By Padmini Arhant
With a finger on the pulse of the economy, the recent reports on employment, housing, financial and stock market post stimulus funding worth $787 billion approved by Congress in February 2009, has drawn both praise and criticism from different quarters. The praise is always welcome and encouraging for any administration and the Obama administration is no exception to the rule, particularly when they are relentlessly engaged in stabilizing the economy as the top priority.
Whereas, the criticism targeted at the President is no revelation considering the partisan Washington atmosphere. The results thus far, indicate the current national unemployment rate at 9.2% against 8% in the pre-approval stimulus package forecast. Further, the reports reveal the economy shed 1.6 million jobs with the White House claiming 150,000 jobs saved since...
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Thank you.
Padmini Arhant
So if being at the mercy of the cost of a barrel of oil is hurting us, why don't we become less dependant on foreign oil? Foreign oil? Well I hate the break the news to you honey, but there is no such thing as foreign oil. Oil is a commodity. The price of oil is the same accross the whole wide world honey. And when the dollar is "worth" less than half of what it was 3 years ago, you can't pay the same amount for a barrel of oil as you did then. Please don't be fooled by low gas prices now.
[PHILADELPHIA - Republican presidential candidate John McCaincut short his first public appearance without running-mate Sarah Palin after chanting supporters of Democratic rival Barack Obama interrupted his speech.
After lunching with a roundtable of women at Philadelphia's Down Home Diner, McCain shook hands with supporters and strode up to a podium to deliver astatement. But as he spoke, chants of "Obama, Obama, Obama" filled the room.
Reporters craned forward trying to hear the Arizona senator. Unfortunately for McCain -- and possibly overlooked by aides who planned the event -- a section of the diner opened up to a market where a crowd had gathered behind a cordon.
A large contingent of Obama supporters showed up, mixed with some who had bumper stickers reading "Democrats for McCain".
"It's time to leave the talk behind and start shaking up Washington and fixing our economy, taking care of the problems facing our families. We'regoing to give a tax cut to every family with a child," he said.
His words were barely audible.
McCain's supporters shouted "John McCain", "John McCain," "John McCain". The duelling chants nearly drowned out the presidential hopeful's voice.
"Pennsylvania is a battleground state as we can tell," McCain said.
Meanwhile Palin, the Alaska governor, was on a flight back to her state.]
U.S. Representative Tom Udall, D-N.M., released the following statement today in solemn remembrance of the tragedies of September 11, 2001:
"September 11 is a day that invokes immense sadness in all of us. Today, we remember the pain that we felt seven years ago.
But Americans learned something about ourselves on September 11, 2001, and what we learned should make us all proud.
We learned that, in America, when we find ourselves face-to-face with tragedy, we know a simple truth: we are our brothers' keepers; we are our sisters' keepers.
We know that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.
That if one American dies needlessly, we are all diminished by that loss. As we mark this somber day, let us take comfort in that lesson: whatever our enemies do to us, Americans will stick together. And we will not be defeated."
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My own recollection/observation was after 9/11 when the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar al Saud, donated a check for many millions of dollars to the 9/11 victims fund, as I recall $10 million, and accompanying the check was a letter in which he made many points, and among them was the question of the United States' need to figure out what it might have done to cause this ghastly disaster and act of Terrorism.
That was too much for Rudy Giuliani, who immediately returned the check to Bandar, objecting very vociferously to Bandar's his commentary.
When I read about this in the New York Times, I immediately recognized this as Giuliani's error, but we all throughout life recognize this uniquely human trait of not being able to accept responsibility (or even a hint of a discussion of responsibility) by someone who is in some kind of serious trouble. It is just too much for them to deal with.....
The Saudi passport of Saeed Alghamdi, said to be discovered in the wreckage of Flight 93.
Steel beams from the WTC were already being removed and recycled on September 20, 2001. [Source: Associated Press]
A chunk of hot metal being removed from the North Tower rubble about eight weeks after 9/11. [Source: Frank Silecchia]
From left to right: Dick Cheney, Prince Bandar, Condoleezza Rice, and George W. Bush, on the Truman Balcony of the White House on September 13, 2001. [Source: White House]
Bandar certainly should have had some keen insights into these matters; from Wikipedia, in italics:
[Prince Bandar has formed close relationships with several American presidents, notably George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, who gave him the affectionate and controversial nickname "Bandar Bush". His friendship with Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, extends to the years before Cheney took office as the United States Vice President. Prince Bandar invited the Cheney family to his daughter's wedding in the 1990s, but they did not attend.
The close relationship with the Bush family is also described in Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud and is highlighted in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11....
Prince Bandar has endured controversy over allegations in the book Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward that President George W. Bush informed him of the decision to invade Iraq ahead of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Also, the book alleged a deal had been worked out to reduce oil prices just ahead of the November 2004 election. Bandar publicly endorsed President Bush.
On June 26, 2005, Prince Bandar reportedly submitted his resignation as ambassador to the United States for "personal reasons".[4][5] Bandar's return to Saudi Arabia was announced weeks prior to the death of King Fahd upon which Bandar's father, Sultan bin Abdul Aziz became the nation's Crown Prince. It has been rumoured that Bandar's return was timed in order to secure a position in the new government.[6] In October 2005 he became the kingdom's national security chief.]
Wat happened? According to another source; "Saudi princesses are no less benevolent than their husbands, brothers and cousins. Ambassador-Prince Bandar's own wife Princess Haifa, daughter of the late King Feisal, received a letter from an unknown woman telling of problems with medical bills. The Princess-Ambassadress dashed her off a check in six figures -- and the money by some strange route ended up among the resources of the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities. The revelation so upset Her Royal Highness that various sympathetic Washington ladies rushed their condolences and sympathy to her -- including Mrs. George H.W. Bush and Mrs. Colin Powell. "
I am not a 9/11 conspiracy kind of guy/paranoid, not at all. I concluded long ago that even talking about such was a waste of time, my time at least....
However, having said that, since September 11, 2001, I do believe we have a lot of evidence of how our hostility about Islam now has alienated most of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, about 60 nations; it is obvious that the Chinese have run rings around us in terms of investment and economic policy throughout most of the world, particularly in Africa; it is screamingly obvious that American excursions into Iraq along with most of the US wars since 1945 have been in essence imperialistic in nature, and as such have earned us increasing hostility; one British tourist visiting Santa Fe compared the British in Ireland to the Americans in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
"If you kill their mothers and children and cousins and brothers over several years, pretty soon the entire nation becomes terrorists."
I do believe that the core of this Modern History was all essentially delineated by Marx, Engels, and especially by Hegel, in his discussions of Dialectical Materialism.
All those ISM's and the thesis/antithesis/synthesis processes make perfect sense to me in explaining the History of Economic Systems; it is clear to me that when Big Pharma and Big Junk Food corporations and their hired guns/lobbyists effectively take over the regulatory processes of a nation, like they have done with the FDA, that we are doomed in health, in history, in medical and consumer credibility, and in Economic well-being.
I have written a lot of articles on related subjects, particularly Consumer Protection, Aspartame, and Donald Rumsfeld's having forced through the FDA the approval for Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde, so he could make $12-20 million personal profit, the health of hundreds of millions of people be damned....
I won't regale you with this on this solemn occasion, but allow me to recall a lecture in Santa Fe a few years ago by former President of Poland and Nobel Laureate Lech Walesa to the effect that the USA has lost its moral stature in toto as well as most of its political power, squandered its economic power in order to preserve and just barely maintain its military power, which was no replacement for moral, political, or economic power. That was quite brilliant, truly.
Similarly, DNC Chairman and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean III, M.D., was recently in Santa Fe to fire up the troops, and one thing in particular stuck with me, when he said no nation could bring peace in any conflict unless it had the moral authority to sit at the negotiating table.
We don't have that power and that moral authority throughout most of the world right now, thanks to the past 8 years of Bush/Cheney/Neocon/Blackwater/Halliburton/Kellogg Brown, and Root mode of economics and government economic policies.
I really don't believe that in general Economics nor specifically that Macro Economic insights from government economic advisors, for example, hardly qualifies as rocket science.
It is more akin to the old irrigation system of colonial New Mexico, in which the farmer who controlled the flow of the irrigation ditch, or ACEQUIA MADRE ("MOTHER DITCH" in Spanish) determined which field the water would flow into. He was called the Majordomo, and in that society, was much more important than any Mayor, or "ALCALDE" in Spanish.
That is what has happened during the past 8 years. The White House and other government masters of the flow of monies have purposefully turned the irrigation ditch waters into such things as Military, Defense Contractors, Weapons, Hardware, Security, etc.
What was in that other field, the one that got neglected and deprived of water?
Just about everything else: Education, Inner Cities, Highway maintenance and construction, Infrastructure, huge realms of Scientific and Medical Research like Stem Cell Research, etc. You name it: our American Economy is in terrible shape, and with the way our international respect has deteriorated, squarely because of Bush and Cheney, it might get a lot worse....the signs are everywhere; they are well known and they are easily recognized: endemic mortage failures, high gas prices, a deflated stock market, high unemployment, failed schools especially in the Inner City, store closings, et. alia.
Much of this election hinges on our ability to change all of that, to put America back on a sane and internationally effective tack, and that is at a minimum, just to ensure our survival as a nation.
That is why I want to see Dr. Dean be the Obama Cabinet Secretary for Health or as FDA Commissioner, and that is why I want to see NM Governor Bill Richardson as the next Secretary of State. I think also that Jerry Brown of California would make a great consumer protection-oriented United States Attorney General, one who would also reconstruct all of our civil liberties.
Such speculations are of course something else entirely, but I am certain that Obama should discuss such things seriously and frequently, ignoring the advice of some who say that that would be ridiculed by the right wing as "presumptuous" or as "arrogant," so that the American people can gain some glimmer of an insight into what he really would like to achieve as President, in terms of names, both possible and real and well known names.
Will Obama win?
To get to that victory, I work day and night as a member of 328 Obama groups, coordinating correspondence, and urging people to not just "preach to the choir," as that is how Democrats usually lose elections, but to get out there and go door to door to tell folks how much is really at stake in this election, plus my special focus: Letters to the Editor, Opinion/Editorials, and so on, all over the United States, wherever they could be published.
Surprising how few people comprehend this in only a few states, and in not many of the so-called BATTLEGROUND STATES, for Obama and for US Senate candidates, as described in my blog about a week ago in the letter from Senator Charles Schumer.
I am going to take a break from all of this furious emailing, so you won't hear from me for a while.
I will conclude with a few paragraphs written today, not by me, but an astute observer and friend of mine,who wishes to remain anonymous, about 50 years old, a realtor, former actress, and thinker:
Recently, I was on a flight to Texas and sat next to a very personable and fairly astute guy. We began talking politics and went back and forth about the issues. He was really impressed by my research and said so.
Then he leaned over to me and whispered conspiratorially, "I concede all the points but Obama is a Muslim, you know."
And when I calmly explained that that particular lie fed on our basest fears, he held up Reverend Wright as proof. This scene has been repeated numerous times with different characters but the underlying emotional message is clear and powerful. Their winning on a gut level. They are afraid and the facts don't matter.
Obama is perceived as "the other."
The Republicans have clearly defined him emotionally and he must wrest these irrational pictures away from them and supplant them with powerful and soothing reassurance.
Obama may loose this election if he does not connect on a visceral level soon. He must capture the emotional narrative and stop trying to be only reasonable. People do not reason their way into the voting booth. They move from the gut.
He has much "low-hanging fruit" to choose from. Sarah Palin is a right-wing fundamentalist wack-job. She is an extremist and Americans of all stripes are uncomfortable with extremism. John McCain has abandoned every "maverick" position he's ever held.
It's all on video, from her prayers to the oil pipeline god to the massively naked ambition which has led him to do a 180 on every major political stance of his past. Use Their Own Words To Out This Outrageous Hypocricy. Draw passionate simple pictures once again and reframe this narrative, from the gut. It's the only way. "
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Obama has to win!
Juan Coles' piece on Salon.com drives home the point that a "theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian." He notes that Sarah Palin, the "GOP vice-presidential pick holds that abortion should be illegal," which is a view "stricter than that of the Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Palin's view represents "a literalist religious impulse that resists any compromise with the realities of biology and of women's lives."
More after the flip . . .
It is a measure of the Bush administration's broken foreign policy that the departure of Pervez Musharraf, the corrupt, long-time military dictator of Pakistan, is provoking fears in Washington of "instability." Despite Bush's warm embrace, Musharraf gutted the rule of law in Pakistan over the previous year and a half, including sacking its Supreme Court. He attempted to do away with press freedom, failed to provide security for campaigning politicians and strove to postpone elections indefinitely.Bush, Cheney and McCain have a regular practice of undermining democracy in places where local politics don't play out to their liking, and in that Musharraf was a true partner. But stability does not derive from a tyrannical brake on popular aspirations but from the free play of the political process. Musharraf's resignation marks Pakistan's first chance for a decent political future since 1977.
You can read the whole thing here.Meanwhile, the Karachi newspaper Dawn runs down how Bush was finally convinced that Musharraf had to go.- Bush was the last holdout supporting Musharraf in Washington, long after Rice and even Cheney had concluded he was not viable.
- PM Yousef Raza Gilani's recent trip to Washington was largely aimed at convincing Bush and others that the dictator had to go. "The prime minister took a team of 'Musharraf experts' with him to the luncheon and they played a key role in persuading Mr Bush to stop supporting the Pakistani leader."
- U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson "argued that if Washington continued supporting Mr Musharraf it would end up stoking massive anti-American feelings in Pakistan."
- Joint Chief Chairman Mike Mullen made three trips to Pakistan and engaged in intensive discussions with his opposite number, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, receiving assurances that without Musharraf the Pakistani military would remain committed to the fight against the neo-Taliban and al-Qaeda.
- Pakistan's Ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, expertly worked Congress and the Senate, as well as think tanks, trying to convince them that Pakistan would not be "unstable" without Musharraf. People in Washington are so funny. Musharraf has been like a one man hurricane in Pakistan for the last year and a half, and the source of most of its instability.
- Perhaps thinking perhaps of his own, personal vulnerability come Jan. 2009. Bush wanted assurances that Musharraf would be granted legal immunity. He enlisted the help of Britain and Saudi Arabia. Dawn reports, "The British sent their former ambassador in Islamabad, Mark Lyall Grant, to Pakistan and the Saudis sent their intelligence chief Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz to negotiate the terms for Mr Musharraf's departure." The Saudis also put pressure on former PM Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Muslim League (N), to tone down his rhetoric (Sharif was in exile in Saudi Arabia for years and is close to its elite).
- Once Bush was convinced Musharraf had to step down, the super-majority in the Pakistani parliament began moving against him.
Imagine my surprise at discovering that Bush, not Cheney, was the last holdout. If the man really does have no common sense and is the ultimate decision-maker, that helps clarify what has gone so wrong for the last seven years.
I just listened to a part of Bushs speech yesterday. He talks about talking to terrorists and rogue regimes. He says "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."Now, today we hear that Bush was in Saudi Arabia begging the government to increase oil production... as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.
This is the same country with heavy links to 9/11. A country with people and leaders who have supported terrorism and, of course, the homeland of Osama Bin laden. A country that is litterally laughing all the way to the bank with record high gas prices.
I thought we did talk to people like that Mr. Bush.
I am an American living and working in Saudi Arabia for the past 13 years. I have watched with dismay as the reputation of my home country has plummeted among my friends and neighbors in my adopted home. When I first arrived in Riyadh in 1995....
Attached are washingtonpost , The New York Times' mediamatters, jihadwatch, nysun and digg dot com articles revealing the Clintons as recipients of contributions exceeding $10,000,000 from the government of Saudi Arabia for The Clinton Library. Hillary has made universal women's rights one of the platforms of her Presidential campaign. During the Iowa caucuses, she accused Iowans of being "Mississippi-like" in having failed to elect women to their legislature. Further, she recently pointed to her speech in China in defense of women's rights worldwide.
How can Mrs. Clinton be an advocate for the rights of women to live their lives free of the most heinous of abusive practices that are commonplace and mundane in Saudi Arabia, while receiving the implicit endorsement of such a barbaric regime made paramount by the acceptance of their multi-million dollar contributions? What moral authority will empower the words of a President Hillary Clinton when, at 3:00 A.M., international women's rights organizations call for immediate emergency American intervention to save the lives of a nine teenage Saudi girls to be beheaded in the morning for the crime against morality of "dancing and holding hands?" Mrs. Clinton, will you refund, denounce and reject?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1204/p02s02-usgn.html?page=1
Lu Gronseth listens regularly to WWTC, a conservative talk-radio station in Minneapolis, and even advertises his mortgage-loan business on the station. But when he learned that a nationally syndicated radio show host had told WWTC listeners that Muslims should be deported and made rude comments about what they could do with their religion, Mr. Gronseth pulled his ads from the station.
So have at least two other Minnesota businesses, at the urging of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., as have a handful of national companies, including OfficeMax, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, and AT&T. But the comments by host Michael Savage in October – and previous anti-Muslim speech – have not created the furor that knocked radio icon Don Imus off of MSNBC and CBS Radio after he denigrated a black women's basketball team. That leaves many Muslims-Americans – and non-Muslims like Mr. Gronseth – suspicious that Americans have a double standard when it comes to Islam.
Have you seen the news? President Bush is negotiating a deal with Iraq to keep our troops there indefinitely--it could include permanent bases and a massive military presence for years! Bush is trying to tie the hands of the next president.
Congress can stop him from setting up permanent bases in Iraq and block an indefinite occupation--but they need to hear a groundswell of pressure from us immediately and loudly so they act on this quickly.
I just signed a petition demanding that Congress stop the president from committing to a massive military presence in Iraq for decades. Can you join me?
http://pol.moveon.org/endless/?r_by=11723-5077189-Cf.Eao&rc=comment_paste
Thanks!
So when Bush failed to find any WMD's in Iraq as well as any connections between Saddam and Osama, he tried to shift the focus from risks to national security to human rights. Not that there weren't several nations with people much worse off, and whom were much more legitimate threats (like North Korea), but for whatever reason, he had his heart set on Iraq. So... human rights huh, Bush?
Then why, pray tell, are you keeping so quiet about this woman in Saudi Arabia who got sentenced to time in jail as well as now 200 lashes for being raped? Isn't this the type of cruelty you preached so vehemently against when you were trying to build a case for invading Iraq?
"But they're our friends! They gave me ice cream!" Time to get a reality check, Mr. President.
I found this excellent clip of the daily show on crooksandliars.com
Its a great summery of the insane games the US has played in the Middle East over the past few decades that often lead us to fighting enemies with weapons we gave them.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/23/daily-show-three-generations-of-america-to-the-rescue/
Four sources of data show that Saudi Arabia's (KSA) oil production declined 8% in 2006. Other indicators combine to confirm KSA's oil production has passed peak and can be expected to continue to decline at rates even higher than 8% per year. See The Oil Drum.
(Oil production in the United States peaked in 1970-71, and now is a mere fraction of its peak. Alaska's oil production peaked in 1987, and now is less than half of peak.)
Saudi production decline is monumental news because, as Matthew Simmons has said many times in his speeches and as he wrote in Twilight in the Desert: the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, Saudi oil production decline presages total global oil production decline.
American urgently needs an informed energy policy directed toward understanding the whole of the bottleneck we're facing. Our energy needs have profound implications for everything, including the cost of endless, fruitless war, trade deficits, global competition, economic vulnerability, health care, immigration, agriculture, transportation, and life as we know it.
