many children as possible?"

Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, have been complaining about the increasing "de-legitimization" of the Zionist state across the world. Netanyahu, who is a skilled media operator, said that Israel "needs to de-legitimize the de-legitimizers".

However, a fleeting glance at recent Israeli actions shows that Israel is a nefarious, lawless and murderous entity whose representatives commit murder and terrorism knowingly and deliberately against innocent people. In doing so, it is they who "de-legitimize" the state of Israel.

Murder, even when "mistaken", is Israel's modus operandi when dealing with its real or imaginary foes, whoever and wherever they happen to be. Some of the murder victims are apolitical figures, innocent people whose killing has no possible justification other than the "need" to make the other party suffer psychologically.

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Mohsen Salih
The Palestine Telegraph

A Disputed land: The fame of Palestine comes from the over 80 years dispute between its local Arab population and the immigrant Zionist Jews who strove and later managed to establish their own political entity, the “State of Israel”, expelling and depriving the local population. Zionism in brief is a political ideology that believes in the establishment of a “national” home for the Jewish people in Palestine, it works to realize its aim through all possible means, with violence on top of the agenda.

It validates its belief and actions with certain religious arguments derived mainly from Judaism and historical arguments that are based mainly on the Old Testament. However, this neither implies that all Jews are Zionists nor that all Zionists are Jews. There are some non-Zionist and even anti-Zionist Jews and there are many non-Jewish Zionists, most of whom are Protestant Christians. On the path to achieve their goals, the Zionists fought six wars, killing and displacing Palestinians inside or even outside Palestine, who escaped to safety in Lebanon, (For more information see the sections on Zionism and Arab-“Israeli” wars). However, the Zionist view does not consider those killed and displaced as victims; on the contrary, it maintains that its actions are legal and ethical, defending the “undisputable” right of the Jews in their homeland. Let us, now examine this so called undisputable right…

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Arthur Silber
Once Upon a Time...

In the aftermath of the horror in Arizona, all major public voices are united in their absolute, vehement condemnation of violence. Almost all minor voices, including every blogger known and unknown, join in the chorus. It seems that everyone, from the most famous and powerful personages to lowly bloggers offering their thoughts to a world which cares nothing whatsoever about what they say, profoundly opposes violence. If all such people -- which would appear to include all people -- were genuinely sincere in their proclamations (and they may well be sincere, in the manner that people are sincere in their announcement of deeply-held beliefs reflecting the intellectual and moral rigor of sayings blazoned on greeting cards or found in fortune cookies), and, of much greater significance, if they matched their actions to any measurable extent to what they insist is a profound opposition to violence, we would certainly inhabit a paradise on Earth.

You may have observed that we do not. In making this statement, I assume you have not been asleep or unconscious for the entirety of your lifetime. You need have been awake and observant for only a few brief moments to appreciate the charnel house that humanity has made of this planet for most of its presence on this cloud of dust.

As is true with regard to every subject of importance, and as is always true when a subject becomes the focus of our "national discourse," almost everyone who repeatedly and passionately denounces violence is, as my title has it, a goddamned liar. On this occasion, the lies are all-encompassing, and they extend over the entirety of the political spectrum, from craven conservatives to peabrained progressives.

It is only proper to begin with the Liar-in-Chief, the chief executive of the Death State -- who is, he reminds us, a public servant and therefore must be "good and important," as he instructed us last evening. Take a moment to appreciate the hideousness of that moment, for it captures the House of Horror quality of this sickening business.

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Ellen Brown
The Web of Debt

"Wall Street Kleptocracy Game" (Credit)

The Federal Reserve was set up by bankers for bankers, and it has served them well. Out of the blue, it came up with $12.3 trillion in nearly interest-free credit to bail the banks out of a credit crunch they created. That same credit crisis has plunged state and local governments into insolvency, but the Fed has now delivered its ultimatum: there will be no “quantitative easing” for municipal governments.

On January 7, according to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed had ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments. "We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," he said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states "should not expect loans from the Fed."

So much for the proposal of President Barack Obama, reported in Reuters a year ago, to have the Fed buy municipal bonds to cut the heavy borrowing costs of cash-strapped cities and states.

The credit woes of state and municipal governments are a direct result of Wall Street’s malfeasance. Their borrowing costs first shot up in 2008, when the “monoline” bond insurers lost their own credit ratings after gambling in derivatives. The Fed’s low-interest facilities could have been used to restore local government credit, just as it was used to restore the credit of the banks. But Chairman Bernanke has now vetoed that plan. -Why?

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Reham Alhelsi
My Palestine

A new year begins and the terror of the Zionist entity continues. With the first day of 2011, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36 years old, died in hospital after being asphyxiated by the poisonous tear gas fired by Israeli occupation soldiers at Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals who were protesting the Israeli wall and the theft of Palestinian land in Bil’in the day before. On Friday, 31.12.2010, it was reported by many news outlets around the world that a resident of Bili’n was in critical condition after inhaling the poisonous gas. The next morning, Jawaher died, murdered; she was gassed to death. As usual, the Israeli occupation forces and their agents, the anonymous and the not-so-anonymous ones who come in all names and titles such as “reporters” and “medical experts”, started their usual spin of lies and propaganda about Jawaher’s murder. They claim Palestinians are contradicting themselves, when in fact it is the Israeli occupation army, with its lies and fake claims, the one that is contradicting itself with each and every lie. They first claimed Jawaher had cancer and died of it, then claimed that she wasn’t at the protest so she couldn’t have died from the effect of the gas (she was standing 200 meters away from the protest), then they claimed that the tear gas kills no one. So what is it that the Israeli occupation army is trying to prove? That the poisonous gas they use against Palestinians is not lethal and thus not the cause of Jawaher’s or any Palestinian’s death?

As usual, main stream media outlets, which often lecture on objectivity and neutrality, readily take the word of an anonymous Israeli military source for credible while ignoring the tens of named Palestinian and other eyewitnesses.

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