An Exercise in Cowardice and Deceit
by Bill Van Auken l World Socialist Web Site
President Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech from the White House Oval Office Tuesday night was an exercise in cowardice and deceit. It was deceitful to the people of the United States and the entire world in its characterization of the criminal war against Iraq. And it was cowardly in its groveling before the American military.

It is for this statement, rather than all the double-talk about troop withdrawals, that Obama’s miserable speech deserves to be remembered.

One of the great mantras of the modern economics profession is that markets know best, and that the collective "wisdom" of investors is generally correct.

[Please see petition here.]

Prime Minister Must Save Fish Lake, Say 12 Environmental Groups
Final Decision Pending on Fate of B.C. Lake Sacred to First Nations
by Tsilhqot'in National Government, Canadian Boreal Initiative, Sierra Club BC, West Coast Environmental Law, ForestEthics, Pembina Institute, Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace, BC Spaces for Nature, Georgia Straight Alliance, Sierra Club Canada, Wildsight and the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance
Vancouver, BC- Twelve environmental groups are calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to save Fish Lake, home to 80,000 rainbow
trout and sacred to the Tsilhqot'in First Nations. The groups are urging the federal government to heed the findings of its
environmental assessment review panel and reject a proposed gold and copper mine that would destroy Fish Lake.

Despite First Nations opposition, Taseko Mines Ltd. plans to drain Fish Lake in central B.C. in order to access a gold and copper
deposit and make room for a waste rock dump and toxic tailings. The proposed "Prosperity" open-pit mine is on the traditional lands of the Xeni Gwet'in First Nation, a member of the Tsilhqot'in National Government, which won a court case recognizing its rights to the area.

The B.C. government issued a 25-year-mining lease to Taseko in June of this year. The following month, a federal environmental review panel reported that Taseko's proposed mine would have significant adverse effects on the environment -- including to fish stocks and grizzly populations-- and on First Nations rights and title.

"We're calling on the federal cabinet and Prime Minister Harper to respect the federal panel report which highlights the multiple
adverse effects of this proposal, including impacts on First Nations rights and title," said Larry Innes, Executive Director of the
Canadian Boreal Initiative. "Failure to honour these findings will not only harm the land and people of the region, they will harm
relations between industry and other communities in the future by seriously undermining public confidence in the review process."

Death By Globalism:
Economists Haven’t a Clue
by Paul Craig Roberts

The main feature of the current issue is “The Great Stimulus Debate.” Is the Obama fiscal stimulus helping the economy or hindering it?

Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi represent the Keynesian view that government deficit spending is needed to lift the economy out of recession. Zandi declares that thanks to the fiscal stimulus, “The economy has made enormous progress since early 2009,” an opinion shared by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and the Congressional Budget Office.

The opposite view, associated with Harvard economics professor Robert Barro and with European economists, such as Francesco Giavazzi and Marco Pagano and the European Central Bank, is that government budget surpluses achieved by cutting government spending spur the economy by reducing the ratio of debt to Gross Domestic Product. This is the “let them eat cake school of economics.”

OBAMA'S "NEW DAWN" in IRAQ

Phyllis Bennis is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis , Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. and Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer.

 

They're Leaving as Heroes?

by William Blum

Things which don't go away. Things the American government and media don't let go of. And neither do I.

 

"They're leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts," declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq. ¹

But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up ... an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.

The Lowest of the Low

by Gilad Atzmon

Considering the scale of the atrocities we are all complicit in thanks to the Labour government, it is my duty to remind the Labour party members who their leading candidate is, what he stands for and what interests he may serve.

One of the problems with sucking on an opium pipe is that it renders you just about useless for anything else. So it has been in the United Kingdom with the love affair it has had with banking, financial services and other non-manufacturing industries over the last few decades.

 

For years, the mantra from economists and pundits in London’s high finance centre of Canary Wharf has been that manufacturing, the production and export of “things”, has no future in post-industrial U.K. Like a bubble, financial services grew and grew, and with it the bombast of the bankers and their shills. “The financial services economy”, “The knowledge economy”, “The service sector economy” - all were trumpeted as the way of the future for the country that once led the world in manufacturing. 

 

Until, of course, the recent financial and credit crisis burst the bubble, leaving battered banks, empty office towers, thousands of layoffs, and a dazed and confused British elite in its wake. Now a new government has come to power, David Cameron’s Conservatives. 

 

And what is the centerpiece of its new economic program? Lo and behold, it is to “resurrect” and “rejuvenate” Britain’s manufacturing base. At the core of the government’s thinking is that serious structural problems exist in the British economy, not the least of which has been the hollowing out of manufacturing, which has been going on for more than half a century.

 

But this “hollowing out of manufacturing” is not just a British phenomenon. Although starting the process much later than the U.K., Canada, in recent years, has lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and the U.S., millions.