The neolibral policies followed by the leadership of the Democrat and Republicans alike have led to the economic ruin not only of the USA, but the world..  These principles were put into place over 50 years ago by a jerk from Chicago by the name of Milton Friedman.  Today a foundation of his and his wife still lives after him to fund the end of public education.  You see, the rich don’t give a damn about public education because they can afford to send their children to schools with tuitions that exceed the annual income of many Americans.  Just ask President Obama and his wife.

But frankly, I don’t expect too much to change at the presidential levels of most countries.  Look at Russia.  Just yesterday Putin was re-elected.  The world revolution that is on its way will come from the bottom up–in local governments, in state legislatures and even in the USA at the national level of the House of Representatives.–the one office where it is still feasible for an ordinary citizen to win.

Mexico is a great example of the severe failure of US neo-liberal policies.  Remember how NAFTA was going to “level” the playing field?  The only thing that NAFTA leveled was the majority of the people in Mexico.  According to the OECD, Mexico’s considerable income gap is widening while CONEVAL reports that 3.2 million more Mexicans have been plunged into poverty in the last three years; a striking commentary on the economic policies of right-wing, pro-US President Felipe Calderón.

Mexico makes the Republican/Democrat leaderships with their ongoing sideshow of  two sides of the same corrupted coin look amateurish by comparison.  Like the USA, in Mexico its a game  that both parties play against the majority of “heads the rich win and tails you lost (and the rich still win).

According to an article from The Upside Down World ”,  . . .the favorite to win this year’s crucial election in Mexico is still Enrique Peña Nieto, the much-hyped fresh face of the country’s former ruling dynasty; the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The party is often called  “the dinosaur” for the way it clung to power for 71 years, the PRI was notorious for corruption and political repression but has gained significantly from the National Action Party (PAN)’s tumble in popularity. It’s widely acknowledged, however, that the man really pulling the strings of Peña Nieto’s bid is Carlos Salinas de Gortari; the much-maligned former president (1988-1994) who signed the NAFTA agreement and was repeatedly linked to organized crime.

Felipe Calderón’s PAN will attempt to retain power through Josefina Vázquez Mota, the first ever female candidate for a major Mexican party. She then ran in the primary, held on February 5, 2012 and won with 55%.  During Calderon’s time in office, he appointed her as Secretary of Public education.  The PAN is a socially-conservative outfit with links to extreme right-wing elements of the Mexican Catholic Church. Poverty and unemployment have increased during its twelve years in charge, although its enduring legacy will be the tragically misjudged “Drug War”, which has left over 50,000 victims in its wake.”

Josefina Vazquez Mota has about as zero chance to win.  But even if she does, it makes little difference because Mota and Nieto are merely different sides of the same corrupted coin–no different from President Obama and Mitt Romney.  The one would give us crumbs to keep us pacified while the other would wold take much more.  It’s only a difference in degree–not kind.  Both Obama and Romney are elitists who represent the investor class to the exclusion of the majority.

Bundesarchiv

I read about a disturbing war crimes ruling this morning in Der Spiegal regarding an international court ruling on Friday that Germany cannot be held liable for paying reparations to descendants of victims of a massacre perpetrated during World War II in Italy.   No doubt both the Democratic and Republican leaders of the USA are rejoicing in this verdict as it has implications for them as well.

This means that  people in Afghanistan or Ethiopia, in the Balkans or in Libya, will not be able to take countries to court whose soldiers committed war crimes on their soil. It is a situation that governments everywhere wanted to avoid.

This means that the USA will get away with the war crimes that they have committed all over the world–especially those of the past 20 years under the leadership of both Bushes, Clinton and Obama.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

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The Fosse Ardeatine massacre was a mass execution carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome.

a total of 335 Italian the prisoners were taken, five in excess of the 320 called for. On March 24, led by SS officers Erich Priebke and Karl Hass, they were transported to the Ardeatine caves in truckloads and then, in groups of five, put to death inside the caves.

Since the killing squad mostly consisted of officers who had never killed before, Kappler had ordered several cases of cognac delivered to the caves to calm their nerves. The officers were ordered to lead the doomed prisoners into the caves with their hands tied behind their backs and then have them kneel down so that the soldiers could place a bullet directly into the cerebellum, ensuring that no more than one bullet would be needed per prisoner. MORE AT WIKI

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Note from ILWQ:  No justice for the victims of Fallujah and Bagram.  It is up to individuals like you and me to remember and tell their stories.  We have leaders like Bill Clinton who don’t even bother to convene a cabinet meeting as over 850,000 human beings are hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda. We have leaders like George Bush who turns his back while the US military extract revenge on innocent civilians in Fallujah.  Our current president oversees drone attacks that kill civilians and doesn’t even bother to apologize for it.

For those who care about the truth can view  ”Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre”–a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta.  The film documents the use of chemical weapons and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the USA in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.

Interviews with American ex-military personnel who claimed to have been involved in the Fallujah offensive back up the case for the use of weapons by the United States, while reporters who were stationed in Iraq discuss the American government’s attempts to suppress the news by covert means.

Then there are the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse cases. In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. armed forces in 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also Bagram Collection Point or B.C.P.) in Bagram, Afghanistan. The prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were chained to the ceiling and beaten, which caused their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners’ deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners’ legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged.

The drawing is from WIKI Commons showing a sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell.

“BOMB, BOMB IRAN.”  With Senators who sing songs like this, why is anyone surprised?  The big surprise is why American are stupid enough to keep sending the same war mongers back to Washington DC year after year

“Outrageously yet routinely, America is preparing for yet another war. Though warned by Iran not to bring an aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, the US now has an unprecedented three. (Gee, I wonder why they call it the Persian Gulf, but don’t be surprised if, say, 200% of our high school seniors don’t even realize that Persia is Iran.) Forget the nuclear weapon babble, America is harassing Iran because it ranks in the top five in both oil and natural gas preserves. Further, it has the chutzpah to wrest itself away from the dollar hegemony by selling oil to Russia and China for rubles and yuans. For five years, Iran also tried to operate an oil bourse where customers were asked to pay in currencies other than the greenback. This, America clearly saw as a grave threat and provocation, for if the petro dollar expires, this empire will sink with it. For showing similar insolence, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were barbarically and publically killed, with their final moments broadcast to the world as a warning. See, when there’s a body to be shown, America does not hesitate to display her trophy.

On land, America has surrounded Iran by having troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. At sea, she has dozens of ships, with a permanent naval base in Bahrain. Assassinations linked to Israel and America have happened inside Iran, and American drones have flown over the country, with one shot down.  .  .”

Read the rest of Linh Dinh’s article at The Dissident Voice.

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ILWQ COMMENTS

But do we really have a choice?  Is there any way to stop the corrupt leaders in Washington DC from declaring war on Iran?

No, not as long as we the people continue to send the same corrupt crooks back to Congress every 2 and 4 years.  Over half of Congress make money from war.  Why the hell do Americans expect them to vote against war?

You want real change?

THEN THEY ALL MUST GO.

Cueva de las Manos – over 10,000 years old is among the oldest evidence of indigenous culture in the Americas. Found in Patagonia Argentina – Wiki Commons

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Cross Post from IfLizWereQueen

Now Hillary is warning Iran against interfering in Iraqi affairs.

This has to be the pinnacle of hypocrisy–the Secretary of State of the USA telling another nation to not interfere in another nation’s affairs when the USA is the world’s leader of such behavior.  Of course, in warning Iran, Clinton is issuing a thinly veiled threat to Iraq to not communicate (or else) with Iran.

The truth about why the USA is leaving Iraq is because the people of Iraq are demanding it–not because the US State department wishes it.  It could even be said that Iraq is kicking the USA out of their country. Of course, Obama will turn that into a campaign talking point with a twist:  ”I said we would have all our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 and so it has happened.”  The real truth is that the Iraqi government has said that all US troops will be out of Iraq.

As far as “interfering in Iraqi affairs”, Iran and Iraq have engaged in many cooperative efforts over the past few years.

News Flash Hillary:  Iran and Iraq are already strengthening their ties and have been for several years.

In July of 2011, Iran and Iraq agreed to increase the value of their bilateral trade to $20 billion in the near future.“We agree to increase the value of mutual economic and trade exchange, which is expected to reach 10 billion dollars by the end of the current year, to 20 billion dollars in the near future,” Iran’s First Vice-President Mohammadreza Rahimi told reporters in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on Thursday, IRNA reported. .  .”

In addition, I remember reading about a year ago that Iraq and Iran had teamed up to study the increase in dust storms plaguing both nations since the USA invasion and occupation.  The joint team are working for solutions to alleviate the problem.  The dust storms today are particularly deadly since the dust is contaminated with depleted uranium (DU) from all the spent US munitions.  But thanks to the trade winds, it won’t just be Iraq and Iran whose people are made ill by this poisonous dust, it will affect all people in all four corners of our world.

The trouble with Hillary?  In fact, the trouble with most of Washington is that they adhere to a policy of coercive  democracy.

In 2008 the Financial times quoted Hillary as saying:   “I believe in coercive diplomacy,” she said. “You try to figure out how to move bad actors in a direction that you’d prefer in order to avoid more dire consequences.” [Note from ILWQ:  In a pinch, this statement could stand in for the definition of a co-dependent who "knows best" for all others.]

There is no coercive diplomacy without coercion. You cannot bluff on every hand. Threats of force lost their power in 1999 when Mr Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, tried to harangue Serbia into evacuating Kosovo. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, called America’s bluff, forcing a European war that Nato came within a whisker of losing. When September 11 happened two years later, the bank of credible threats was overdrawn. A threat of war meant a war.

Washington’s conception of US power is outdated. It rests on a willingness to interfere in the internal workings of sovereign countries. That requires force, and it is doubtful whether the tools of force are even still effective.

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ILWQ:  What can you do about it?

You can get your ass down to your city’s Occupy Wall Street site today and start talking and planning for real change in 2012–not merely a changing of the guard.  A policy of coercive democracy is nothing more than colonial imperialism.  Until we replace Congress with Independent non-Wall Street investors who are not millionaires [and who are]  from the 99% who do not adhere to a policy of coercive democracy, little will change.  Therefore:  Run for office as an Independent in 2012!  Support a friend’s campaign for office as an Independent.  Vote for Jill Stein for President.  We have many choices.  Some of them we still need to create and others are there merely waiting to select in 2012.  We don’t have to settle for Democrat or Republican.

Once upon a time things were prosperous in Anytown USA.  There were many thriving businesses. Most of them provided goods and services for the people in the community and the surrounding region.  The largest employer in the community was Widget Deluxe Factory.  Widget Deluxe employed 1,500 employees—all of whom lived in Anytown.  Widget Deluxe  was a Wall Street corporation and its stock was traded on the NYSE.  The widgets that the people made were shipped to other communities where they were then assembled with other widgets.

Mary, who worked at Widget Deluxe, had her nails done every week at Sally’s Nail Salon on Main Street.  In fact, nearly all of Sally’s customers worked at Widget Deluxe.  There were other Wall street-owned businesses in Anytown.  For example there was a McDonalds with 30 employees.  Many of the  Widget Deluxe employees ate lunch there. Anytown was a bustling thriving community. And of course there were locally owned businesses as well such as Joe’s Gardening and Nursery Supplies,  and Belle’s Cafe.

Then one day, over a thousand miles away in New York City, Floyd Blankhead had a brain fart. The stench of it was still lingering as he pulled out his laptop and began to powerpoint his foul inspiration.  Floyd did not know anyone in who lived in Anytown.  In fact, it had been years since Floyd had set foot outside of Manhattan.

Later that week, following his powerpoint presentation, a board member asked:  ”But what about the people? What about the jobs that will be lost if we shut down Widget Deluxe?  After all Widget Deluxe is still operating at a profit.”

Floyd airily waved the questions aside.  ”Profits!  Pah!  What I’m talking about here is the bottom line and  eliminating thousands of dollars in labor costs. Think about the benefits that our stockholders will realize if we cut the labor force by 1,500, not to mention selling off all the fixtures and the deductions that we will receive as the property deteriorates.  The slack can be picked up by our Minneapolis and Buffalo operations.  In this economy no one is going to complain about longer hours.”

And so began the demise of Anytown USA.  Of course Sally’s Nail Salon was one of the first businesses to go after Widget Deluxe folded. Last I heard Sally had a part-time job at the local McDonalds.  A lot of folks have moved away. The few that remain don’t know what they will do when their unemployment runs out.

The millionaires and multimillionaires who got their Widget Deluxe dividend statements never had a clue at what cost.  In fact the irony of it all was that many of them didn’t even notice that the dividend was slightly more than the  payment from the last quarter.

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IfLizWereQueen

Anytown is just one example of many scams that Wall Street financial carnies have pulled and continue to pull on the American people.  They don’t give a damn about Main Street.  They live on and for the corporate bottom line.

Here is another Wall Street Scam that has destroyed thousands of USA Neighborhoods: The Scam of Making a Profit from your Losses

Indeed, the financial world of Wall Street is a true twisted Orwellian newspeak jungle where loss means profit. Buyout guys like Henry Kravis decide to buy a company. They find a company they want to buy.  It may be in your community. Their goal is to make money from the company—but not by growing the company, or by hiring more people, or by making better more competitive products. Their goal is a destructive, evil and self-serving goal—to make money for themselves and their wealthy  investors.  To heck with the people in the community.  Wall Street with the anonymity that it provides investors makes the perfect tool.

The buyout/private equity people like Kravis get some investors to put some cash down.  Then they borrow the rest from banks  When ordinary Americans buy a house or car, you have to pay back the loan and at interest rates much higher than the rich pay.  But thanks to loopholes, created with the help of millionaire members of the US Congress, the buyout guys don’t have to pay back their loans. The company they just bought is responsible for the debt—not them.

So private equity investors like Mr. Kravis and his pals  have layoffs and sell offs. [That means jobs of ordinary Americans.] The debt of the company brings other bonuses—lower taxes.  That’s right.  Same company same product.  Just less taxes. Because of all the new debt, the company gets to pay a lot less taxes  which of course means less money for schools and roads and hospitals in your community.

Then there is capital gains.  When a private equity company sells the company, after they have completely gutted it, the buyout guys take 20%. That’s called carried interest. AND the carried interest that buyout guys like Kravitz collects gets taxed at only 15%.   While people like Kravis make more than a million dollars a day, they get taxed at a lower rate than most ordinary Americans pay.

What happens to the roads and the schools in your community? As far as the rich Wall Street investors are concerned they don’t give a damn.   After all, they don’t live in your community.  They live in places like New York City and Washington D.C. They don’t give a damn.

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Now do you see why I say that if you own Wall Street stock that you are part of the problem?  It’s because you are.

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Syria has opened a “national dialogue” that it hailed as a step towards multi-party democracy after five  decades of Baath party rule. The government said the discussions would include a new media law but the credibility of Sunday’s talks appeared to have been undermined by an opposition boycott.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent, Rula Amin, reported from Beirut, “We have to remember that whoever is there came on an invitation from the government.  MORE

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iflizwerequeen comments

Good!  Hurrah for the bravery of the Syrian people.  Like the people from Bahrain, they are facing torture and death for the stand that they are taking for their freedom and dignity.  They are not accepting the BS rhetoric churned out by the spin masters sponsored by their leaders. I hope that Americans, who face no immediate threat to their lives, will have the courage to stand up to the farce that BOTH parties are playing out today over the debt ceiling–a farce that is supported by the mainstream media spin masters of the USA.  There are many other solutions to solving the debt other than punishing those from our society who can least afford it by cutting social security and medicare.

I hope that in 2012 more Americans have the sense to turn away from BOTH parties.