The Rag Blog

The Corporate Democratic Party is into snuff politics.

The target this month–single payer, Medicare for all.

The motive–protect the corporate health insurance industry.

Democratic snuff politics was on display yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Senator Ron Wyden was on the Hill surrounded by his corporate supporters–Steve Burd, CEO, Safeway Inc., Art Collins, CEO of Medtronic, Inc, H. Edward Hanaway, CEO, CIGNA, Steve Sanger, CEO, General Mills, and Ronald Williams, CEO, Aetna, Inc.

Wyden has introduced legislation that is similar to that introduced by Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All claim to create universal health care.

None can, do or will.

What’s the common denominator between Wyden-care, and Romney-care and Schwarzenegger-care?

Individual mandates.

The individual must get insured or the individual is violating the law.

As opposed to single payer.

Which says to the health insurance companies–get out.

We will take care of our people.

If you sell basic health insurance, you are violating the law.

Everyone is in one insurance pool.

Nobody is out.

All are covered.

No bills, no co-pays, no deductibles.

No losing your health insurance when you change jobs.

No escalating premiums when you get sick.

Cheaper than the current system.

With better outcomes.

One approach sets up a system that outlaws individual wrongdoing.

The other sets up a system that outlaws corporate wrongdoing.

The corporate executives were at the press conference to support Wyden’s plan and to push their own newly created Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform.

The key element focused on by the CEOs–market-based healthcare system.

The goal–derail publically funded single payer legislation that will cut administrative waste.

The single payer bill has 70 sponsors in the House of Representatives and is supported by 52 percent of the American people.

When asked why he doesn’t support single payer when 52 percent of the American people do, Wyden didn’t blush.

“The people of my state, not a poll, but at the ballot box in 2002, they voted by about 3-1 against a single payer proposal,” Wyden said.

Well yeah, after the insurance industry dumped millions to scare people into believing the government was going to take over their lives.

“If you go to a community meeting and take a poll in my state, what people want is coverage like their member of Congress gets,” Wyden said. “They want benefits like their members of Congress. They want the quality of care that their members of Congress get.”

But can’t single payer deliver exactly that?

A man inspects the body armor police riot gear displayed on a mannequin, at the ‘Rebuild Iraq 2007,’ the 4th International Trade Exhibition for the Rebuilding of Iraq in Amman, Jordan, Monday, May, 7, 2007. More than 40 countries are taking part in the conference to encourage countries and companies to invest in all aspects of Iraqi life. (AP Photo/Nader Daoud)

Rebuild Iraq? Police in riot gear are supposed to rebuild Iraq? And this is the FOURTH trade fair for ‘rebuilding’ Iraq? Have they lost their minds? If they want to rebuild Iraq, they should start with supplying all the hospitals and clinics with EVERYTHING that they need. They should start by seriously looking for a neutral third party (not the USA!) to broker peace and stability in Iraq. They should make sure everyone has enough food and a decent shelter.

Having more armed men in riot gear or body armor is not going to REBUILD IRAQ – have we not had four years of evidence to establish that fact? More guns and more armies and more mercenaries are not going to REBUILD IRAQ.

Sometimes I think this whole war business is just a racket to make some sickos out there a LOT OF MONEY. They keep promoting violence and chaos and strife, and hey, guess what, some of the people fall for it. And then some more people are fearful and feel they need to protect themselves – and the weapons manufacturers get to sell even MORE weapons. And people like George Tenet can help get a war on, whine that they were mis-judged, write a damn book about it and MAKE TONS OF MONEY. And he is far from being the only one – Senator Edwards who co-sponsored the bill for the war on Iraq ALSO made money off the war (all legal) and now is going around telling other people what they should be doing – now that the political winds have shifted!

So far US forces in Iraq have paid out $32m for ‘wrongful deaths’. Karzan Sherabayani went back to Kirkuk to ask why his uncle had to die

One cold London morning in January, I received a phone call from one of my brothers. Uncle Kakarash was dead, killed by American soldiers at a checkpoint. He was my mother’s brother, 75, and like most Kurds had suffered greatly under Saddam and welcomed the Americans as liberators.

Civilians in Iraq face everyday hazards beyond the snipers and the insurgents’ bombs – hundreds have been run over by tanks or hit by stray bullets or shot at checkpoints. There are no records kept of the numbers of civilians killed during the war or by coalition troops.

Figures released last month after a request from the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the US army has paid out $32m to Iraqi civilians in compensation for ‘wrongful deaths’ and injuries. That does not include condolence payments which can be made at the discretion of commanders on the scene.

I had been back to Iraq several times since the war, reporting for More4 News. But this time I had a personal mission to return to Kurdistan, the homeland I fled 27 years ago.

My cousin Sabah took me to the checkpoint where his father died, not far from his home on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Kakarash had gone out first thing in the morning, before breakfast, to get petrol before the queues built up. As luck would have it, I found several eyewitnesses who had seen the whole incident.

One of them was an Iraqi soldier who had been on duty at the checkpoint. ‘When the Americans are here we have to stop all the cars, but your uncle was distracted and kept driving,’ he told me. ‘The Americans shot a bullet into the ground to warn him – he didn’t stop but tried to turn away and the Americans started shooting at him, thinking he might be a suicide car bomb.’

A group of local men, clearly distressed by what they had seen, told me the soldiers kept on firing after my uncle had turned around and tried to get away. ‘They obviously shot to kill him,’ one man told me. ‘If not, they could have stopped after the first shot, they could have given him a chance to see what was he going to do next, but they just shot him dead.’

The increasing incidents of human smuggling and trafficking in the wake of the arrest of an M.P. belonging to the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have become a major topic of discussion and pontification in public forums in general and the media in particular. Despite long hours of debates and discussions, clarity over the issue has been missing. For example, none of the so-called experts could answer why and how the number of human beings migrating willingly or unwillingly from one country to another has been growing at an unprecedented rate.

While 15 million or so people were taken, over two centuries, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean to work as slaves, around 50 million people were enticed during the fifty year span of the 1830s – 1880s from India and China to work in foreign lands as indentured labourers after slavery was formally abolished in the British empire in 1833 and in the USA in 1865.The entire system of indentured labour was based on fraud and the labourers were trapped in by false promises with the connivance of the British government. The gullible fell in the trap in the hope of realizing their fond dream of a better life. Almost all these indentured labourers came from the rural areas where life was extremely miserable.

Ever since those days human smuggling and trafficking have been on the increase despite restrictive immigration laws, punitive actions and hazardous journey. There are several reasons for this. Let us first begin with human smuggling, i.e., the cases where people try to cross over to other countries of their own volition. On the one hand, job opportunities in developing countries are unable to keep pace with the volume of demand. Nay, in a number of countries they have been shrinking in certain areas. Take, for example, India. With increasing flow of foreign direct investment in retail trade besides the entry of Indian big business, small shopkeepers and hawkers are becoming jobless. Similarly agriculture has ceased to give jobs and sustenance to people dependent on for ages. Handicrafts and small industries have been declining. In addition, the population increase has led to the entry of more people in the working age group. The spread of education has resulted in the formation of a veritable army of the educated unemployed who want better and more paying job opportunities and for that they try to migrate at all cost to the countries where prospects appear to be more promising. Unprecedented improvements in and expansion of information and communication technologies in recent times have encouraged the desire for international migration.

It is baffling that none of the ten points of the Washington consensus on which the ongoing globalization is based, talk of the free flow of labour across national boundaries while they want the removal of all impediments in the way of the free flow of goods, services and capital. UN Economic and Social Council’s report “Globalization and Labour Migration” has this to say in this regard: “Recent globalization trends have been characterized by the greater integration of global markets for goods, services and capital across borders while their impact on the cross border movement of people and labour remains much more restricted, regulated by immigration laws and policies that uphold the principle of state sovereignty.” This is nothing but hypocrisy and falsifies the claim of those who think that national sovereignty has become redundant. The declining employment opportunities and the growing pressure of population in developing countries act as a push factor while better prospects in developed countries, highlighted by the media and the tales of their prosperity told by relations and friends act as a pull factor. To quote the UN report again: “… globalization has … led to widening disparities of employment opportunities, income and living standards across the globe. In some countries, globalization has adversely affected jobs and livelihoods in traditional sectors. The failure of globalization to create new jobs where people live is a prime factor in increasing migration pressures.” It is obvious that the failure to find means of livelihood propels people to go elsewhere despite serious odds. Looking back, one finds that throughout history, “migration has been a courageous expression of the individual’s will to overcome adversity and to live a better life.” The migration of the Aryans to India, notwithstanding what the Hindutva ideologues may say, was a typical example of this. Discriminations of various sorts have neither stopped nor slowed this process. Recall the latest thesis of Samuel Huntington in America calling for stopping the immigration of the Hispanics or the vile propaganda by the Hindutva forces and the police brutality in India against the Bangladeshis in this context that have failed to act as deterrence.

In 2005, total migrants worldwide came to 191 million and most of these were induced by better job prospects. Five years earlier, in 2000, the number of migrants came to around 81 million. With their families they accounted for almost 90 per cent of total migrants. Refugees and asylum seekers accounted for the rest. In the years to come, international labour migration will go on increasing at an accelerated rate. Because of the difficulties in obtaining visas and work permits, the phenomenon of human smuggling has come into existence. There has appeared, to quote Moises Naim, editor of the Washington-based, Foreign Policy, “an organized wholesale trading business shipping bulk consignments of humans over long distances, and involving staggering amounts of money.” During 1988-1996, a Maltese of Pakistani origin, Tourab Ahmed Sheikh, gathered $15 million from this venture. Mandir Kumar Wahi from India entered into partnership with him and began gathering his cargo from India and shipping to Europe and America. He too became phenomenally rich in no time.

Over the years, a national network of pimps, travel agents, corrupt officials from passport issuing department and politicians with their clouts came into being. A number of politicians themselves with diplomatic passports and certain immunities and influence began ferrying people from India to Europe and America for hefty fees. The officials looking after the security of airports and air services began winking at this business. It is not that this phenomenon has not been known but nobody dared talk about before the recent incident involving the BJP M.P., Babubhai Katara, from Gujarat. Startling revelations have begun dripping in as a result of investigations. The M.P. had a number of, both genuine and fake, passports, used to smuggle the aspirants of both sexes out of the country for hefty amounts. The total monetary value of the turnovers in this business is not accurately known, but it is baffling. The facilitators bear little risk while the migrants have to put their lives and property in jeopardy from the very beginning of their adventure. They may be arrested any time during the journey or their vessels may meet with disastrous accidents as happened some years ago near Malta. Agents may ditch them and they may be deported back for their failure to secure valid documents for stay and work in host countries. If their mission goes haywire, they are sure to sink in debt and lose their landed property and ultimately reduced to begging.

Now, coming to trafficking. Through this process, human beings are taken out of the country forcibly or by employing fraudulent means. Children are taken to be converted into slaves for life or for entertaining the rich in the gulf countries as camel jockeys. Young girls are enticed or even kidnapped to be employed as sex slaves for the rich. The brothels get replenishment of prostitutes. In addition, human trafficking is used for satisfying the growing demand for human organs.

Rightwing nationalist Nicolas Sarkozy, is the next president of France. He campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform that veered uncomfortably close to that of Jean-Marie LePen, though he did make a provision for affirmative action. Sarkozy will try to break the unions, and his view of the immigrants who rioted in 2005 over joblessness as “scum” bodes ill for social peace. An Arab blogger’s view of Sarkozy’s police tactics is eye-opening.

Sarkozy’s message, that he wants to restore pride in Frenchness, wants to promote free market reforms, and worries that France has lost control of its borders all sounds Reaganesque. Just as Reaganism was a form of American (“white”) nationalism, so Sarkozyism is a form of French nationalism. And just as Reagan’s nationalism had a class location in the upper middle classes and the rich, so too does Sarkozy’s “French” nationalism.

But the United States and France are both founded on civic nationalism (open to everyone of any race or culture), not on ethnic nationalism. While Germany’s laws allowed persons of German heritage and language resident in eastern Europe and Central Asia under Communist rule to come to Germany as citizens after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States would hardly make a law allowing English-speakers to immigrate at will. Citizenship in the US is open to all ethnicities and is about allegiance to the Constitution. The revolutionary ideal of France is similarly civic. The Republican French thought nothing of bestowing citizenship on some provinces of Senegal and actually allowing them to elect deputies to the French national assembly. French citizenship was never about race, about “Français de souche.” But I worry that Sarkozy’s trajectory is to privilege that kind of narrow Frenchness.

Sarkozy’s French nationalism (he uses the French equivalent of “France: Love it or leave it!”– a sentiment pioneered by LePen) will clash with the realities of French multiculturalism. France’s Muslims are estimated at anywhere from 4 million on up, but I favor the 4 million figure (the population of metropolitan France is about 60 million, so this is 6.6 percent).

The Muslims are only one immigrant group. There are thought to be 14 million French of immigrant origins (over the past century?)– including 100,000 Britons. The biggest group is the Portuguese.

Sarkozy intends to create an Orwellian “Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.” He rubbed the practicing Muslims the wrong way when he came out in favor of the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and he supported banning the headscarf for Muslim school girls.

Although it is often said that Sarkozy played a positive role in insisting that French Muslims form a Muslim Council and develop a “French Islam,” it is often forgotten that the council ended up being dominated by first-generation immigrants out of touch with French Muslims (many of whom are third or fourth generation), and by conservative religious groups–the “National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF).” Sarkozy himself is said to have favored the UOIF, which is to say the least made up of hardliners. One suspects that he was attempting to set up religous Muslims as a force in rightwing politics in France, on the model of the practicing Roman Catholics. (About 18 percent of the French are practicing Roman Catholics; most of these congregations have tended to vote Gaullist. Some 45 percent of practicing Catholics voted in the first round for Sarkozy, with only 11 percent voting Socialist. The rest must have voted for the centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou.)

Ironically, Sarkozy may have succeeded in setting up a rightwing Muslim Council, but failed to attract its loyalty to himself, given his subsequent record of anti-immigrant rhetoric and his positions on cultural issues important to Muslims.

In the first round, only 1 percent of Muslim voters embraced Sarkozy, with 64 percent voting for Segolene Royal. That French Muslims supported a woman socialist candidate so overwhelmingly shows how few of them have a fundamentalist mindset. Most French Muslim youth are relatively remote from the culture of their grandparents and the rioting was economic in character.

The struggle over Iraqi oil has been going on for a long, long time. One could date it back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter — before his Habitat for Humanity days — declared that Persian Gulf oil was “vital” to American national interests. So vital was it, he announced, that the U.S. would use “any means necessary, including military force” to sustain access to it. Soon afterwards, he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would eventually develop into United States Central Command (Centcom) and give future presidents the ability to intervene relatively quickly and massively in the region.

Or we could date it all the way back to World War II, when British officials declared Middle Eastern oil “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination,” and U.S. officials seconded the thought, calling it “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

The date when the struggle for Iraqi oil began is less critical than our ability to trace the ever growing willingness to use “any means necessary” to control such a “vital prize” into the present. We know, for example, that, before and after he ascended to the Vice-Presidency, Dick Cheney has had his eye squarely on the prize. In 1999, for example, he told the Institute of Petroleum Engineers that, when it came to satisfying the exploding demand for oil, “the Middle East, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” The mysterious Energy Task Force he headed on taking office in 2001 eschewed conservation or developing alternative sources as the main response to any impending energy crisis, preferring instead to make the Middle East “a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.” As part of this focus, the Task Force recommended that the administration put its energy, so to speak, into convincing Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment” — in other words, into a policy of reversing 25 years of state control over the petroleum industry in the region.

The Energy Task Force set about planning how to accomplish this historic reversal. We know, for instance, that it scrutinized a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, together with the (non-American) oil companies scheduled to develop them (once the UN sanctions still in place on Saddam Hussein’s regime were lifted). It then worked jointly with the administration’s national security team to find a compatible combination of military and economic policies that might inject American power into this equation. According to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, the National Security Council directed its staff “to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'”

While we cannot be sure that this planning itself was instrumental in setting the U.S. on a course toward invading Iraq, we can be sure that plenty of energy was being expended in Washington, planning for the disposition of Iraq’s massive oil reserves once that invasion was successfully executed. In 2002, just a year after Cheney’s Task Force completed its work, and before the U.S. had officially decided to invade Iraq, the State Department “established a working group on oil and energy,” as part of its “Future of Iraq” project. It brought together influential Iraqi exiles, U.S. government officials, and international consultants. Later, several Iraqi members of the group became part of the Iraqi government. The result of the project’s work was a “draft framework for Iraq’s oil policy” that would form the foundation for the energy policy now being considered by the Iraqi Parliament.

The Prize

The specific prize in Iraq is certainly worthy of almost any kind of preoccupation. Indeed, Iraq could someday become the most important source of petrochemical energy on the planet.

Few notice huge shift towards globalization as frothing masses distracted by climate change debate

05/06/07 “Infowars” — – In a sweeping move that has garnered surprisingly little attention this week the United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership that will see regulatory standards “harmonized” and will lay the basis for a merging of the US and EU into one single market, a huge step on the path to a new globalized world order.

The BBC reported from the Summit in Washington on Monday:

“economic council” to push ahead with regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas, including intellectual property, financial services, business takeovers and the motor industry.

Skipping over what the fall out from a single Western market will be, the BBC simply announced “The aim is to increase trade and lower costs.” before moving swiftly on to analyse what this means in terms of global warming.

While the masses are being whipped up into a never ending frenzy over climate change at every given opportunity, hardcore political actions that will affect the lives of everyone on the planet in the here and now are being skated over with little or no attention being paid to them.

The proponents and architects of a one world order have worked long and hard behind the scenes for a long time pushing a gradual erosion of national sovereignty via a harmonization of all areas of life, economic, social, cultural and environmental.

Such harmonization and elimination of diversity is the only way to maximize the profit of the few at the expense of the many, while maintaining tight controls over society as a whole in order for a long continuation of that status quo.

The global corporate elite are the only ones who will benefit from essentially wiping out the free market and eliminating economic competition across nations.

The EU has long been used as a tool for such harmonizing globalization and has now reached the point at which it has become a supranational federal government for Europe. Over the years, what was originally sold as a simple free trade treaty has slowly been built from the bottom up into an all encompassing monolithic authority over the entire region.

The areas it now seeks to dominate also include public health, social policy, transport, justice, agriculture, fisheries, energy, economic and social cohesion, the environment, internal and external trade, and consumer protection.

It has recently been highlighted that European globalists such as Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Angela Merkel are seeking to implement by stealth areas of the EU constitution regardless of its blanket rejection by voters. Senior British Cabinet sources have warned that they are also pushing hard for Brussels to be given a full-time unelected president, who would serve a five year term and speak as the voice of Europe on the world stage.

It is commonly accepted that reforms to strengthen the European Parliament, scheduled to be implemented before 2009, could undermine the ability of member states to opt out of EU laws, as Britain does at present, effectively ending national sovereignty.

In their important history of the EU, The Great Deception, British authors Christopher Booker and Richard North, concluded that the 27 member nations now entangled in the union have ceded their sovereignty in a carefully planned stealth operation. They grudgingly credit european globalists with accomplishing “a slow-motion coup d’etat: the most spectacular coup d’etat in history.”

The authors of The Great Deception summarized the effect of the Treaty of Rome: “Thus did the central deception of the whole story become established. From now on, the real agenda, political integration, was to be deliberately concealed under the guise of economic integration. Building Europe was to be presented as a matter of trade and jobs.”

In addition dissidents and outcasts such as Vladimir Bukovksy have warned that an elite plan has long existed whereby the EU would be hijacked and transformed into a Soviet style Socialist superstate that would eliminate the individual nation state’s power and create a governing body with no accountability or direct representation.

The Italian media compare Nicolas Sarkozy to Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the fascist Alleanza Nationale party. Sarkozy has shown to be greatly influenced by the Nazis’ ‘eugenic’ theory of ‘superior race’. It is also revealed that Sarkozy was involved in violation of international humanitarian law concerning immigrants. If elected, Sarkozy will polarise France, incite hatred and divisions, and return France to a violent imperialist power.

With 85 per cent of French electorate – the highest in generations – voting in the first round of the French elections on April 22, Sarkozy’s right-wing Union for Popular Movement (UMP) party won 31.10 per cent of the vote, ahead of Ségolène Royal of the “Socialist” Party at 25.85 per cent. François Bayrou of the Union for French Democracy (UDF) party won 18.55 per cent of the vote, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front won 10.51 per cent. The decline in Le Pen’s popularity is due to Sarkozy’s appeal to Le Pen voters. Le Pen was understandably furious, and accused Sarkozy of stealing “my ideas and my votes”. Because the French Constitution requires that a candidate receive an absolute majority of votes in order to be elected president, the results mean a run-off on May 06 between Sarkozy UMP and Royal’s Socialist Party for the French presidency.

In its recent article “Le Vrai Sarkozy” (The Real Sarkozy), the French weekly Marianne (PDF) (20 April, 2007), sheds light on the man who wants to become France’s president. Marianne describes Sarkozy as an “egomaniacal, power-hungry demagogue” and a “danger” to French democracy. It adds that Sarkozy’s “folly is of the kind that in the past has served as fuel for the ambitions of many small dictators”. A member of Sarkozy’s UMP party told Marianne: “It is said that [Sarkozy] is narcissistic, an egotist. These words are weak. I’ve never encountered anyone with such a capacity to spontaneously erase from his surroundings everything that is not a reflection of himself. Sarko is sort of a blind man regarding the exterior world who can only look at his interior world. He looks at himself, he looks at himself constantly, but he can’t look at anything else”. It is a familiar portrait of past European dictators.

While the mainstream media like to portray Sarkozy as “a changed man”, Sarkozy is, in reality, an extremist in sheep’s clothing, who has attacked minorities, oppressed civil liberties and divided the French people.

Sarkozy’s main target is the marginalised Muslims and Muslim immigrants in France. Like other Western leaders, Sarkozy is banking on the current anti-Muslim plague – the contagious Islamophobia virus – in the West. With his rhetoric of false patriotism and negative nationalism, Sarkozy is playing on people’s imagined fears and tapping into a growing pool of hardcore racists. He has called for more Nazi-like repression against immigrants, and he is in favour of creating a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity.

As France’s Minister of the Interior in 2005, Sarkozy was involved in illegal deportation of immigrants and engaged “in expulsion quotas and charter flights”. Sarkozy’s attacks on French youth (mostly descendants of Muslim and non-Muslim African immigrant families) demonstrating against discrimination and police violence, calling them “scum” and “riff-raff”, and saying that they should be hosed with “Karcherized” (pressurized water). This brought him notoriety and revealed his real colour.

Furthermore, Sarkozy has made public that he is in favour of the Nazis’ ideology of ‘superior race’. (See Sarkozy’s interview in Philosopie Magazine conducted by French Philosopher, Michel Onfray).

If we look back at world history, we can see that Sarkozy is using a “blueprint” to turn France into a dictatorial (fascist) state. It is a frightening time when Western politicians conveniently forget the horrors of the Holocaust.

Furthermore, Sarkozy is one of the few European politicians to support the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ongoing murderous occupation of that country by the U.S. and Britain. His policy on Israel and the Palestinians is a U.S. policy; he has said he will “defend Israel’s security”, a deliberately constructed Western cliché designed to justify Israeli terror, Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and dispossession of the land and rights of Palestinian people. He has praised France’s imperialist past, including French crimes against humanity. His attitude to Turkey’s membership in the European Union (EU) is: “If you let 100 million Turkish Muslims come in, what will come of it?” Of course the comment is grossly misleading and Sarkozy is engages in fear mongering and spreading of the Islamophobia virus.

Contrary to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media, Sarkozy is not the “answer to France’s problems”. With 8.6 per cent overall unemployment (although a very high rate among youths), France is doing better than many countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “[M]ost French have jobs and love their security; all French love their efficient public transport, high-speed trains running like clockwork at 320km/h, efficient urban planning, fine health services and excellent state primary and secondary schools”, wrote Professor Charles Sowerwine, of Melbourne University and the author of France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society. It is evident why, in 2005, the French voted against the (neoliberal) EU constitution.

In addition, Professor Tony Judt of the Remarque Institute at New York University wrote in a New York Times op-ed (NYT, April 22, 2007) that: “French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people”. Professor Judt added: “Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls”. If elected, Sarkozy will rollback all these achievements in favour of the ‘Neoliberalism’ that has infected other countries and destroyed many lives.

Finally, the highly respected Berliner Tageszeitung described Nicolas Sarkozy as a “tricolore George Bush who wants to impose on France a right-wing American ideology of neoconservativism”, an ideology characterised by perpetual violence, racism, violation of international laws and civil liberties.

If elected, Sarkozy will follow in George Bush’s footsteps. Sarkozy will compromise France’s independence, disregard international laws and civilised norms, and destroy constitutional freedoms. On May 6, the French people will have an important choice to make: to reject extremism.

The U.S. bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya and three days before a large anti-war action in Washington, January 27. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN) was present in Nairobi, and after returning home asked out loud how ‘to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?’ Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, she suggested one reason I think valid: ‘Perhaps US-based organizations don’t have the proper analytical framework from which to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos, with ‘fundamental Islamic’ forces not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of ‘terrorists’.’ To that I would add: the major U.S. media’s role in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa. ‘The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade — but you’d hardly know it from your nightly news,’ wrote Andrew Cawthorne from Nairobi for Reuters last week. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now recently examined ABC’s, NBC’s and CBS’s coverage of Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion. ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating a whole three sentences to it. This, despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon.

While the major U.S. print media has not completely ignored the conflict, its reporting is even shallower than its reporting was prior to the invasion of Iraq. As recently as last week, Reuters was still maintaining that Ethiopian troops had invaded its neighbor with the ‘tacit’ support of the United States. At least the New York Times has taken to describing it as ‘covert American support.’ Both characterizations obscure the truth. The attack on Somalia was preplanned and would never have taken place without being approved by the White House. We now know that the Bush Administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea in order to gear up for the battle ahead. U.S. military forces took part in the assault.

‘US political and military alliance with Ethiopia – which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa,’ wrote Kadane.

The planning for the invasion actually began last summer when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the Somali government. It, too, was supposed to be a slam dunk. The U.S.- Ethiopian version of shock and awe was to swiftly bring about the desired regime change, installing the Washington-favored, government-in-exile of President Abdullahi Yusuf. Only a few days after their troops entered the country, Ethiopian officials said their forces lacked the resources to stay in Somalia and they would be leaving soon. At one point, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared – Bushlike – that the invaders’ mission had been successfully accomplished and two-thirds of his troops were returning home. That turned out not to be true. Three months later the Ethiopians are still in Somalia committing what numerous observers are calling horrendous war crimes.

‘The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives.’ Walter Lindner, German Ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country’s acting president last week. Displaced persons are ‘at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape – including by uniformed troops’ at a various “checkpoints.”

“Cholera – endemic to the region during the rainy season – is beginning to cut a swathe through the displaced,’ he continued, adding that attempts by international groups to offer assistance to the victims are being obstructed by militias who are stealing supplies, demanding ‘taxes’ and threatening relief workers.

On April 3, the Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that ‘Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes and that donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” the e-mail said.

In the meantime, the Bush Administration has worked hard to raise troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Promises were made, but with one exception, remain unfulfilled. In a telephone conversation, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised President Bush to provide between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia’s transitional government and train its troops. The Ugandans arrived but are said to have been largely confined to their quarters, refraining from taking part in the effort to crush the opposition. Meanwhile, the ‘Transitional Government’ and Ethiopian forces have been reported shelling civilian areas in the capital from the government compound they are supposedly guarding.

None of the reporters on the scene appear to have explored the question of why the other African governments have failed to send troops but I think the answer is obvious. They would be called ‘peacekeepers’ but would be called upon to inject themselves into a civil conflict on the side of an unpopular puppet government, something they are loathed to do.

Three months ago, I wrote in this space that ‘If the unfolding events in Iraq are any indication, what started out as a swift invasion and occupation could turn out to be a long and widening war.’ That was an understatement. As of this writing, about 1,300 people are reported to have perished in the fighting, over 4,300 wounded and nearly 400,000 have fled their homes.

Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reported drowning off the Somali coast.

“There is a massive tragedy unfolding in Mogadishu, but from the world’s silence, you would think it’s Christmas,” the head of a Mogadishu political think- tank told Cawthorne. ‘Somalis, caught up in Mogadishu’s worst violence for 16 years, are painfully aware of their place on the global agenda.’

“Nobody cares about Somalia, even if we die in our millions,” Cawthorne was told by Abdirahman Ali, a 29- year-old father- of-two who works as a security guard in Mogadishu.

And, just as in Iraq, the U.S. supported forces – the small army of the enthroned and very unpopular government and the invaders – are caught up in a civil war, set in motion by the invasion and occupation. In addition to the forces loyal to the overthrown Islamist government, the regime in power is opposed by the Hawiye, one of the country’s largest clans. A spokesman for the clan recently called upon ‘the Somali people, wherever it exists, to unity in the fight against the Ethiopians. The war is not between Ethiopia and our tribe, it is between Ethiopia and all Somali people,’ he said.

“For the major [world] leaders, there is a tremendous embarrassment over Somalia,” Michael Weinstein, a US expert on Somalia at Purdue University told Reuters. “They have committed themselves to supporting the interim government — a government that has no broad legitimacy, a failing government.

This is the heart of the problem. … But Western leaders can’t back out now, so of course they have 100% no interest in bringing global attention to Somalia. There is no doubt that Somalia has been shoved aside by major media outlets and global leaders, and the Somali Diaspora is left crying in the wilderness.”

Last week, during what was described as a lull in the fight, Ethiopian soldiers were moving from house to house in the capital Mogadishu, taking hundreds of men away by the truckloads to an uncertain fate. Meanwhile, the traumatized residents of the rubble strewn city were reported gathering up bodies, many of them rotting, for burial. ‘Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu’s outskirts, where the scenes are medieval,’ reported The Economist last week. ‘People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter.’

Martin Fletcher wrote in the London Times, April 26, about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis. ‘Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.’

Last week the Washington Post reported that interviews it conducted in Ethiopia and testimony given to diplomats and human rights groups, ‘paint a picture of a nation that jails its citizens without reason or trial, and tortures many of them — despite government claims to the contrary.’

‘Such cases are especially troubling because the U.S. government, a key Ethiopian ally, has acknowledged interrogating terrorism suspects in Ethiopian prisons, where some detainees were sent after being arrested in connection with Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December,’ said the Post story. ‘There have been no reports that those jailed have been tortured.’ The following day, the paper reported, ‘More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia’s capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees — including a U.S. citizen — picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.’

History will probably record the Ethiopian government’s decision to team up with the U.S. Administration for regime change in Somalia as the height of folly. The country has enough problems at home. This was brought into sharp relief April 24, when forces of an ethnic- Somali separatist group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, raided an oil exploration facility, killing 74 people, including nine employees of a Chinese oil company. ‘As Much as China’s – and indeed America’s – ally Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, might like to be on top of security across the Horn, he is not always able to deliver,’ said the Financial Times editorially April 26. ‘His army is the region’s most powerful conventional force. But under his rule, Ethiopia is fraying again around the edges. Armed separatist groups are now changing tactics. Unable to match the army on the battlefield, the Ogaden National Liberation Front has chosen the spectacular to draw attention to its cause. Only recently, a separatist group in the north tried something similar, by kidnapping a group of British diplomats.’

‘Both horrific events can be attributed partly to fallout from Ethiopia’s messy intervention in neighboring Somalia,’ said the newspaper. ‘Initial battles last December were decisively in Ethiopia’s favor. But like the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians in Somalia were ill prepared for the aftermath. A growing insurgency has delayed the withdrawal of their troops, exposing the government to attacks at home. It has also inflamed tension among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia, who fight for the ONLF.

‘Ironically, the Chinese workers killed near Ethiopia’s border with Somalia may have been victims more of Washington’s policy in the region than of Beijing’s. The US has actively backed Mr. Meles’s Somali adventure. In doing so it has undermined multilateral efforts to bring about peace.’

‘There are two main questions that Colonel Yusuf’s and Ethiopia’s western backers should now ask themselves,’ said the Guardian April 26. ‘What was gained by encouraging the Ethiopian army to topple the Islamic Courts? The US allowed Ethiopia to arm itself with North Korean weapons and also participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border. Washington was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects. But how many did they get and what price have Somalis paid?’

‘America can be more heavily criticized for subordinating Somali interests to its own desire to catch a handful of al- Qaeda men who may (or may not) have been hiding in Mogadishu,’said The Economist. ‘None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened. Western, especially European, diplomats watching Somalia from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya to the south, have sounded the alarm. Their governments have done little.’ Chatham House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of International Affairs, has concluded, “In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors — especially Ethiopia and the United States — following their own foreign policy agendas.’

Actually, there is no more reason to believe the Bush Administration promoted this war, in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter, ‘to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men,’ than that the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. What has unfolded in over the past three months, flows from much larger strategic calculations in Washington. The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon’s now operational plan to build a new ‘Africa Command to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed ‘Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda.’

When I first visited this subject shortly after the invasion, I quoted a 10 percent figure for the proportion of petroleum our country takes in from Africa and noted that some experts were saying the U.S. will need to up that percentage to 25 by 2010. Wrong again. Last week came the news that the U.S. now imports more oil from Africa than the Middle East, with Nigeria, Angola and Algeria providing nearly one-fifth of it — more than from Saudi Arabia. While the rulers in Addis Ababa claim the invasion was a preemptive attack on a threatening Somalia and the Bush Administration says giving a wink and a nod to the attack was only a chance to capture a few terrorist holed up in Somalia, for most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the U.S. it was another strategic move to secure positioning in the region where there is a lot of oil. On file are plans – put on hold amid continuing conflicts – for nearly two-thirds of Somalia’s oil fields to be allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. It was recently reported that the U.S. – backed prime minister of Somalia has proposed enactment of a new oil law to encourage the return of foreign oil companies to the country. Salim Lone, spokesperson for the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003, now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya, recently told Democracy Now: ‘the prime minister’s attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his crying wolf about al-Qaeda at every turn. Every time you interview a Somalia official, the first thing you hear is al-Qaeda and terrorists. They’re using that. No one believes it. No one believes it at all, because all independent reports say the contrary.’

I spoke with Kidane last week and she allowed that the situation in Somalia might seem complex to many in the peace and social justice movements. However, she said it is impossible to overlook the parallel with the situation in the Iraq. ‘It’s aggression, that is undeniable, and the same language is being used to justify it,’ she said. Kidane is on target in insisting that the movements for peace and justice in the U.S. – and elsewhere – must take up the issue. The unlawful U.S.- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new – and still mostly hidden – war in many ways similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason.

The great liberator of Iraq was actually the hyena that cleaned out the nation.

Piece by piece, Halliburton over here, a corrupt company over there, we have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American firms in the reconstruction of Iraq. Last weekend, a Globe story connected some of the dots of corruption. Of $20.7 billion in Iraqi bank accounts and oil revenues seized by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the US-led invasion of Iraq, $14 billion was given out for reconstruction but tens of millions of dollars were unaccounted for. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation.

Halliburton and its hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges or baseless costs are well known. But millions more were taken by companies that promised to build or restore libraries or police facilities, or deliver trucks and construction equipment. Money was given to the puppet government with no follow-up. US government investigators can account for only a third of the $1.5 billion given by the CPA to the interim government and it appears that a substantial portion of the $8 billion given to Iraqi ministries went to ”ghost employees.”

Because of the way the United States set things up after the invasion, contractors are immune from prosecution by Iraqis. And even when firms are prosecuted, the millions of dollars in fines go to the US Treasury, not the Iraqi people. It amounts to two invasions. First the bombs. Then the banks.

This is robbery, not reconstruction.

It also amounts to yet another slow-motion lie by the Bush administration. The magnitude of the corruption brings into sharper relief the claims made by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz a month before the war.

The claims came from the same infamous testimony before the House Budget Committee where Wolfowitz said Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was ”wildly off the mark” for saying several hundred thousand troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq. Wolfowitz told the committee that the administration was ”doing everything possible in our planning now to make post-war recovery smoother and less expensive.”

Besides pooh-poohing Shinseki’s estimates, Wolfowitz said a Washington Post story that quoted administration officials as saying the initial invasion would cost $60 billion to $95 billion was also way off the mark. Speaking about such administration officials, Wolfowitz said, ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking – he or she knows what they’re talking about. I mean, I think the idea that it’s going to be eclipsed by these monstrous future costs ignores the nature of the country we’re dealing with.”

”It’s got already, I believe, on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports, which can finally – might finally be turned to a good use instead of building Saddam’s palaces. It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq, those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them.”

”It is a country that has somewhere between, I believe, over $10 billion — let me not put a number on it – in an escrow account run by the United Nations. It’s a country that has $10 billion to $20 billion in frozen assets from the Gulf War, and I don’t know how many billions that are closeted away by Saddam and his henchmen. But there’s a lot of money there and to assume that we’re going to pay for it is just wrong.”

Wolfowitz was wrong on nearly every point, except for the idea that there was about $20 billion floating around Iraq to seize. It has been three years and all Iraq has become is a ”free-fraud zone,” according to one of the attorneys for whistleblowers in Iraqi swindles. Recently, the Army found that Halliburton had $263 million of exaggerated or unexplainable costs on a $2.4 billion no-bid contract, yet still paid Halliburton $253 million of the $263 million.

BAGHDAD — U.S. officers here say they are increasingly troubled by the high number of innocent Iraqis being detained and held — in some cases for many months — by the Iraqi army.

Several officers who serve as advisers to the Iraqis said at least half the people detained by the Iraqi army in Baghdad are innocent.

And the advisers say their close association with the units doing the detaining is placing the Americans on the horns of an ethical dilemma: On one hand, they are forbidden from taking unilateral action in order to free the prisoners; on the other hand, by not freeing innocent detainees being held by their close allies, they feel complicit in what some termed “a war crime.”

In at least one case, a U.S. officer received a letter of admonishment from a general officer after taking it upon himself to free 35 prisoners he knew had been wrongly detained.

All U.S. officers interviewed for this story also said that the practice of locking up people who have done nothing wrong is counterproductive, and directly contrary to the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual.

“In (counterinsurgency) environments, distinguishing an insurgent from a civilian is difficult and often impossible,” the manual states. “Treating a civilian like an insurgent, however, is a sure recipe for failure.”

U.S. and Iraqi army officers said the problems worsened March 1, when, as part of the new Baghdad security plan, the U.S. military transferred authority for running operations in Baghdad to the Iraqi military and the Iraqis assumed responsibility for detainees. Prior to March 1, U.S. officers down to the battalion level had the authority to order the release of detainees, according to a senior U.S. Army official in Baghdad.

Reasons behind detaining

U.S. officers see two main reasons why the Iraqi army detains so many innocents.

The first is what some termed the Iraqis’ “dragnet” approach of arresting all military-age males in the vicinity of an attack on U.S. or Iraqi forces, or of a large weapons cache at the time of its discovery by Iraqi troops.

Lt. Col. Steve Duke, leader of the U.S. military transition team of advisers for the 5th Brigade of the Iraqi army’s 6th Division, cited two recent examples of this dynamic at work.

In late March, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 10th Iraqi Army Division detained 54 men in Baghdad after an improvised explosive device attack, he said.

“If you were near the IED, or you could spell IED, you were detained,” he said.

It took “a couple of weeks” before the Iraqis released any of them, he said.

“The Iraqis are not good at field interviews … and there’s a perception that subordinate commanders do not have the authority to release, but they do have the authority to detain,” Duke said.

Authority to release any detainee rests with Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abud Ganbar Hashimi, who heads the Baghdad Operational Command, said Maj. Michael Philipak, a U.S. Army intelligence officer who advises the Iraqi army 6th Division.

The second reason cited by U.S. officers is that the Iraqi defense and interior ministries are drawing up lists of individuals to be detained and sending them down to brigade and even battalion levels of the Iraqi army, all based on “intelligence” that is never shared with either Iraqi commanders or their U.S. counterparts, according to American and Iraqi officers.

“In the old days — and now — we are the ones who create intelligence according to information we receive from sources,” said Capt. Amjad Abbas Hasson, intelligence officer for 3rd Battalion, 5th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division.

May I interrupt the clamorous political debate raging in Washington over Iraq to set the record straight? Contrary to what his critics say, President Bush does have a timetable for ending the war. He plans to hand the disaster over to his successor at high noon on Jan. 20, 2009.

If Iraq is going to have an ugly ending, as it almost surely will, Bush is determined to see that it doesn’t happen on his watch, and there’s not much the Congress can do to foil him short of cutting off funds for the war, a step Democrats apparently are not ready to take.

Bush will keep asking for more time and money. As long as American forces are in Iraq, as long the fighting goes on, the war cannot be labeled a failure, at least in Bush’s mind. To admit defeat, to acknowledge that they blundered and destroyed a nation in the process, and maybe set the stage for even greater mayhem in the Middle East, is not the way of the swaggering pseudo-cowboy from Texas or his delusional and treacherous vice president.

Iraq is an immense human tragedy and major foreign policy debacle, and Bush’s troop surge only delays the terrible day when this fact must be faced. At this point, what happens in Iraq is far more consequential than what happens in Washington, and there is little reason to expect much good news from Iraq in the coming months. So far, the main result of the troop surge is a painful spike in U.S. casualties. It has not quelled the violence or moved Iraq’s sectarian factions closer to political reconciliation. There is no reason to believe the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, even if it wanted to, is capable of reaching a political accord acceptable to the minority Sunni insurgents, who are inflicting most of the U.S. casualties.

Other than the cost in American blood, does it really matter whether we start withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq on Oct. 1, as the Democrats called for in the bill Bush vetoed last week, or after the next presidential election? The outcome is likely to be the same – bloody chaos as sectarian factions slaughter each other and settle scores. Is postponing that awful day of reckoning worth the lives and the limbs of hundreds or even thousands more American soldiers?

The president talks about a “way forward” in Iraq; Democrats are talking about a way out of Iraq, and most Americans are with them. But Bush continues to defy both.