The 2003 U.S. aggression against Iraq has taken Western “progressive” élites, particularly those on the Left by surprise, not because of the violent and criminal nature of U.S.-orchestrated terror against the Iraqi people, but because of the instant rise of the Iraqi Resistance against the unprovoked military and economic against Iraq. While meddling in the affairs of other distant peoples has been a conspicuous feature of the “progressive” élites, their interference in the affairs of the Iraqi people is disturbing and contributing to the suffering of the Iraqi people.

As most people know, the invasion of Iraq was an illegal act of aggression, in violation of international laws and the UN Charter. The ‘Supreme International Crime’ the Nuremberg judges found, was that of unprovoked aggression, because it contains ‘the accumulated evil’ of all war crimes. However, despite all this, Western élites, supported by the mainstream media continue to describe the Iraqi Resistance against the Occupation as “insurgency” in order to justify U.S. “counter-insurgency”.

The Iraqi Resistance is not an “insurgency”. Insurgency is an organized rebellion aimed at overthrowing a legitimate and constituted government by force, such as the Contras, a U.S. proxy terrorist gang used against the legitimate government of Nicaragua in the late 1980s. There is nothing legitimate about the U.S. Occupation and its puppet government in Iraq. The Iraqi Resistance has the support of most Iraqi. One only needs to watch the jubilation of Iraqis at a destroyed U.S. tank or a Humvee to have a sense of Iraqi feelings. This distortion of the truth is part of U.S. psychological warfare not only against the Iraqi people but also against the rest of the world. It denies indigenous Iraqis their right for legitimate national resistance, and it deliberately demonises the armed struggle against the invaders. The presence of “insurgency” implies that the U.S. Occupation is (nonexistent) peaceful and legal, and that the puppet government is legitimate government; it is not imported to Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks and imposed and legitimised by undemocratic and fraudulent elections at gunpoint.
globalresearch.ca

Thin is still in, but apparently fat is nowhere near as out as it used to be.

A survey finds America’s attitudes toward overweight people are shifting from rejection toward acceptance. Over a 20-year period, the percentage of Americans who said they find overweight people less attractive steadily dropped from 55 percent to 24 percent, the market research firm NPD Group found.
news.yahoo.com

…A century ago people talked of “What we could do to Africa”. Last century, it was “What can we do for Africa?”. Now, in 2006, we must ask what the developing world, empowered, can do for itself.

British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.

The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once “acid” hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.

Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March – the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.

“I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument,” says Dr Sessa. “I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience.

“Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That’s what really drives me.”
guardian.co,uk

July 10, 2001
Nearly 20 years ago the man who is now Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, sent Lebanese militiamen into the Palestine refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. When they left 36 hours later at least 800 people lay dead after a rampage of murder, torture and rape.

The massacre provoked international outrage. In Israel itself 400,000 people took to the streets in the largest demonstration the country had ever seen. Ariel Sharon was forced to resign as Israel’s defence minister.

But he has maintained that he could not have foreseen the danger of a massacre in the camps. Fergal Keane investigates this claim, and talks to key witnesses and survivors of the massacre.
bbc.co.uk

“Evo, what do you and the MAS understand by ‘socialism,'” I asked him, when I was invited by the Executive Committee of the Bolivian Labor Central (COB). “To live in community and equality,” he answered. “Fundamentally, in the peasant communities they have socialism. For example, if we speak of land. I come from the ayllu of the Department of Oruro. Clearly, where I live at this moment, in the East in Chapare, there are no ayllus. It is individual parceling, and there arise very serious problems, because it leads to small holdings, which you don’t see in a peasant community where the land is communal.”

“Does the socio-economic model of the MAS resemble more that of Lula, Cuba, or Hugo Chávez?” I insisted. “I believe it is something much deeper,” he answered. “It is an economic model based on solidarity, reciprocity, community, and consensus. Because, for us, democracy is a consensus. In the community there is consensus, in the trade union there are majorities and minorities.

“Inside this official democracy of Bolivia they do not respect the thought, sentiments, and the sufferings of the national majorities. And within this framework we are seeking a communitarian socialism based on the community. A socialism, let’s say, based on reciprocity and solidarity. And beyond that, respecting Mother Earth, the Pacha Mama. It is not possible within that model to convert Mother Earth to merchandise. In Bolivia with the agrarian reform it is better to be a vaccinated cow than a human being. For a vaccinated cow there are 25 hectares and for a human being there is nothing.”
zmag.org

If there had been justice and reparation for the victims of hundreds of massacres committed in the last twenty years in the Colombian countryside, as well as those committed between 1946 and 1958 and in previous waves of violence, the prin cipal measure would be to return their land to the campesinos, indigenous people and afro-colombians who have time and again been thrown off Mother Earth by blood and fire.

As dawn came on 2 September 2005, two hundred comuneros – commu nity activists – from the Indigenous Reserve of Nasa de Huellas dared to implement the decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Court established that the Colombian state should hand back their land as part of an integral reparation to victims of a massacre committed by paramili taries on 19 September 1991 in the Nilo hacienda – large farmstead – that the indigenous people had occupied. Twenty of them, children included, were assassinated.
zmag.org

After spending 36 days in the fall of 2000 in thrall to politicians, pundits and the press, Americans probably thought they knew all about the hanging, dangling and pregnant chads that helped decide the presidential election.

Turns out, those chads only distracted attention from much more grievous breakdowns during the 2000 election.

At least that’s what longtime Florida political observer Lance deHaven-Smith believes. His most recent book, The Battle for Florida (University Press of Florida, 2005), looks at the twilight of democracy in Ancient Greece and draws disturbing parallels with the institutions in Florida and the nation during the 2000 election and up until today.
research.fsu.edu

…China shows that when it comes to economics, the dividing line among the world’s nations is no longer between communism and capitalism. Capitalism has won hands down. The real dividing line is no longer economic. It’s political. And that divide is between democracy and authoritarianism. China is a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government.

For years, we’ve assumed that capitalism and democracy fit hand in glove. We took it as an article of faith that you can’t have one without the other. That’s why a key element of American policy toward China has been to encourage free trade, direct investment, and open markets. As China becomes more prosperous and integrated into the global market — so American policy makers have thought — China will also become more democratic.

Well, maybe we’ve been a bit naive. It’s true that democracy needs capitalism. Try to come up with the name of a single democracy in the world that doesn’t have a capitalist economy. For democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government. Capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root.

But China shows that the reverse may not be true — capitalism doesn’t need democracy. Capitalism’s wide diffusion of economic power offers enough incentive for investors to take risks with their money. But, as China shows, capitalism doesn’t necessarily provide enough protection for individuals to take risks with their opinions.
commondreams.org

How about the idea that robber baron capitalism is antithetical to democracy?

Mike Whitney: China and the Dollar
“It’s the death blow to the US dollar,” said Peter Grandich, editor of the Grandich Letter.

On Thursday, The People’s Republic of China fired off the first volley in what could turn out to be economic Armageddon. China announced that it would begin to diversify its foreign-exchange reserves away from US dollar.

Gulp!

The only thing keeping the dollar atop its fragile perch is the fact that other countries have been willing to lap up the $600 billion of American red ink every year via the trade deficit. That amounts to roughly $2 billion per day or nearly 7% GDP.

Currently, China is holding $769 billion, the vast majority of its foreign exchange reserves. This is a humongous sum by any measurement and represents approximately 30% of China’s gross domestic product. Regrettably, the Bush administration’s wasteful spending makes the dollar look like a bad long term investment, so China will either have to change its strategy or face a huge loss on its reserves. It’s a thorny predicament and one that China needs to handle delicately. If they move too aggressively it could trigger a sell-off and send the dollar plummeting.

Iraq has vast hydrocarbon potential that could rival major producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, but United States government analysts are predicting that Iraqi oil production development will remain thwarted for years to come.

Its enormous reserves of an estimated 115-billion barrels of proven crude are the world’s third largest after those of the Saudi Kingdom and Canada.

As of December 2005, Iraqi net oil production was averaging a modest 1,9-million barrels per day (bpd) according to the latest country report on Iraq compiled by the US government’s Energy Information Agency (EIA).

This is well below production levels of an estimated 2,3-million bpd in January 2003 just before the US-led military operation to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime.

The December number is also well below the near 3,5-million-bpd production level prior to Iraq’s 1990 invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait that led to the 1991 Gulf War.

“Most analysts believe that there will be no major additions to Iraqi production capacity for at least two-three years, with Shell’s vice-president recently stating that any auction of Iraqi’s oilfields was unlikely before 2007,” said the EIA report released late in December 2005 and carried on its website.
mg.co.za

William Blum: Iraq is Open for Business

The sign has been put out front: “Iraq is open for business.” We read about things done and said by the Iraqi president, or the Ministry of this or the Ministry of that, and it’s easy to get the impression that Iraq is in the process of becoming a sovereign state, albeit not particularly secular and employing torture, but still, a functioning, independent state. Then we read about the IMF and the rest of the international financial mafia — with the US playing its usual sine qua non role — making large loans to the country and forgiving debts, with the customary strings attached, in the current instance ending government subsidies for fuel and other petroleum products. And so the government starts to reduce the subsidies for these products which affect almost every important aspect of life, and the prices quickly quintuple, sparking wide discontent and protests.[1] Who in this sovereign nation wanted to add more suffering to the already beaten-down Iraqi people? But the international financial mafia are concerned only with making countries meet certain criteria sworn to be holy in Economics 101, like a balanced budget, privatization, and deregulation and thus making themselves more appealing to international investors.