European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz

Published on Friday, April 27, 2012 by Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/27-1

European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz

'The Occupy movement has been very successful in bringing those ideas to the forefront of political discussion.'
- Common Dreams staff

Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,"

Measuring Wars by a Loss of Principles

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling

http://article.wn.com/view/WNATC098D62D5DFC32E3BD36CEECDCA1CBD3/

Literally over night in May of 1970, President Richard M. Nixon's ill-planned and ill-fated invasion of Cambodia revived the dwindling antiwar movement to vigorous life. Whether it was his verbal barrages of "Peace with Honor" or his "Vietnamization" euphemism that lulled pro-life protesters to sleep, when President Nixon announced he was ordering a military "incursion" into Cambodia to "clean out" bases the enemy had been using for "its increased military aggression," a crescendo of anti-war demonstrations across America occurred. Anger at the draft, false optimism about the endless military occupation in Vietnam, and combat footage of atrocities in the nightly news all had an impact on antiwar protesters. But nothing infuriated them more than escalating the war with Cambodia.

Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters marched on, and then occupied, Washington DC. Millions participated in small rallies and pro-life marches on college campuses nationwide. Military rage and insanity was being met by a more peaceful and more sane and principled movement. Some protesters were willing to even sacrifice their own lives to assure the U.S.-Vietnam/Cambodia War was brought to an end and that senseless killings, killings that had cost the lives of four million Vietnamese and fifty-thousand U.S. troops, would not happen in Cambodia. On May 4, the National Guard opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State killing four students. Ten days later at Jackson State, police fired into a women's dormitory with automatic weapons killing two black students.

But since the U.S.-Vietnam War, most military engagements and occupations have been measured only by the loss of American soldiers. Principles, like increasing technological savagery, psychological distress and political repression, or the disregard for murdering thousands of non-Americans, or even one, has been ignored. The preemptive wars against Iraq and Afghanistan killed hundreds of thousands of people. Millions have become refugees. Prior to these military interventions and even though very few American troops died, sanctions against Iraq killed over 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children and the elderly. Past incursions into Central America, the Caribbean and Africa have also created mass carnage, maiming and killing thousands of people while causing hardship for millions.

Instead of measuring America's wars by how many U.S. soldiers have been killed, why not base them on universal principles that have somehow been lost. If a principle is an important rule, law and guideline which other rules or judgments are derived, why not measure wars on how many non-Americans are killed or the utter disregard for national sovereignty? Since principles denote moral decisions that are required for civilizations to thrive, even survive, should not individuals-especially in wartime-guard against the loss of democratic rights and life? And if the character of a nation is founded on principles and moral beliefs too, instead of self-interest or the tyranny of the market why not: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "Do no harm" values?(1)

Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - The Hospital Of Horrors

By Robert Fisk

Source: The IndependentFriday, April 27, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-children-of-fallujah-the-hospital-of-horrors-by-robert-fisk

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

"We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby's head. A doctor beside me speaks of "Tetralogy of Fallot", a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – "all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body."

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published.

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

By Kathy Kelly and Hakim

Saturday, April 21, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/afghan-screams-aren-t-heard-by-kathy-kelly

Imagine that you knew a business was going to go bankrupt before anyone else...

Imagine that you knew a business was going to
go bankrupt before anyone else...

And took millions from its coffers before
it did...

And then were allowed to control the bankruptcy
process to cover your tracks.

No need for imagination. It's business as usual
at JP Morgan.

A Darkness Visible Afghanistan - by Seamus Murphy

Undesired

India is a diverse country, separated by class and ethnicity. But all women confront the cultural pressure to bear a son. This preference cuts through every social divide, from geography to economy.

This preference originates from the belief that men make money while women, because of their expensive dowry costs, are a financial burden. As a result, there is a near constant disregard for the lives of women and girls. From birth until old age, women face a constant threat of violence and too frequently, death.

The numbers are staggering. Since 1980, an estimated 40 million women are 'missing,' by way of abortion, neglect or murder. 7,000 female fetuses are aborted every day according to the U.N., aborted solely because they are girls. One dowry death is reported every 77 minutes. Countless others are never known.

The government has tried to intervene. Dowry and sex selective abortions are illegal. Yet both practices still thrive, in large part because of deep-rooted cultural prejudices.

Today, eighty percent of Indian states are now facing a shortage of women. To compensate for this differential, young, unknowing women are bought from surrounding countries like Bangladesh and sold to young bachelors. Not knowing a word of the language, these trafficked women now face the same kinds of violence as other Indian women.

Diamonds and gold —vast natural resources that could enrich a nation - are a curse in the Democratic

Republic of Congo, where the Congolese people have suffered the largest death toll since the second world war.

http://mediastorm.com/publication/rape-of-a-nation

"Diamonds and gold — vast natural resources that could enrich a nation — are a curse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Congolese people have suffered the largest death toll since the second world war.

The conflict between warlords and armed rebels for control of these resources have plunged the citizens into a life of poverty, sexual violence, and war. Some 45,000 people die each month as a result.

The actual miners who extract the sought-out treasures have no access to a living wage, societal safety, or simple medical care, while their leaders enrich themselves and allow the misery to continue.

Marcus Bleasdale traces how the west's consumer appetite for these resources have led to such sub-human conditions for the Congolese, and poses that we might make a difference — at the jewelry counter — simply by asking: where does that ring come from?

Published: January 22, 2008"

The Congo's Midas Curse - Meet the men and women who bring you the bling

The Congo's Midas Curse
Meet the men and women who bring you the bling. —Marcus Bleasdale/VII

http://motherjones.com/photoessays/2010/02/congo-photo-essay/child-labor-congo-gold-mining-pit

As far back as Congo's history is recorded, the wealth from this vast natural treasure house has flowed almost entirely overseas, leaving some of the planet's best-endowed land with some of its poorest people. I have often heard Congolese friends say, "We wouldn't have so much trouble if we weren't so rich."

Dealers in mining towns buy diamonds, gold, and whatever else locals can wrest from the ground by hand.

Of all the minerals to be found here, none has for so long lit up the eyes of foreigners as the yellow metal that has shaped the course of conquest on almost every continent. And today, with worldwide economic troubles and ever-rising demand from electronics manufacturing (see "The Scary Truth About Your iPhone&quot sending its price to unimagined heights, a new gold rush is in the making in Congo. Some of the richest goldfields in all of Africa lie up this dirt road, which begins some 350 miles east of the turnaround point of Conrad's nightmare steamboat trip up the Congo River. The journey there, I hope, will be a way of seeing some of this country's tragic—for there is no other word for it—wealth at its point of origin, before it vanishes into jewelry stores and bank vaults and electronics plants in Europe and China, New York and California. .................