Category: Uncategorized

Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS (Counterpunch)

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Leaders of the puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serioU.S. doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the U.S. Government.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.

Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”

What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?

Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.

CP for more

By Marjorie Cohn (marjoriecohn.com)

From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).

Between 2.5 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange. 1.4 billion hectares of land and forest – approximately 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam – were sprayed.

The Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases, and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.

The U.S. government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. The U.S. government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange. It wasn’t until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.

U.S. soldiers who served in Vietnam have experienced similar illnesses. After they sued the chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the government, the case settled out of court for $180 million which gave few plaintiffs more than a few thousand dollars each. Later the U.S. veterans won a legislative victory for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. They receive $1.52 billion per year in benefits.

But when the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies in federal court, U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Agent Orange did not constitute a poison weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. Weinstein had reportedly told the chemical companies when they settled the U.S. veterans’ suit that their liability was over and he was making good on his promise. His dismissal was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The chemical companies admitted in their filing in the Supreme Court that the harm alleged by the victims was foreseeable although not intended. How can something that is foreseeable be unintended?

On May 15 and 16 of this year, the International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange convened in Paris and heard testimony from 27 victims, witnesses and scientific experts. Seven people from three continents served as judges of the Tribunal, which was sponsored by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).

Marjorie Cohn for more

By Ishaan Tharoor (Time Mobile)

When Pakistani troops began to pummel Taliban positions in the Swat Valley last month, there were other military advances against insurgent outposts — barely noticed by the global media — taking place in valleys not so far away. In late May, Uzbek soldiers and tanks patrolled parts of the troubled Ferghana Valley following shootouts with suspected Islamist extremists and a suicide bombing in the valley’s main city of Andijan. In neighboring Tajikistan, government forces fanned out across the remote Rasht Valley in a supposed attempt to hunt down a notorious militant commander named Abdullo Rakhimov. The veteran jihadi, according to some local reports, had recently abandoned Taliban allies in Pakistan to resume the struggle in his nearby native land.

While much of the focus of the U.S.-led war on terror now surrounds that theater of operations the Obama administration terms “Af-Pak,” the post-Soviet ‘Stans to the north present their own strategic quagmire. The tactical support of governments in the region is becoming increasingly vital for U.S. plans to bring stability to Afghanistan. Central Asian countries also sit atop a significant chunk of the world’s untapped oil and natural gas reserves, assets which are eyed covetously by both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region — dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes — is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies vulnerable to domestic upheaval. “There is the possibility for really unpredictable change,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And it’s change few Central Asia watchers expect to be positive. While great powers vie for resources and influence, countries that were once seen as a bulwark against more turbulent nations to the south and west are themselves lurching toward crisis.

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(Submitted by reader)

By Stefan Stern (Financial Times)

Can you become a billionaire by accident? It seems unlikely. Surely wealth of that kind has to be fought for and won against almost impossible odds. Billionaires, you might think, should be imposing figures, battle-hardened veterans from the financial world.
But if you had asked other diners at The Jam Factory in Oxford on a recent, damp lunchtime to pick out the billionaire in the room, I doubt they would have pointed to the FT’s guest, Jeff Skoll. Slim, slight even, with flyaway brown hair and a short stubbly beard, he looked more like a young academic or artist than a corporate titan. The taller, more heavily built gentlemen (a press officer and some other suited figures) who had arrived with him and gone to sit at a corner table, looked more the part.

Skoll was formally dressed too, but less assertively. He was wearing a dark blue suit, light-coloured shirt and pale blue tie. Having only just arrived in the UK from Los Angeles a couple of days earlier he was still pretty jet-lagged. But this did not explain his quiet demeanour. Skoll doesn’t really do media, you see, only one extended interview a year at best. He was here on sufferance, offering himself for interrogation, to publicise his philanthropic work with the Skoll Foundation (more on that later). Even though he was probably dreading the next 90 minutes, his manners were impeccable. He shook hands, smiled bravely and sat down.

The 44-year-old made his money as the first company president at Ebay, the online auction site. He joined the then one-year-old company in 1996 after completing an MBA at Stanford in California in 1995. He wrote a business plan for company founder Pierre Omidyar and stuck around for five years, when he stepped back from the business. Two months after the company’s flotation, in September 1998, Skoll found that his (then) 22 per cent shareholding made him a billionaire. The precise level of his wealth has fluctuated since, of course, and he has sold shares to fund his activities but in March this year Forbes magazine estimated he was worth $1.8bn (£1.13bn).
What would you do with that sort of money? How would it make you feel? Skoll is, I sense, deeply uneasy about the whole thing. He’s really just a nice shy kid from Toronto (mum was a teacher, dad was in business). He didn’t ask to be rich. It just sort of happened.
The venue for our lunch is The Jam Factory, an arty café in the old Frank Cooper marmalade building in Oxford. It turns out to be a good choice. Skoll has crossed the road from the Said Business School, where he is attending his own Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship, which is being staged, in Oxford as usual, for the sixth time.

The waitresses are attentive and are soon by our side taking the order. We both opt for the (very good value) £5 “quicky” offer: soup and a sandwich. Skoll goes for tomato and basil soup followed by a coronation chicken sandwich, while I have carrot, parsnip and lentil soup with the gravadlax sandwich to follow. There being no iced tea available – this is England, after all – my guest has to settle for mineral water. I have a ginger beer. One of the richest men in the world is going to have one of the cheapest ever lunches with the FT.
When he left Ebay in 2001, there was only one direction for a reluctant billionaire like him to head in. “I had started to think about philanthropy, which I’d never really thought about before, because I never had any money,” he says. “I was living off room-mates’ leftovers and then all of a sudden I had all this money.” He sounds half-sad, half-amazed. But while he had sincere ambitions to support social entrepreneurship – business people who try and make money working on worthwhile causes – his initial efforts were, by his own admission, patchy.

This changed when Skoll met and briefly worked with John Gardner, who had been the minister for health, education and welfare under Lyndon Johnson, and the architect of his “great society” programmes. “He said something that really stuck with me. I said, ‘Look, I’m trying to figure out my own philanthropy, I have set up a foundation [the Ebay Foundation] and I’m doing different things.’ I asked him, ‘What do you think is the most effective way for philanthropy to make a difference in the future?’ And he said: ‘Bet on good people doing good things.’
FT for more

SURFACE LIBRARY GALLERY presents:
TEXTURES
Artists as alchemists survey aesthetic significance with unexpected and repurposed materials
by guest curator Lynn Dunham

OPENING Reception:
June 27th 2009, 6 – 8 PM
845 Springs Fireplace Rd
East Hampton, NY 11937
Exhibit runs 6/25/09- 7/26/09

For more information:
(631)291.9061

info@surfacelibrary.com or visit our website: www.surfacelibrary.com
Featuring images from the Bagit! series.

Guest curator Lynn Dunham of Art Rent & Lease has assembled a group of artists who find unexpected beauty in unusual materials with an emphasis on texture.

Participating artists include international and local artists whose work is currently on rotation with Art Rent and Lease – a cyber-gallery that rents, leases and sells fine art to business and residential clients, including eco-friendly Green Art. Lynn Dunham brings her unique art-acquiring concept to SURFACE LIBRARY in support of emerging and established artists and to promote sustainable, green and environmentally friendly art.

Ms. Dunham Dunham has chosen works by David M. Mitchell, Vincent Romaniello, Gregory Coates, Matuschka, Gabriel Shuldiner, Jesse Pasca, James Kennedy, Lori Glavin and Tanya Bell – all of whom explore texture with unconventional materials. Lori Glavin and Gregory Coates are relevant to the Art Rent and Lease “green” certification, whereby site specific works are created with re-purposed materials.
Matuschka for more on Matuschka

To be published in Pakistan in the first week of July.

The book portrays many aspects of this great man which remain unknown. How he took interest in so many things and when got going he did them with extraordinary finesse. He spun khadi and wove sarees for his wife Kasturba on a loom and stitched blouses for her. He was hair-cutter, made leather sandals, washed clothes and cleaned toilets with broom and bucket Gandhiji did the most menial tasks with utmost pride. This book has the power to sensitize and change people. He told us that every single individual on earth can make a significant contribution. Gandhiji’s message is loud and clear – Live Simply, so that Others Can Simple Live….”

The English version can be read at http://mkgandhi.org/bahurupi/bahurupi.htm
The following is a Foreword by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru:

This book is for children. But I am sure that many grown-ups will read it with pleasure and profit.
Already Gandhiji has become a legend. Those who have not seen him, especially the children of today, must think of him as a very unusual person, a superman who performed great deeds. It is desirable, therefore, for the common aspects of his life to be placed before them, as is done by this book.
It is extraordinary how in many things he took interest and when he took interest, he did so thoroughly. It was not superficial interest. It was perhaps his thoroughness in dealing with what are considered to be the small things of life which emphasized his humanism. That was the basis of his character.
I am glad that this book has been written telling us of how Gandhiji functioned in a variety of ways, quite a part from politics and the public scene . It will perhaps give us a greater insight into him.
Jawaharlal Nehru
New Delhi, 10th March, 1964.

(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)

From The Economist print edition
Illustration by KAL

Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic

AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson

A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.

By M K Bhadrakumar (Asia Times Online)

By the yardstick of Jacques, the melancholy philosopher-clown in William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has indisputably passed the stage of “Mewing and pucking in the nurse’s arms”.

Nor is SCO anymore the “whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school”. The SCO more and more resembles Jacques’ lover, “Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” Indeed, if all the world’s a stage and the regional organizations are players who make their exits and entrances, the SCO is doing remarkably well playing many parts. That it has finally reached adulthood is beyond dispute.

But growing up is never easy, especially adolescence, and the past year since the SCO summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, has been particularly transformational. What stands out when the SCO’s ninth summit meeting begins in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in Russia on Monday is that the setting in which the regional organization – comprising China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – is called on to perform has itself unrecognizably shifted since last August’s gathering of leaders in Dushanbe. First, the big picture.

The locus shifts east
The world economic crisis has descended on the SCO space like a Siberian blast that brings frost and ice and leaves behind a white winter, sparking mild hysteria. The landscape seems uniformly attired, but that can be a highly deceptive appearance. Russia and China, which make up the sum total of the SCO experience, are responding to the economic crisis in vastly different terms.

For Russia, as former prime minister and well-known scholar academician Yevgeniy Primakov observed ruefully in a recent Izvestia interview, “Russia will not come out of the crisis anytime soon … Russia will most likely come out of the recession in the second echelon – after the developed countries … The trap of the present crisis is that it is not localized but is worldwide. Russia is dependent on other countries. That lessens the opportunity to get out of the recession in a short period of time.” [1]

Primakov should know. It was he as president Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister who steered Russia out of its near-terminal financial crisis 10 years ago that brought the whole post-Soviet edifice in Moscow all but tumbling down.

Russia’s economic structure is such that 40% of its gross domestic product (GDP) is created through raw material exports, which engenders a highly vulnerable threshold when the world economy as a whole gets caught up in the grip of recession. But what about China?

This was how Primakov compared the Chinese and Russian economic scenario:
In China too, as in Russia, exports make up a significant part of the GDP. The crisis smacked them and us. The difference is that China exports ready-made products, while on our country [Russia] a strong raw material flow was traditional. What are the Chinese doing?

They are moving a large part of the ready-made goods to the domestic market. At the same time, they are trying to raise the population’s solvent demand. On this basis, the plants and factories will continue to operate and the economy will work.

We [Russia] cannot do that. If raw materials are moved to the domestic market, consumers of such vast volumes will not be found. Raise the population’s solvent demand? That merely steps up imports.

Asia Times Online for more