Saturday, May 19, 2012

At Summit, a Struggle for Consensus on Economic Woes ~ WSJ

http://on.wsj.com/KPkjcz
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Updated May 19, 2012, 7:20 p.m. ET
By CAROL E. LEE, SUDEEP REDDY and STEPHEN FIDLER

CAMP DAVID, Md. -- Leaders of the Group of Eight major economies struggled to agree on next steps to calm the euro zone debt crisis, with consensus at a weekend summit coming more easily on ways to cushion the world from an Iranian oil embargo.

Meeting at the presidential retreat here, the G-8 leaders agreed that the euro-zone turmoil posed a critical threat to the global economy. But there were distinct signs of differences on the crucial question of how to resolve them.

In a joint statement Saturday, the G-8 leaders said they would take steps to boost their economies, while "recognizing that the right measures are not the same for each of us."

For U.S. President Barack Obama, who can do little more than nudge European leaders toward a solution, an economic crisis in Europe that spreads to the U.S. could be a devastating blow to his re-election campaign.

"All of us are absolutely committed to making sure that both growth and stability -- and fiscal consolidation -- are part of an overall package that all of us have to pursue in order to achieve the kind of prosperity for our citizens

Photos: G-8 Leaders Meet
View Slideshow

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European Pressphoto Agency

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Leaders of the world's eight richest economies gathered in Camp David Saturday.


G-8 leaders, from left, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, Canada's Premier Stephen Harper, new French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Council president Herman van Rompuy and EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso focused on Iran, North Korea, Burma and Syria during the Friday night dinner.

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Michael Froman, the White House deputy national security adviser for international economics who attended the day's sessions, said leaders showed "total consensus" that major economies needed to adjust their budgets and to boost growth. Officials generally agreed that major economies needed new steps to boost growth, even if they disagreed on how best to do that.

But others who attended the sessions indicated that divisions remained about how specifically to deal with Greece and the currency union's broader debt woes.

Some in the group, including new French President François Hollande, wanted to send a strong signal to Greece that its future lay in remaining within the euro zone.

But other leaders accepted German Chancellor Angela Merkel's position that argued that if support for Greece was unequivocal, it risked sending the message that Greece could have a free ride without having to meet conditions attached to its bailout aid.

The result was a lukewarm summit statement afterward in which the leaders said, "We affirm our interest in Greece remaining in the euro zone, while respecting its commitments."

Before the meeting, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, "There is a growing sense of urgency that action needs to be taken, contingency plans need to be put in place and the strengthening of banks, governments, firewalls… need to take place very fast."

But there was no sign of any concrete new initiative emerging from the meeting, in which non-euro-zone leaders recognized that decisive measures could only come from inside the currency bloc.

European Union leaders meet in Brussels on Wednesday for a summit aimed at pushing growth, in response to Mr. Hollande's election campaign and the urging of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. But no concrete new measures appear to be in the offing, and one senior European official said the meeting would likely be dominated by the "psycho-drama" of Greece.

The G-8 welcomed "the ongoing discussion in Europe on how to generate growth, while maintaining a firm commitment to implement fiscal consolidation."

Mr. Hollande took satisfaction in the fact that the role of growth had been expanded in the economic debate.

"In the name of France, I wanted to put growth at the heart of the debates, and make sure that growth, as well as budgetary discipline, could find its place in all meetings, at the G-8, at the European council, and at the G-20," Mr. Hollande told reporters at a press conference at Camp David.

For Mr. Obama, Ms. Merkel, the German leader, has been a key focus this weekend as Europe's chief driver of austerity and the continent's most powerful player in the euro-zone. Mr. Obama has prodded her in side conversations to ease her strict preference for budget-cutting as more of the Europe risks falling into recession.

The two were to hold a formal one-on-one meeting Saturday evening after the conclusion of the summit.

Mr. Obama hoped that the informal setting at Camp David would encourage free-flowing discussion among the leaders as a long list of security and economic concerns threaten to flare up in the coming months. Aides said the leaders frequently pulled each other aside on Friday night and Saturday morning for one-on-one discussions.

The G-8, the largest ever gathering of world leaders at Camp David, began with a Friday night dinner focused on several hot-button security issues.

On Saturday, leaders addressed a series of such concerns. The G-8 leaders vowed to maintain pressure on Iran amid growing concerns about the country's nuclear program. But they acknowledged that new U.S. sanctions and a European Union embargo in the coming months risked disrupting global oil supplies further.

The G-8 nations said they "stand ready" to call on the International Energy Agency, which coordinates emergency oil stockpiles for major energy consumers, "to take appropriate action to ensure that the market is fully and timely supplied," according to a separate statement Saturday.

The G-8 agreement is intended "to provide assurance that we are determined to implement the sanctions fully," Mr. Froman said. "It's an important statement -- to the market, to consumers, to producers, to the Iranians -- that the G-8 has a common position that they are ready to act."

U.S. officials said the leaders negotiated the specific wording of the statement themselves while sitting around a circular wooden table, a task at international summits that's usually left to aides.

G-8 leaders' discussion on Syria focused on the need to move toward political transition, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, told reporters Saturday. The U.S., he said, used Yemen as an example. Mr. Rhodes said Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev "did not dispute" the need for a political transition in Syria.

Mr. Obama said Saturday that the leaders are supportive of a plan put forward by United Nations envoy Kofi Annan, but that it "has to be fully implemented and that a political process has to move forward in a more timely fashion."

Many G-8 leaders will leave for Chicago Saturday night to attend a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.

Afghanistan will be the primary focus of the two-day summit.
—Gabriele Parussini and Toko Sekiguchi contributed to this article.

Write to Carol E. Lee at carol.lee@wsj.com, Sudeep Reddy at sudeep.reddy@wsj.com and Stephen Fidler at stephen.fidler@wsj.com
~~
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303360504577413932511290566.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


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Friday, May 18, 2012

#OWS Can Occupy Fight Back Against the War on Women? ~by Sarah Seltzer

http://bit.ly/LfGCUP




Three hundred feminists blanketed the concrete in Washington Square Park last night, their attention focused by the now-familiar mic check. The “Raging Grannies” had just performed. A banner, framed by the park’s iconic arch, declared that the first NYC Feminist General Assembly, presented by Women Occupying Wall Street (WOWS), was in full swing.

The first Feminist General Assembly is a model for how OWS can—and can't—work alongside established social movements.

By Sarah Seltzer
After seven months of reporting on feminism and the work of women activists in the Occupy movement, I wanted to know: could this meeting be a model for how OWS collaborates with other social movements? Might I witness the forming of a new activist coalition, bringing SlutWalkers, Occupiers, second-wavers and radicals together to fight back against the assault on rights we know as the War on Women?

The assembly gathered activists of a wide range of ages, ethnicities, abilities and gender presentations, with a noticeable majority of cisgender (that is, non-transgender) white women. Not a single police officer looked on, a rarity for an OWS event.

We began in consciousness-raising knots of three. Facilitators from WOWS instructed us to speak in turn without interruption about our personal involvement with feminism. In my cluster, blushes and downturned eyes in response these big questions gradually turned into animated conversations when we fell into small talk: “When did you move to New York?” “Wasn’t May Day awesome?”

Later, we broke into larger circles to brainstorm goals, leading into an hour of intense discussions. As the sun set, speakers from each breakout group shared their results, echoing over the human microphone. Soon, the usual Occupy hand signals dissolved into vocal responses: applause, hoots, and shouting.

A few themes emerged: first, the need to fight the assault on reproductive freedom and second, the need to make feminism more inclusive of trans people, the disabled, incarcerated women, women of color, and “different discursive styles.”

Many goals presented were big-picture. We should fight capitalism, reclaim our history, unite with labor, and educate our kids about misogyny. There were some Occupy-style solutions: those whose voices dominate should “step back” for an entire meeting. Let’s have more feminist tweets from Occupy’s account. We should distribute free condoms, as an art project, all over the city. Men should notice when they are “mansplaining” (this one got a thunderous ovation).

Occasionally, the conversation got a little jargony: my group’s representative announced our rejection of the notion that we could even come up with a set number of goals in a timed scenario. “It’s a temporality that’s...anti-feminist!” she said, getting knowing laughs.

A number of speakers alluded to an uneasy alliance between OWS and mainstream feminism. “We want Occupy’s support fighting women’s issues,” one speaker said. “We are Occupy!” shouted someone from behind me. “When I was presenting the breakout group questions last night, a woman asked if we were trying to separate feminism from the purpose of the movement,” said Simran Sachdev, an organizer with WOWS. “What she was missing is how feminism is integral to the movement!” Occupy won’t create change, Sachdev said, “if it doesn't recognize the need to include the values of feminists, women, and transgender individuals.”

A push to inject feminism into Occupy and bring the action-oriented focus of OWS to feminist issues were the genesis for this General Assembly, which emerged from the Women Occupying Wall Street Caucus, a group forged in the early days of the Zuccotti Park occupation. Its members wanted to address oppressive behavior within their own ranks and pick the brains of experts on feminism.

“We have a lot to learn. Many of us are new to feminism,” said Lisa Rubenstein, one of the GA’s organizers. “This is the great thing about Occupy. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’ve learned in these eight months.”

In planning the GA, WOWS expanded its membership to include participants like Dior Vargas, who had bypassed Zuccotti Park entirely. “I felt that I couldn’t relate to OWS’s mission,” Vargas, who works in publishing, said. But organizing around feminist issues offered “a place where I could make a difference.” “As with all the previous movements, it doesn’t take very long before feminism becomes an obvious next step,” novelist Alix Shulman, another organizer told me. “It’s one thing to be alive for a great political movement as I was for the second wave, but to be able to do it twice in my lifetime is a huge privilege.”

The very public battles over reproductive rights all winter long provided the catalyst that pushed this group into high gear for the GA. “If there’s truly going to be a ‘war on women,' we need to form a peaceful army,” said Melanie Gold, a member of WOWS. Organizers said they didn’t want to kick start a new wave of feminism, but rather “a tsunami.”

Although this wasn’t the first feminist GA in Occupy history (activists in LA, DC and elsewhere have had women or feminist-centered GAs) it was the first in New York. Organizers wanted to emerge from the GA with a trajectory towards fighting back.

“You don’t have to agree on everything to work together and be productive,” Sachdev told me earlier this week, when I asked her how she’d feel if some attendees were fans of Occupy bête noire and high-profile Planned Parenthood donor Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

And after the report backs, announcements, and a final performance from Mahina Movement, there was plenty of energy, if not a concrete action plan.

Aspects of this GA offered a model for how Occupy can work with other progressive movements without accusations of “co-option” on either side. The fact that the organizers of the GA were both new to and familiar with Occupy meant that the attendees came from both inside and outside the movement, an example of horizontalism—rejecting hierarchy—in action. Beyond that, the GA reinforced the notion of Occupy as platform for ideas, rather than organization. The simple act of presenting feminist ideas in the Occupy format--in a public space, welcome to all, mingling with strangers beyond the reach of institutions--was refreshing and inspiring, the opening of a door of possibility, almost like the early days at Zuccotti Park. I realized with a start during the event that I’d never been in a public space that simply existed for feminist-minded conversation before, without a destination or goal or even work-oriented networking.

Will that door of possibility lead to a new coalition or plan for action? That remained unclear. None of the goals mentioned in the report-backs included targeted plans like “organize a sit-in in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops offices.” No specific march or strike or radical art project is in the works, and no one appeared as a representative from an established feminist organization to start building a formal coalition. At this point, the OWS ethos may not mesh with most institutional organizations, and perhaps that’s okay. What the feminists at the GA wanted more than a formal partnership was to keep converging and talking. So the one thing there will definitely be? Another GA.

When Rubenstein took a “temperature check” about how often participants wanted to gather, almost everyone present raised hands to indicate they wanted monthly feminist GAs. The organizers grinned. “Come back with an idea for an action that is both fun and uncomfortable,” Rubenstein exhorted the crowd before it dispersed. 
 
http://www.thenation.com/article/167969/can-occupy-fight-back-against-war-women

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#Latino Stop & Frisk ~ Juan Cartagena

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/juan-cartagena/latino-stop-frisk_b_1522893.html

Juan Cartagena ~ President and General Counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF

Posted: 05/18/2012 7:50 am

From the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles to the garbage fires set by Young Lords in East Harlem, urban Latino youth have had to overcome predators in Blue. Some relief came with the wave of successful discrimination challenges that integrated the ranks of police with Blacks and Latinos. Law enforcement began to adopt community policing models as one of the few proactive elements to their repertoire, and by and large probable cause and its lite-counterpart, reasonable suspicion, ruled most encounters.

Now decades after the havoc created by Nixon's ill-fated but still perpetual War on Drugs our urban police are modeled under a Cheneyesque paradigm of prevention. It's called Zero Tolerance Policing (ZTP) and like the War on Drugs it operates under a racial construct. ZTP is never activated in the business class brothels of Manhattan because most of the Johns are white, nor is it deployed on Wall Street where cocaine trafficking is legendary. Similarly, the so-called War on Drugs is never a real war in America's malls even as the profile of a typical drug user in America is a white male.

Nor is ZTP played out in a black-white binary in urban America. No señores, Latinos are also disproportionately targeted by an overzealous, quota-driven police force in many of our cities.

New York City is the classic example; indeed, it is the ground zero of over-policing. In 2002 at the start of the Bloomberg administration about 97,000 persons were subject to the Stop & Frisk effort. That's now increased seven times with over 685,000 persons ensnared in 2011.

Latinos have definitely felt the impact. The first serious study of Stop & Frisk was by then Attorney General Elliot Spitzer whose groundbreaking 1999 report, analyzing over 175,000 incidents, confirmed what our Latino residents experienced day in and day out: even when you control for crime, Latinos were more likely than whites to be stopped. Even worse, stops of Blacks and Latinos were less likely to result in arrests than concomitant stops of Whites. None of these unsettling conclusions have eroded even with today's data.

In 2012, with Stop & Frisk continuing unabated, it seems like the more we complain the more Commissioner Ray Kelly and his occupying forces conduct Stop & Frisk. And Latinos are disproportionately found within its web. The most recent Stop & Frisk report by the NYCLU concludes that not only are Blacks and Latinos disproportionately subject to these practices but 90% of young Black and Latino men stopped were innocent.

The stakes are higher now as the positions have hardened for and against Stop & Frisk. Commissioner Kelly still walks on water in NYC - murders are down, so why stop Stop & Frisk? Outgoing Mayor Bloomberg - who admitted to inhaling marijuana and liking it - still presides over the marijuana arrest capital of the world in a State - get this - that decriminalized marijuana possession decades ago. That's over 50,000 low-level pot busts in 2011, second-highest in NYC history.

On the other side Black, Latino and progressive White elected officials have increased the volume of their critiques. Many Black and Latino electeds have their own personal narrative here, having been picked up unnecessarily by the NYPD sometime in their own past. Trying to channel those real lived experiences into police reform in Albany is so far ringing on deaf (White) ears, however.

Fortunately, it appears that the NYPD practices are finally going to be a mayoral election issue in 2013. More data is being released under public information access laws. Current and former officers of the NYPD are revealing the pressure they underwent to concoct the pretexts for "lawful" stops and frisks. Lawsuits are continuously filed: suits to stop the practice outright; suits to force the disclosure of data; suits to stop the subset of unwarranted trespass arrests in public housing projects; wrongful arrest suits that generate money damages; and last month's suit to stop trespass arrests of residents in their own private apartment buildings dubbed "hallway stop and frisk" (where LatinoJusice PRLDEF is part of the team of lawyers challenging the practice).

Ever wonder what behavior would justify the Stop & Frisk of a Black or Latino resident of NYC? The number one reason? The incomprehensible "furtive movement." For that behavior hundreds of thousands of inner city residents are harassed daily.

On top of all this activity is a groundswell of resistance. Civil disobedience protests garner the involvement of folk like Cornell West at the behest of leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton, George Gresham and Ben Jealous. Now the makings of a serious Latino contingent is making headway as well including Hector Figueroa, Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU, Councilwoman Melissa Mark Viverito from East Harlem, and the undersigned.

A Father's Day Silent March is in the works on June 17 at 1 p.m. in Harlem. Stay tuned for the backlash.

Follow Juan Cartagena on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@latinojustice
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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Veterans Say No to NATO By Amy Goodman

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/veterans_say_no_to_nato_20120517/

Posted on May 17, 2012
By Amy Goodman

Veterans of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are now challenging the occupation of Chicago.

This week, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is holding the largest meeting in its 63-year history there. Protests and rallies will confront the two-day summit, facing off against a massive armed police and military presence. The NATO gathering has been designated a “National Special Security Event” by the Department of Homeland Security, empowering the U.S. Secret Service to control much of central Chicago, and to employ unprecedented authority to suppress the public’s First Amendment right to dissent.

The focus of the summit will be Afghanistan. “Operation Enduring Freedom,” as the Afghanistan War was named by the Bush administration and continues to be called by the Obama administration, is officially a NATO operation. As the generals and government bureaucrats from around the world prepare to meet in Chicago, the number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 topped 3,000. First Lt. Alejo R. Thompson of Yuma, Ariz., was killed on May 11 this year, at the age of 30. He joined the military in 2000, and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Shortly after his death, The Associated Press reported that Thompson would be receiving the Purple Heart medal posthumously and is “in line for a Bronze Star.” On Wednesday, President Barack Obama awarded, also posthumously, the Medal of Honor to Leslie H. Sabo Jr., killed in action in Cambodia in 1970.

While the president and the Pentagon are handing out posthumous medals, a number of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will be marching, in military formation, to McCormick Place in Chicago to hand their service medals back. Aaron Hughes left the University of Illinois in 2003 to join the military, and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. He served in the Illinois National Guard from 2000 to 2006. Since leaving active duty, Hughes has become a field organizer with the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). He explained why he is returning his medals: “Because every day in this country, 18 veterans are committing suicide. Seventeen percent of the individuals that are in combat in Afghanistan, my brothers and sisters, are on psychotropic medication. Twenty to 50 percent of the individuals that are getting deployed to Afghanistan are already diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or a traumatic brain injury. Currently one-third of the women in the military are sexually assaulted.”

IVAW’s Operation Recovery seeks increased support for veterans, and to stop the redeployment of traumatized troops. Hughes elaborated: “The only type of help that [veterans] can get is some type of medication like trazodone, Seroquel, Klonopin, medication that’s practically paralyzing, medication that doesn’t allow them to conduct themselves in any type of regular way. And that’s the standard operating procedures. Those are the same medications that service members are getting redeployed with and conducting military operations on.”

Another veteran—of the anti-war movement of the 1960s—and now a law professor at Northwestern University, longtime Chicago activist Bernardine Dohrn, also will be in the streets. She calls NATO the “militarized arm of the global 1 percent,” and criticizes Chicago Mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for misappropriating funds for the summit: “Suddenly we don’t have money here for community mental-health clinics. We don’t have money for public libraries or for schools. We don’t have money for public transportation. But somehow we have the millions of dollars necessary ... to hold this event right here in the city of Chicago.”

Occupy Chicago, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, has been focused on the NATO protests. The unprecedented police mobilization, which will include, in addition to the Chicago police, at least the Secret Service, federal agents, and the Illinois National Guard, also may include extensive surveillance and infiltration. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests by the activist legal organization Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJ) indicate what the group calls “a mass intelligence network including fusion centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social-justice movement.” PCJ says the documents clearly refute Department of Homeland Security claims that there was never a centralized, federal coordination of crackdowns on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Aaron Hughes and the other vets understand armed security, having provided it themselves in the past. He told me the message he’ll carry to the military and the police deployed across Chicago: “Don’t stand with the global 1 percent. Don’t stand with these generals that continuously abuse their own service members and then talk about building democracy and promoting freedom.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
© 2012 Amy Goodman


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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Two Mexican generals detained for alleged drug gang ties

http://trib.in/JgaXHS

How Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Establishment Drugged Up Our Kids


Pediatric psychopharmacology is a billion-dollar business that sustains Pharma and Pharma investors on Wall Street.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock
In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by "grandiose delusions" that she was special and cars could not harm her.1
How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive "pediatric psychopharmacology" that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted "spectrum" disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the "psychopathologies" in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that's where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding "love" in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop.2
Doctors have a "growing fear of prescribing new drugs with unknown side effects,"3 explains the Journal, and the government is cracking down on illegal marketing. But also, private and government insurers are less willing to "cough up money for an expensive new drug—particularly when a cheap and reliable generic is available.4
It's gotten so bad, AstraZeneca, whose controversial Seroquel® still makes $5.3 billion a year though it is no longer new, now conducts "payer excellence academies" to teach sales reps to sell insurers and state healthcare systems on its latest drugs.5 No wonder Pharma is finding "love" by prescribing drugs to the nation's youngest (and oldest) patients, who are often behavior problems to their caregivers, who make few of their own drug decisions, and who are often on government health plans.

"Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs," says former Pharma rep Gwen Olsen, author of Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.6 "Children are forced by school personnel to take their drugs, they are forced by their parents to take their drugs, and they are forced by their doctors to take their drugs. So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and 'longevity.' In other words, they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma."

Just as it used to be said in obstetric circles, "Once a cesarean, always a cesarean," it's also true that "once a pediatric psychiatric patient, always a pediatric psychiatric patient." Few, indeed, are kids who start out diagnosed and treated for ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other "psychopathologies" who end up on no drugs, psychologically fine, and ready to run for class president. Even if they outgrow their original diagnoses—a big "if" with a mental health history that follows them—the side effects from years of psychoactive drugs and their physical health on mental, social, and emotional development take their toll. Even children on allergy and asthma drugs, which are promoted for kids as young as age one, are now known to develop psychiatric side effects according to emerging research.7
Kids who start out with psychiatric diagnoses are not only lifers—they are expensive lifers usually shuttled into government programs that will pay for psychiatric drug "cocktails" that can approach $2,000 a month. What private insurer would pay $323 for an atypical antipsychotic like Zyprexa®, Geodon®, or Risperdal®, when a "typical" antipsychotic costs only about $40?8
Not all medical professionals agree with the slapdash cocktails. Panelists at the 2010 American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting assailed Pharma for such "seat of the pants" drug combinations and called the industry nothing but a "marketing organization."9 In a symposium about comparative drug effectiveness, a Canadian doctor castigated the FDA's Jing Zhang, who had served as a panelist at the symposium, for his agency's approval of drugs for "competitive reasons" rather than for patient health or effectiveness.10 Research presented at the 2010 APA meeting also questioned the psychiatric cocktails. When twenty-four patients on combinations of Seroquel, Zyprexa, and other antipsychotics were reduced to only one drug, there was no worsening of symptoms or increased hospitalizations (except in one case), and patients' waist circumferences and triglycerides improved (a large waist circumference and high levels of triglycerides [fat] in the blood heighten one's risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases).11 The drug cocktails were not working and were making patients worse by creating new medical problems.

But pediatric psychopharmacology is a billion-dollar business that sustains Pharma, Pharma investors on Wall Street, doctors, researchers, medical centers, clinical research organizations, medical journals, Pharma's PR and ghostwriting firms, pharmacy benefits managers, and the FDA itself—which judges its value on how many drugs it approves. The only losers are kids given a probable life sentence of expensive and dangerous drugs, the families of these children, and the taxpayers and insured persons who pay for the drugs.

The father of pediatric psychopharmacology, Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, is often called Joseph "Risperdal" Biederman, because he is credited with ballooning the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children by as much as fortyfold.12 In 2008, Biederman, a prolific author who has written five hundred scientific articles and seventy book chapters, was investigated by Congress for allegedly accepting Pharma money he didn't disclose, and he agreed to suspend his industry-related activities.13 After a three-year investigation, Harvard "threw the book" at Biederman and two other professors: they were required to "refrain from all paid industry-sponsored outside activities for one year and comply with a two-year monitoring period afterward, during which they must obtain approval from the Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital before engaging in any paid activities." What a deterrent. They also face a "delay of consideration for promotion or advancement."14
When it comes to grandiosity, Biederman seems a lot like the three-year- old who ran out in traffic. He not only served as the head of the Johnson & Johnson Center for the Study of Pediatric Psychopathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, whose stated goal was to "move forward the commercial goals of J. & J."—the facility was his idea! 15 According to court-obtained documents, Biederman approached J. & J. with the money-making scheme.16 Biederman also promised the drug maker that upcoming studies of its popular child antipsychotic Risperdal would "support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone [Risperdal] in this age group."17
The Johnson & Johnson Center for the Study of Pediatric Psychopathology netted a cool $700,000 in one year of operation, according to published reports, but a spokesman for Harvard Medical School said Harvard isn't involved with Johnson & Johnson Center, even though the hospital where it operates, Massachusetts General, is a Harvard teaching hospital. "Harvard Medical School does not 'own' any of its teaching hospitals," he told Bloomberg News. "While we are affiliated with them through academic appointments, all teaching hospitals are individually governed."18
Many people are aware of such Pharma/academia arrangements, since the 1980 Bayh-Dole law allowed universities to operate as patent and profit mills for industries "commercializing and transferring" technology. But fewer realize how much taxpayer money is part of the play-to-pay. The government gave Biederman and a colleague $287 million in 2005—on top of their Pharma sinecures—to be administered by Massachusetts General Hospital. (No wonder Harvard keeps Biederman on.) Biederman also received $14,000 from Eli Lilly the same year he got a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study Lilly's ADHD drug, Strattera®. Why does the government fund researchers already funded by Pharma? Not only do these researchers not need our tax dollars; working for Pharma is an overt conflict of interest that contaminates scientific results.

Another master at playing both the Pharma and government sides of the street is psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, former head of psychiatry at Emory University and also investigated by Congress for unreported Pharma money.

Nemeroff's NIH grant was terminated after the probe, something that is rarely done with a government grant.19
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, when Nemeroff was later under consideration to be the head of psychiatry at the University of Miami, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (part of the NIH), Thomas Insel, MD, assured the medical school dean that if Nemeroff were hired, NIH money would follow, his prior problems notwithstanding. What's a little congressional investigation? The reason for the largesse, according to the Chronicle, was that Nemeroff had gotten Insel a job at Emory when Insel lost his NIH position in 1994. Nor does the cronyism and revolving door stop there. Nemeroff serves on two NIH peer-review advisory panels that decide who else receives grant money, says the Chronicle, and Insel is personally involved with revising the National Institute of Mental Health's "conflict of interest" rules.20
Insel is also known for advancing Pharma's "SSRI deficiency/suicide hypothesis," in which a decrease in antidepressant sales was—according to Pharma—resulting in suicides because people weren't getting their drugs. "[The National Institute of Mental Health is] "looking at whether the decrease in SSRI [antidepressant] utilization might be associated with an increase in suicidality rather than a drop in suicide, and my expectation is that we may see an increase," Insel told Psychiatric News, lamenting "the focus on risk and a neglect of benefit."21
Antipsychotics for Everyone
When the atypical antipsychotics Zyprexa, Geodon, Risperdal, Abilify®, and Seroquel, for use in stabilizing schizophrenia, came into being in the 1990s, they were like the credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations of the pharmaceutical world. No one knew exactly how they worked, how long they would work, or what the final effects of their wide use would be (as with many withdrawn drugs, FDA gives approval on the basis of information from short-term trials). But they could make a lot of quick money easily compared with old-fashioned products; they had government's backing, and everyone was doing it!

Drug reps especially swarmed state agencies with many mentally disabled patients, including children. For example, Texas's Medicaid program spent $557,256 for two months of pediatric Geodon prescriptions in 2005, according to court documents, and Geodon was not even approved for children at the time.22 Eighty-five percent of the state's Risperdal prescriptions were paid by the state government, court documents also show.23 And Florida's Medicaid program spent $935,584 for one year of Geodon.24 One hundred and eighteen prescriptions for Geodon were written in one day, according to the Tacoma News Tribune, at Western State mental hospital in Washington State. Asked why Pfizer reps made almost two hundred visits to the facility in four years, Pfizer spokesman Bryant Haskins told the Tribune, "That's where our customers are."25
Mental institution psychiatrists were not the only ones targeted. United States Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrists said in a survey that they were contacted an average of fourteen times per year by Pharma reps and were invited to attend company-continuing medical education seminars.26 And court documents unsealed in South Carolina in 2009 show that Eli Lilly sales reps even used golf bets to push their atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa; one doctor agreed to start new patients on Zyprexa "for each time a sales representative parred."27
But as state outlays for atypical antipsychotics grew twelvefold between 2000 and 2007, some states and whistle-blowers began bringing Pharma to court. In 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb settled a federal suit for $515 million, brought by whistle-blowers in Massachusetts and Florida, which charged that the company marketed the antipsychotic Abilify for unapproved uses in children and the elderly, bilking taxpayers in the process.28 And the next year, Alaska won a precedent-setting $15 million settlement from Eli Lilly in a suit to recoup medical costs generated by Medicaid patients who developed diabetes while taking Zyprexa. Atypical antipsychotics are known to cause weight gain and glycemic changes that can lead to diabetes.29 Soon Idaho, Washington, Montana, Connecticut, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Texas took Pharma to court for the "prescribathon," which hit the poor, the mentally ill, children, and the elderly the hardest.30
Of course, as with credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations (or the cases of Bernie Madoff or BP's Deepwater Horizon or Enron), there were voices of dissent about the atypical revolution if people chose to listen. A National Institute of Mental Health study of children ages eight to nineteen with psychotic symptoms found Risperdal and Zyprexa were no more effective than the older antipsychotic Moban, but it caused such obesity that a safety panel ordered the children off the drugs.31 In just eight weeks, children gained an average of thirteen pounds on Zyprexa, nine pounds on Risperdal, and less than one pound on Moban.

"Kids at school were making fun of me," said study participant Brandon Constantineau, who put on thirty-five pounds on Risperdal.32
Other studies, like one on Risperdal in the British medical journal Lancet and one on Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Risperdal in Alzheimer's patients reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found that atypicals work no better than placebos.33 One study in the British Medical Journal found that Seroquel not only did not relieve agitation in Alzheimer's patients, but that it "was [also] associated with significantly greater cognitive decline" than placebos.34 As with Risperdal, the drug made patients worse.

"The problem with these drugs [is] that we know that they are being used extensively off-label in nursing homes to sedate elderly patients with dementia and other types of disorders," testified FDA drug reviewer David Graham, MD, during a congressional hearing.35 Graham is credited with exposing the dangers of Vioxx and other risky drugs approved by the FDA. "But the fact is, is that it increases mortality perhaps by 100 percent. It doubles mortality," said Graham. "So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this, and you have probably got 15,000 elderly people in nursing homes dying each year from the off-label use of antipsychotic medications. . . . With every pill that gets dispensed in a nursing home, the drug company is laughing all the way to the bank."36
Just like Wall Street and banking lobbyist and cronies "advised" the government on how to write the credit default and derivative rules under which they would be regulated, Pharma helps states regulate—and buy—its brand- name drugs. An Eli Lilly–backed company named Comprehensive Neuroscience has "helped" twenty-four states to use Zyprexa "properly," reports the New York Times.37 "Doctors who veer from guidelines on dosage strengths and combinations of medications for Medicaid patients are sent 'Dear Doctor' letters pointing out that their prescribing patterns fall outside the norm," it reports. Doctors are also notified if patients "are renewing prescriptions," lest they have "setbacks in their condition." One such program sends registered nurses to the homes of patients who are on expensive brand drugs to ensure "compliance"; that is, to make sure patients have not stopped taking the drugs.

Some states say they have saved money under Pharma's guidance, but Wisconsin found that once it "placed restrictions on Zyprexa and three other antipsychotic drugs" and scrapped the Lilly-funded program, it lowered its antipsychotic bill by $4 million. 38
And then there's the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, a "decision tree" developed by Pharma and Johnson & Johnson's Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 1995 to "help" the state buy its drugs. The algorithm rules required doctors to treat patients—surprise!—with the newest, most expensive drugs first, which ballooned Risperdal sales as well as other atypical antipsychotics.39
But in 2008, the Texas attorney general's office charged Risperdal maker Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson & Johnson's antipsychotic drug unit, with fraud.40 Janssen defrauded the state of millions, said a civil suit, "with [its] sophisticated and fraudulent marketing scheme," to "secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on the state's Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in state custody." In addition to lavishing trips, perks, and kickbacks on Texas's mental health officials to win drug sales, and disguising marketing as scientific research, the attorney general's office charged that Janssen "paid third-party contractors and nonprofit groups to promote Risperdal . . . to give state mental health officials and lawmakers the perception that the drug had widespread support."41
Such faux grassroots support from phony front groups has been cited in other lawsuits against Pharma. Whistle-blowers charge that Pfizer funded the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to serve as a "Trojan horse" to sell Geodon in a complaint that led to forty-three states receiving givebacks and the largest criminal fine ever imposed in US history—$2.3 billion in 2009. 42
The National Alliance on Mental Illness calls itself a "nonprofit, grassroots, self-help, support and advocacy organization of consumers, families, and friends of people with severe mental illnesses,"43 but it has been investigated by Congress for undisclosed Pharma money and is considered by some to be a front organization. The Geodon complaint even cites jailed physician Richard Borison, who also worked with Seroquel and Neurontin, in the corruption.44
Of course, to lock in taxpayer funding of psychoactive drugs, especially for children, it takes more than "helping" state officials at the point of purchase (and sending zealous drug reps to state facilities where the "patients are"). Pharma also finances continuing medical education (CME) courses that reward credits doctors need to retain their state licenses. A CME course called Individualizing ADHD Pharmacotherapy with Disruptive Behavioral Disorders taught by the Johnson & Johnson–funded Robert L. Findling, MD, refers to Risperdal thirteen times.45 Another CME course that promoted Seroquel was "taught" by AstraZeneca staff and Dr. Nemeroff but was scrapped after the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education found it "lacked sufficient information about possible adverse effects of treatment with atypical antipsychotic drugs; and failed to emphasize sufficiently the efficacy of alternative treatments."46 The course was called Atypical Antipsychotics in Major Depressive Disorder: When Current Treatments Are Not Enough.

Pharma doctors also spread confidence about the drugs by publishing in medical journals like a Johnson & Johnson–subsidized article that upheld the "long-term safety and effectiveness of risperidone [Risperdal] for severe disruptive behaviors in children" in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Despite thirty-one recorded child deaths, the drug was found to be safe, according to the article, on the basis of a one-year study.47
END NOTES 
CHAPTER 2. FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH RISPERDAL . . . AND SEROQUEL AND ZYPREXA AND GEODON
1. Martha Rosenberg, "Phillip Sinaikin, M.D., 'Psychiatryland' Author, Explains How Psychiatry Is Broken," Huffington Post, July 1, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha- rosenberg/phillip-sinaikin-psychiatryland_b_884863.html.
2. Jeanne Whalen, "Hurdles Multiply for Latest Drugs, Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2011.
3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.; Duff Wilson, "For $520 Million, AstraZeneca Will Settle Case over Marketing of
a Drug," New York Times, April 26, 2010. 6. Gwen Olsen, "Drugging Our Children to Death," Health News Digest, June 29, 2009,
http://healthnewsdigest.com/news/Guest_Columnist_710/Drugging_Our_Children_to_ Death.shtml (accessed September 25, 2011).
7. "FOX 5 Investigates Singulair," Fox News, November 8, 2010.
8. Emily P. Walker, "Senators Question Use of Psych Drugs in Nursing Homes," MedPage Today, August 15, 2011, http://www.medpagetoday.com/Geriatrics/Dementia/28052.
9. Martha Rosenberg, "Meeting the Drug Industry," CounterPunch, June 4–6, 2010, http:// www.counterpunch.org/2010/06/04/meeting-the-drug-industry/.
10. Martha Rosenberg, "No Free Pens but Pharma Influence Still Felt at Psychiatric Meeting," AlterNet, June 2, 2010, http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/02/ no-free-pens-but-pharma-influence-still-felt-at-psychiatric-meeting/.
11. "Evaluating Antipsychotic Polypharmacy Regimens for Patients with Chronic Mental Illness," poster from Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, American Psychiatric Associa- tion 2010 meeting, New Orleans.
12. Gardiner Harris, "Research Center Tied to Drug Company," New York Times, November 24, 2008.
13. Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey, "Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay," New York Times, June 8, 2008; "Private Money, Public Disclosure," Science, July 2009.
14. Xi Yu, "Three Professors Face Sanctions Following Harvard Medical School Inquiry Investigation by Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Punishes Psychiatrists Accused by Senator," Harvard Crimson, July 2, 2011.
15. Harris, "Research Center Tied to Drug Company."
16. Gardiner Harris, "Drug Maker Told Studies Would Aid It, Papers Say," New York Times, March 19, 2009.
17. Ibid.
18. Rob Waters and Julie Ziegler, "Harvard Teaching Hospital Reviewing J&J Ties to Psychiatry Unit," Bloomberg, November 25, 2008.
19. Martha Rosenberg, "Why You Should Care about the University of Miami NIH Scandal, CounterPunch, June 22, 2010; Bradley F. Marple and Matthew W. Ryan, "Facing Conflicts: The Battle between Medicine and Industry," ENT Today, April 2009, http://www. enttoday.org/details/article/497837/Facing_Conflicts_The_Battle_between_Medicine_and_ Industry.html.
20. Ibid.
21. Jim Rosack, "New Data Show Declines in Antidepressant Prescribing," Psychiatric News 40, no. 17 (September 2, 2005): 1.
22. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts Civil Action No. 08 CA 11318 DPW, Second Amended Complaint for False Claims Act Violations 31 U.S.C. § 3729, ET SEQ., March 13, 2009.
23. Jim Edwards, "J&J and Risperdal: New Claims of Kickbacks and Fraudulent Mar- keting," BNET, December 17, 2008, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42840276/ j038j-and-risperdal-new-claims-of-kickbacks-and-fraudulent-marketing/ (accessed January 30, 2012).
24. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts Civil Action No. 08 CA 11318 DPW.
25. M. Alexander Otto, "Drugs Might Breed Violence," News Tribune (Tacoma, WA), May 28, 2007.
26. Michael Sernyak and Robert Rosenheck, "Experience of VA Psychiatrists with Phar- maceutical Detailing of Antipsychotic Medications," Psychiatric Services 58 (October 2007): 1292–96.
27. Margaret Cronin Fisk and Jef Feeley, "Lilly Paid Doctors to Prescribe Zyprexa, Bloom- berg, September 8, 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aHX OSlLoUMbM.
28. "$515 Million California Claims Drug Giant Bribed Docs to Prescribe," Associated Press, March 23, 2011.
29. Alex Berenson, "Lilly Settles Alaska Suit over Zyprexa," New York Times, March 26, 2008; Sanjay Gupta et al., "Atypical Antipsychotics and Glucose Dysregulation: A Series of 4 Cases," Primary Care Companion, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 3, no. 2 (2001): 61–65, http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC181163/.
30. Martha Rosenberg, "States Taking Pharma to Court for Risky Antipsychotic-Pre- scribing Spree," AlterNet, October 19, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/health/103543.
31. Benedict Carey, "Risks Found for Youths in New Antipsychotics," New York Times, September 15, 2008.
32. Ibid.
33. Peter Tyrer et al., "Risperidone, Haloperidol, and Placebo in the Treatment of Aggres- sive Challenging Behaviour in Patients with Intellectual Disability: A Randomised Controlled Trial," Lancet 371, no. 9606 (January 5, 2008): 57–63; Lon S. Schneider et al., "Effectiveness of Atypical Antipsychotic Drugs in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease," New England Journal of Medicine 355 (October 12, 2006): 1525–38.
34. Clive Ballard, "Quetiapine and Rivastigmine and Cognitive Decline in Alzheimer's Disease: Randomised Double Blind Placebo Controlled Trial," British Medical Journal 330 (Feb- ruary 18, 2005): 874.
35. Ed Silverman, "Antipsychotics, Nursing Homes & Increased Risks," Pharmalot, November 19, 2007, http://www.pharmalot.com/2007/11/antipsychotics-nursing-homes -expendable-patients/.
36. Ibid.
37. Stephanie Saul, "In Some States, Maker Oversees Use of Its Drug," New York Times, March 23, 2007.
38. Ibid. 39. Edwards, "J&J and Risperdal." 40. Emily Ramshaw, "Filing Alleges Drug Maker Defrauded Texas to Get on Medicaid
List," Dallas Morning News, December 17, 2008. 41. Ibid.
42. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts Civil Action No. 08 CA 11318 DPW.
43. "Welcome to NAMI Arapahoe/Douglas Counties: A NAMI Colorado Affiliate," National Alliance on Mental Illness, http://www.nami.org/MSTemplate.cfm?MicrositeID=257. 44. Jim Edwards, "Pfizer Used Docs Accused of Misconduct to Prep Geodon Submission to FDA," BNET, September 22, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42843001/
pfizer-used-docs-accused-of-misconduct-to-prep-geodon-submission-to-fda/. 45. "Individualizing ADHD Pharmacotherapy in Patients with Disruptive Behavioral Disorders," Medscape, December 28, 2007, http://www.medscape.org/viewprogram/8468
(accessed September 25, 2011). 46. Daniel Carlat, "New York Times Covers Industry Funding of CME," Carlat Psychiatry
Blog, October 21, 2009, http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-york-times-covers- industry-funding.html (accessed September 25, 2011).
47. Jan Croonenberghs et al., "Risperidone in Children with Disruptive Behavior Disor- ders and Subaverage Intelligence: A 1-Year, Open-Label Study of 504 Patients," Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 44, no. 1 (January 2005): 64–72; Gardiner Harris, "Use of Antipsychotics in Children Is Criticized," New York Times, November 18, 2008.
Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets.

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Venceremos! We Will Win!
Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Five Reasons Why Drone Assassinations Are Illegal By Bill Quigley

http://www.countercurrents.org/quigley150512.htm


15 May, 2012
Countercurrents.org

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U
S civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.
These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US. Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US?

Some Facts about Drone Assassinations

The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or the identities of most of those killed.

In Pakistan alone, the New America Foundation reports US forces have launched 297 drone strikes killing at least 1800 people, three to four hundred of whom were not even combatants. Other investigative journalists report four to eight hundred civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Very few of these drone strikes kill high level leaders of terror groups. A recent article in Foreign Affairs estimated “only one out of every seven drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader. The majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low level fighters, together with a small number of civilians.”

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in November 2011 revealed that most of the time the US did not even know the identities of the people being killed by drones in Pakistan. The WSJ reported there are two types of drone strikes. Personality strikes target known terrorist leaders. Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants but are people whose identities are not known. Most of the drone strikes are signature strikes.

In Yemen, there have been at least 34 drone assassination attacks so far in 2012 alone, according to the London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Using drones against people in Yemen, who are thought to be militants but whose names are not even known, was authorized by the Obama administration in April 2012, according to the Washington Post. Somalia has been the site of ten drone attacks with a growing number in recent months.
Civilian deaths in drone strikes are regularly reported but more chilling is the practice of firing a second set of drone strikes at the scene once people have come to find out what happened or to give aid. Glenn Greenwald of Salon, a leading critic of the increasing use of drones, recently pointed out that drones routinely kill civilians who are in the vicinity of people thought to be “militants” and are thus “incidental” killings. But also the US also frequently fires drones again at people who show up at the scene of an attack, thus deliberately targeting rescuers and mourners.

Here are five reasons why these drone assassinations are illegal.

One. Assassination by the US government has been illegal since 1976

Drone killings are acts of premeditated murder. Premeditated murder is a crime in all fifty states and under federal criminal law. These murders are also the textbook definition of assassination, which is murder by sudden or secret attack for political reasons.

In 1976 U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, Section 5(g), which states "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." President Reagan followed up to make the ban clearer in Executive Order 12333. Section 2.11 of that Order states "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Section 2.12 further says "Indirect participation. No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order." This ban on assassination still stands.

The reason for the ban on assassinations was that the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate national leaders opposed by the US. Among others, US forces sought to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
Two. United Nations report directly questions the legality of US drone killings

The UN directly questioned the legality of US drone killings in a May 2010 report by NYU law professor Philip Alston. Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said drone killings may be lawful in the context of authorized armed conflict (eg Afghanistan where the US sought and received international approval to invade and wage war on another country). However, the use of drones “far from the battle zone” is highly questionable legally. “Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.” Can drone killings be justified as anticipatory self-defense? “Applying such a scenario to targeted killings threatens to eviscerate the human rights law prohibition against arbitrary deprivation of life.” Likewise, countries which engage in such killings must provide transparency and accountability, which no country has done. “The refusal by States who conduct targeted killings to provide transparency about their policies violates the international law framework that limits the unlawful use of lethal force against individuals.”

Three. International law experts condemn US drone killings

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international affairs and politics at Princeton University thinks the widespread killing of civilians in drone strikes may well constitute war crimes. “There are two fundamental concerns. One is embarking on this sort of automated warfare in ways that further dehumanize the process of armed conflict in ways that I think have disturbing implications for the future,” Falk said. “Related to that are the concerns I’ve had recently with my preoccupation with the occupation of Gaza of a one-sided warfare where the high-tech side decides how to inflict pain and suffering on the other side that is, essentially, helpless.”
Human rights groups in Pakistan challenge the legality of US drone strikes there and assert that Pakistan can prosecute military and civilians involved for murder.

While stopping short of direct condemnation, international law expert Notre Dame Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell seriously questions the legality of drone attacks in Pakistan. In powerful testimony before Congress and in an article in America magazine she points out that under the charter of the United Nations, international law authorizes nations to kill people in other countries only in self-defense to an armed attack, if authorized by the UN, or is assisting another country in their lawful use of force. Outside of war, she writes, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning. Because the US is not at war with Pakistan, using the justification of war to authorize the killings is “to violate fundamental human rights principles.”

Four. Military law of war does not authorize widespread drone killing of civilians

According to the current US Military Law of War Deskbook, the law of war allows killing only when consistent with four key principles: military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity. These principles preclude both direct targeting of civilians and medical personnel but also set out how much “incidental” loss of civilian life is allowed. Some argue precision-guided weapons like drones can be used only when there is no probable cause of civilian deaths. But the US military disputes that burden and instead directs “all practicable precautions” be taken to weigh the anticipated loss of civilian life against the advantages expected to be gained by the strike.
Even using the more lenient standard, there is little legal justification of deliberately allowing the killing of civilians who are “incidental” to the killings of people whose identities are unknown.

Five. Retired high-ranking military and CIA veterans challenge the legality and efficacy of drone killings

Retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright squarely denies the legality of drone warfare, telling Democracy Now: “These drones, you might as well just call them assassination machines. That is what these drones are used for: targeted assassination, extrajudicial ultimate death for people who have not been convicted of anything.”
Drone strikes are also counterproductive. Robert Grenier, recently retired Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, wrote, “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in the future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”

Recent polls of the Pakistan people show high levels of anger in Pakistan at US military attacks there. This anger in turn leads to high support for suicide attacks against US military targets.
US Defense of Drone Assassinations

US officials claim these drone killings are not assassinations because the US has the legal right to kill anyone considered a terrorist, anywhere, if they can argue it is in self-defense. Attorney General Holder and White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan recently defended the legality of drone strikes and argued they are not assassinations because the killings are in response to the 9/11 attacks and are carried out in self-defense even when not in Afghanistan or Iraq. This argument is based on the highly criticized claim of anticipatory self-defense which justifies killings in a global war on terror when traditional self-defense would clearly not. The government refuses to provide copies of the legal opinions relied upon by the government.

Growing Resistance to Drone Assassinations

In signs of hope, people in the US are resisting the increasing use of drones.

CODEPINK, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the London-based human rights group Reprieve co-sponsored an International Drone Summit in Washington DC to challenge drone assassinations. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill noted that Congress only managed to scrape up six votes to oppose the assassination of US citizens abroad. “What is happening to this country? We have become a nation of assassins. We have become a nation that is somehow silent in the face of the idea that assassination should be one of the centerpieces of US policy.”

The American Society of International Law issued a report “Targeting Operations with Drone Technology: Humanitarian Law Implications” in March 2011. Concerned that drones may be the future of warfare, scholars examined three questions in the US use of drone technology: the scope of armed conflict (what is the battlefield upon which deadly force of drone killing is authorized); who may be targeted; and the legal implications of who conducts the targeting (since it is often not military but clandestine CIA agents who decide who dies). Concluding that the US may soon find itself “on the other end of the drone” as this technology expands, they criticize official US silence on these key legal questions.

Others are taking direct action. Select examples include: fourteen people arrested in April 2009 outside Creech Air Force base in Nevada in connection with a protest against drones by the Nevada Desert Experience; in January 2010 people protested drones outside the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia; in April 2011, thirty-seven were arrested at Hancock Air Force base in upstate New York as part of a four hundred person protest against the use of drones; in October 2011, as part of the International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space there were protests outside of Raytheon Missile Systems plant in Tucson; in April 2012, twenty-eight people were pre-emptively arrested on their way to protest drones at Hancock Air Force Base.

There is a brilliant new book, Drone Warfare authored by global activist Medea Benjamin which documents the nuts and bolts of the drone industry and the money involved in their production and operation. She collects many global media reports of innocent civilian deaths, investigations into these deaths, and gives voice to international opposition groups like her own CODEPINK, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters International, Human Rights Watch, the Catholic Worker movement, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and others working against the drones.

As National Public Radio and The New Republic jointly editorialized, there is good reason to doubt the veracity of US claims that drone killings are even effective. Drone use has escalated and expanded the US global war on terror and thus should be subject to higher levels of scrutiny than it is now. As the use of drones escalates so too does the risk of killing innocents which produces “legitimate anti-American anger that terrorist recruiters can exploit….Such a steady escalation of the drone war, and the inevitable increase in civilian casualties that will accompany it, could easily tip the delicate balance that assures we kill more terrorists than we produce.”

There is incredible danger in allowing US military and civilians to murder people anywhere in the world with no public or Congressional or judicial oversight. This authorizes the President and the executive branch, according to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, to be prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.
The use of drones to assassinate people violates US and international law in multiple ways. US military and civilian employees, who plan, target and execute people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are violating the law and, ultimately, risk prosecution. As the technology for drone attacks spreads, protests by the US that drone attacks by others are illegal will sound quite hollow. Continuation of flagrantly illegal drone attacks by the US also risks justifying the exact same actions, taken by others, against us.

Palestinian prisoner deal shows non-violence works

http://reut.rs/IVXaAY
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By Ali Sawafta
RAMALLAH, West Bank | Tue May 15, 2012 10:03am EDT

(Reuters) - Standing up to Israel through non-violent resistance can produce encouraging results, Palestinians said on Tuesday, after a prisoner hunger strike produced some Israeli concessions.

The deal under which some 1,600 Palestinian prisoners agreed on Monday to end a month-long fast against Israel's prison policy was struck on the eve of Nakba (catastrophe) Day that marks Israel's founding in a 1948 war when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes.

Youths clashed with Israeli police and soldiers in several parts of the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, but there was no repeat of last year's violence, when Israeli soldiers killed up to 13 protesters on the borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza.

To some, the hunger strike proved the value of "popular resistance" as favored by President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah group. But his rivals in the Islamist Hamas movement in Gaza said their own confrontational attitude had paid dividends.

Two of the Palestinian prisoners had not eaten for 77 days, raising fears of a backlash if they had died. Under a deal brokered by Egypt, Israel agreed to end solitary confinement for 19 prisoners and lift a ban on visits by relatives living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

It also agreed to free those held without trial for six months at a time under so-called "administrative detention" -- unless they are brought to court before their terms end.

"It is our hope that this gesture by Israel will serve to build confidence between the parties and to further peace," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Some Palestinians said Israel was used to meeting violence with violence, but less adept at countering non-violent tactics.

"The prime lesson here is that resistance, unity and solidarity can bear fruit for the political movement," said West Bank political analyst Hani Al-Masri. "Resistance, unity and determination can bring about results."

LESSON FOR POLITICIANS

Gaza Strip political analyst Hani Habib called it "a success for the prisoners and an example that should be copied by the politicians," alluding to continued deep divisions between Hamas and Fatah that have split the Palestinian people.

"We should reshape the relationship with Israel, in the sense that we should benefit from steadfastness and defiance. Steadfastness can win positions and gains, regardless of how unequal in power we are in comparison with the occupation."

Despite the suspension of formal peace negotiations 18 months ago, Abbas cooperates closely with Israel on security.

Top-level contacts "every hour, every moment" helped to resolve the impasse, said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

"We spared no means and no effort ... and (Abbas) managed to get everyone to intervene including the American administration whom we had contacted," Erekat said.

Anat Litvin of the activist group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said: "The Palestinian inmates proved that a non-violent and just struggle can bring important achievements and raise international awareness."

The hunger strikers included militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which reject peace with Israel, as well as members of Abbas's Fatah group which recognizes Israel and is prepared to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement.

Israel's Prisons Authority asked prisoners to pledge "not to engage in actions contravening security inside the jails".

But Israel made no undertaking to scrap administrative detention without trial, under which some 320 of 4,800 Palestinian prisoners are held. It also refused to treat Palestinians as "prisoners of war". Many prisoners have been convicted in Israeli courts of serious crimes, including murder.

Hamas claimed credit for the Israeli concessions, suggesting its commitment to violent methods was the decisive factor.

A Hamas statement said Israel's will began to break last year when it agreed to free 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured in a cross-border raid and held for over five years in Gaza.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/West_Bank_%26_Gaza_Map_2007_(Settlements).png/250px-West_Bank_%26_Gaza_Map_2007_(Settlements).png
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http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/israel_nbr90.jpg
(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Writing by Douglas Hamilton; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

N0te: Hard to find decent map of Palestine now. It has changed over the years. Free Palestine! ~ Peta


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Monday, May 14, 2012

Tripoli: Violence Reaches into 3rd Day ~

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2114799,00.html
http://www.longwarjournal.org/maps/syria-map.jpg

AP / BASSEM MROUE and BEN HUBBARD Monday, May 14, 2012

(TRIPOLI, Lebanon) — Firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Lebanese gunmen clashed in street battles Monday as sectarian tensions linked to the 14-month-old uprising in Syria bled across the border for a third day.

At least five people have been killed and 100 wounded in Lebanon's second-largest city since the gunbattles erupted late Saturday, security officials said. Residents say differences over Syria are at the root of the fighting, which pits neighbor against neighbor and raises fears of broader unrest that could draw in neighboring countries.

(The Syria Crisis: Is Al-Qaeda Intervening in the Conflict?)

Lebanon and Syria share a complex web of political and sectarian ties and rivalries, which are easily enflamed. Tripoli has seen bouts of sectarian violence in the past, but the fighting has become more frequent as the conflict in Syria worsens.

The fighting camps break down along sectarian and political lines. On one side are Sunni Muslims who support the rebels trying to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. On the other are members of the tiny Alawite sect, followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam who are Assad's most loyal supporters.

The recent clashes were sparked by the arrest of Lebanese national Shadi Mawlawi, an outspoken critic of Assad. The Sunni fighters say the root of the latest conflict in Tripoli is across the border. "Syria. It wants it this way. It wants to start a battle here so it can say, look, even in Lebanon the Sunnis are killing the Alawites," said Mustafa Nashar, 35, whose family lives in an apartment overlooking Syria Street, which cuts through the overwhelmingly Sunni Bab al-Tabbani neighborhood.

Posters supporting the Syrian opposition hang on walls, and pictures of a local activist shot by a sniper in similar clashes in February read "Greetings to the free martyrs of Syria" and bear the Syrian revolutionary flag.

Groups of men, many carrying assault rifles and wearing military-style vests, ducked through trash-strewn alleys. The residents who remained in the neighborhood took cues from fighters about when to sprint across alleys to evade the snipers up the hill.

(In Syria, Lebanon's Most Wanted Sunni Terrorist Blows Himself Up)

A car with children crouching in the back sped past one alley, a bullet pinging the pavement behind it.

The Lebanese army set up a small position a few hundred meters (yards) away from the fighting, but no soldiers or police could be seen in the immediate area.

Mohammed Jaber, a 49-year-old fighter and Tripoli resident, said local fighting has been going on for decades in Tripoli, but the Syria unrest has set it off again. "The old has become new," he said. "Once the Syrian revolution started, we supported all efforts to get rid of the regime."

Sunnis comprise the majority in Syria, but Assad and his fellow Alawites play an outsized role in the country's government and security forces, prompting seething resentments. Inspired by the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian protesters defied the authoritarian regime and began taking to the streets in March 2011 to call for political reform. But a relentless government crackdown led many in the opposition to take up arms. Some soldiers also have switched sides and joined the rebels.

World powers have backed a peace plan for Syria that was put forward by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, but the bloodshed has not stopped. More than 100 U.N. observers have been deployed in Syria to oversee a truce between the government and armed rebels. The U.N. estimates the conflict has killed more than 9,000 people.

Damascus ~Below
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/3/25/1301067615449/Damascus-the-capital-of-S-007.jpg
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Mroue reported from Beirut.



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Rational Conflict Resolution: What Stands In the Way? (*)

http://www.transcend.org/tms/2012/05/rational-conflict-resolution-what-stands-in-the-way/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Johan_Galtung.png/350px-Johan_Galtung.png

EDITORIAL


by Johan Galtung, 14 May 2012 – TRANSCEND Media Service
Basel, Switzerland, World Peace Academy
Six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality.  Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party.  It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities.  Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable.  But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others.  Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation.  This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation.  Are we able?

First case: USA vs Latin America-Caribbean.  The recent meeting of the Organization of American States ended 32 against 1, USA. The 32 wanted Cuba readmitted and decriminalization of marijuana.  Obama vetoed both; the relation a scandal, overshadowed by a sex scandal.

Solution
: The USA yields to democracy on both, negotiates some time for the transition, and a review clause after 5 years.  The USA also welcomes CELAC–the organization of Latin American and Caribbean states without USA and Canada–with OAS as a meeting ground for equitable and amicable South-North relations.  Washington would be embraced by CELAC and the whole world.  A sigh of relief.  And the world could continue its fight against the far more lethal tobacco.

What stands in the way
?  A falling empire clinging to the past, fear of looking weak, elections, huge problems like a crisis economy and social disintegration: Charles Murray Coming Apart and Timothy Noah The Great Divergence. Backyard treatment of the US backyard.

Second case: Israel vs Iran; the nuclear issue; war or not.  Uri Avnery[i]:  “–in our country we are now seeing a verbal uprising against the elected politicians by a group of current and former army generals, foreign intelligence [Meir Dagan, Mossad] and internal security [Yuval Diskin, Shin Beth] chiefs–condemn the government’s threat to start a war against Iran, and some of them condemning the government’s failure to negotiate with the Palestinians for peace.”

Diskin: “Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran will lead to a world-wide catastrophe.  Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb–it will hasten this effort–with the support of the world community.
Uri Avnery on the not exactly dialogical, talmudic response:

“They did what Israelis almost always do when faced with serious problems or serious arguments; they don’t get to grips with the matter itself but select some minor detail and belabor it endlessly. Practically speaking no one tried to disprove the assertions of the officers, neither concerning the proposed attack on Iran nor the nuclear issue.  They focused on the speakers, not on what was said: Dagan and Diskin are embittered because their terms of office were not extended.  They felt humiliated–venting personal frustration”. Then Diskin on Netanyahu: “a Holocaust obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father-altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in real crisis” according to Avnery.
Solution: A Middle East nuclear free zone with Iran and Israel; 64 percent of Israelis are in favor, Iran the same provided Israel is in it.  Could also be a model for the Korean peninsula.  Agreement to try, a sigh of relief all over, both countries would be embraced.

There are problems: under whose auspices and whose monitoring.  How about Pakistan and Ali Bhutto’s “islamic bomb”, impossible without India that has superpower denuclearization as condition?

There are answers, all worth discussing, in depth, seriously.

Israel is wasting its time.  A wonderful talmudic tradition, a precious freedom of expression–generally very present in Ha’aretz–and misused for personal abuse instead of for solutions to very real crises.  Like Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, and Gershom Gorenberg, The Unmaking of Israel (2011).

What stands in the way?  The horrors of the past defining the discourse.  Like some Iraqis use the Baghdad massacre in 1258, some Israelis use the holocaust as a framework for world events, blind to the differences, and to what could have been done at that time.  And many let this pass not to hurt Israeli-Jewish feelings or for fear of being labeled as anti-Semites or holocaust-deniers.  Not Dagan, Diskin and some generals.  Nor real friends searching for solutions: not anti-Semites, nor holocaust deniers, nor prisoners of the past.

Third case: Israel vs Palestine.  I have argued since 1971 a Middle East Community of Israel with five Arab neighbors, Palestine recognized according to international law, 1967 borders with some exchanges, Israeli cantons on the West bank and Palestinian cantons in northwest Israel.  Solution: A two-state Israel-Palestine nucleus within that six-state community within an Organization for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East (or West Asia).  Model: Germany-France 1950, + EEC as of January 1 1958, + OSCE from 1990 onwards.  Open borders, a council of ministers, commissions for water, border patrols, economy; capitals in the two Jerusalems; right of return, also for Palestinians: numbers to be discussed, as Arafat insisted.

What stands in the way? Key Israeli and Arab contra-arguments:  “Surrounded by hostile Arabs we cannot let them in that close, they overpower us numerically, push us into the sea” says one; “The Jews penetrate us economically and run our economies”, says the other.

There are answers: Decisions would have to be by consensus.  Start slowly with free flow of goods, persons, services and ideas; settlement and investment perhaps later.  Build confidence.  Change a relation badly broken by naqba into a peaceful, evolving relation.

Fourth case: A recipe for disaster: minorities, outsiders in key niches like economy-culture: Turks vs Armenians, Hutus vs Tutsis, Indonesians vs Chinese.  But not Malays vs Chinese due to Mahathir’s discrimination in favor of the majority.  Israel would gain from lifting the Arabs out of this social rank discordance; also a feature of Germany.  Add the Versailles Treaty humiliation, Hitler and willing executioners.

Solution?  Cancel the Versailles treaty in 1924, lift the German majority through education and employment into equality and we might have avoided World War II in Europe.  What is rationality?  Not justify, but explain, understand, and then remove the causes!

What stood in the way?  Very few thought of this.

So much for a major fourth conflict of the past.  Fifth case: rampant US anti-Semitism, now latent, using scapegoating to explain the decline of the USA and Israel; failing to grasp solutions for their eyes, both lost in the past, one in glory, one in trauma.

Imagine USA losing even more: support from allies, the magic of being exceptional-invincible-indispensable gone, torn between misery at the bottom and incredible riches at the top, the dollar no longer a world reserve currency, etc.  A real fear right now: rampant anti-Semitism in the USA.  This must be handled constructively, not by churning out anti-Semitism certificates, scaring US congressmen from questioning Israel, thereby jeopardizing US democracy itself.  The tipping point from christian zionism to an anti-Semitism against Israel, Wall Street and American Jews in general may be close.

Solution: The US mainstream media become more pluralistic, less monochromatic, opening up to a range of discourses and solutions.  Criticism of Israel and Wall Street is not enough, constructive solutions are needed.  A solution culture, not a blaming culture.  Like the ideas above for USA vs CELAC, Israel vs Iran, Israel vs Arab states.  Nothing extreme, outlandish, and much to discuss.

But mainstream media constructive discussions are few in the US.  There are hundreds of points to be made, like there once were when Europe was emerging from the ruins of World War II.  Instead of degrading and humiliating Germany two brilliant French invited them into the family (now with its problems).   Let thousand good ideas blossom!  There is too much about the Cartagena sex scandal and too little about new ways of lifting the bottom of US poor into dignity, reducing the ever increasing inequality devastating the US economy.
What stands in the way? Clinging to the past, vested interests, the war industry, a blaming culture rather than a solution culture.  But vast majorities and new and old media should be able to overcome.

Sixth case, very much related to this: debt bondage.  China-Japan-EU vs USA; Germany vs Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland (GIPSI); the World Bank vs the Third World, with John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as a gruesome illustration.

Yes, I have mentioned that fabrication by the Russian secret police, the Protocols–a conspiracy revealed long time ago.  But like Mein Kampf condemnation is not enough, better know what one talks about.  The Protocols read like a textbook on how to get others into debt bondage, starting with making workers believe they can be better paid and how these entitlements as they are called in the US debate can push a country into bondage.  The first reaction to credit is a sigh of relief, the second is not knowing how to cut expenses or make some income to service the debt.  The third is hatred mobilizing old traumas–look at Greece and Germany.

Solution: debt forgiveness, and contracting fewer debts.  The time horizon can vary, and it must be accompanied by mobilization of all internal resources to lift the bottom up from suffering and into some acquisitive power, rejuvenating countrysides with agricultural cooperatives, trade among GIPSI countries.  The threat to EU today is not only a single currency with no treasury–much better would have been the euro as a common currency–but a debt bondage gradient in what should be a more egalitarian community.  The material out of which aggression is made.  Not only forgiveness but also stimulus would be in Germany’s interest relative to the EU periphery, and the same goes for China relative to the USA (possibly coupled to agreed reduction of their arms budgets), and to the World Bank in general.

What stands in the way?  Long on neo-liberal market ideology, short on eclecticism, of all good ideas, for alternative economies.

Conclusion:  Humanity has vast positive and negative experiences. We should all join building on them, wherever they can be found.

 (*) Some recent statements of mine, quoted out of context, have hurt some feelings.  I apologize most sincerely for that, it was entirely unintended. One such context was the Breivik case in Norway with its many ramifications. A deeper context are the six conflicts addressed in this presentation.
NOTE:
[i] Uri Avnery, “A Putsch against War.” TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS May 7 2012.
_______________
Johan Galtung, a Professor of Peace Studies, is Rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University-TPU. He is author of over 150 books on peace and related issues, including ‘50 Years – 100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives’ published by the TRANSCEND University Press-TUP.
 Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgment and link to the source, TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS, is included. Thank you.
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This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 3.0 United States License.

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