By Dave Lindorff

One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.

In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.

By Dave Lindorff

    American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one.  “Clearly, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."

     Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

Arab American Dems Rally For Obama3 07 2008

On Saturday Night, June 28th, the Moroccan Congress of USA held their “Unite Tonight” for Obama event at Shiraz Grill in Orlando. The event was spearheaded by Jamila “Mimi” Chami, who is the director of the Moroccan Congress in Florida.

By Dave Lindorff

What the hell is Barack Obama talking about?

He says that America should be talking with leaders in Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Korea, Syria. Fine. But he calls this “talking with our enemies.”

What enemies?

Let’s get something straight. Enemies are people who are fighting against you, who are trying to destroy you. Is Cuba fighting against America? Is Iran fighting against America? Is Venezuela fighting against America? Syria? China? No. These countries may be rivals, but they are not enemies.

The closest we come to having an actual enemy in today’s world is North Korea, where we are technically still in some kind of truce following a hot war, but of course that war itself has been over for half a frigging century, and nobody has been killing anyone on the Korean Peninsula in decades.

By Dave Lindorff

So Hillary Clinton, her campaign sagging as it becomes clearer and clearer that she’s not going to get the Democratic nomination unless she can destroy her opponent, insists she would have quit Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago after hearing the allegedly “hateful” words of its pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

But wait a sec. Putting aside the matter of whether what Wright said was even “hateful,” this same Hillary Clinton chose the rabidly anti-semitic Rev. Billy Graham for spiritual mentor in her time of troubles during wayward hubby Bill’s impeachment scandal, and welcomed his offer of support for her senate and presidential bids. This, of course, is the same Billy Graham who was caught on tape telling President Nixon that he thought Jews had a “stranglehold” on the American media, and that if something weren’t “done about it,” the “country’s going down the drain.”

By Dave Lindorff

When I lived in China in the early 1990s, there were things that you could not discuss. One was Tibet. Another was Taiwan, "referred to in my daughter's public elementary school in Shanghai as "China's largest island." Another was the 1989 massacre of students and workers in Beijing. I used to be grateful at the time that I was an American and that back home, we could talk about anything.

Except that in a way we can't. Not in public discourse, anyhow.

Take the silly broughhaha on the Right, in the media, and in the Democratic primary campaign, over the statements of Obama's "spiritual mentor" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Everyone is all worked up--and Obama has sacked Wright from his campaign's religious advisory committee--because of some statements Wright has made that crossed an invisible line of permissible discourse.

There’s a time bomb ticking over here in Europe, and it’s completely off the radar where it will hit the hardest: the US.

The Bush administration is pushing for radical new regulations on airline travel including:

- Armed guards on all US-airline flights from Europe to the US
- More personal data on all air passengers FLYING OVER (not even landing in) the US
- Europeans will need new permits and a lengthier permission-application process before even booking a ticket to the US
- "Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers - for example family members - who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as ‘absurd’".

http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/nesara/news/news.php?q=1198091808

Criminal collapse of Citibank and Morgan Stanley imminent

Page update: 19.12.07

A stolen sum totalling $4.5 trillion (four and a half trillion American dollars) was held illegally in a suspense account at Citibank’s offices at 399 Park Avenue, New York, USA, at the end of October 2007 and the beginning of November 2007. The money returned to Citibank on the 16th November 2007, having been temporarily concealed at Morgan Stanley.

By Dave Lindorff

The New York Times had a news article about Venezuela in Thursday’s edition, but it was about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saying he would cut diplomatic ties with neighboring Colombia. There wasn’t a word about a memo from a CIA operative in Caracas to CIA Director General Michael Hayden, uncovered yesterday, outlining a plan for interfering with a Venezuelan referendum set for Dec. 2, and laying out the steps for instigating and backing a coup.

The plot, called “Operation Pliers,” and laid out in the letter to Hayden by an undercover operative named Michael Steele, who reportedly works in the US Embassy as a “regional affairs officer,” was intercepted by Venezuelan intelligence and released publicly on state TV yesterday.