Town Hall Meeting

22 May 2009

Breaking Through the Propaganda on Pakistan

Filed under: — Al @ 4:41 pm

The PBS show Bill Moyers Journal (last Friday) started with an extremely enlightening discussion about Pakistan, with 2 people who have actually lived there (again, what a journalistic concept!). It seems most of the fear mongering is not true, sound familiar? For example, the “Taliban” in Pakistan are not really all Taliban. In reality there are a handful of different factions who do not all agree with each other that are being lumped in to the word “Taliban” by the US Establishment (mass media, political leaders, pundits). Then there are only about 4000 of these “bad guys,” vs about 550,000 Pakistani military forces. And the fact that Pakistan was able to get rid of a military dictator and demand free and fair elections and ended up electing the most popular candidate at the time (who has his own issues of corruption though), is considered a weak and unstable place!? What a propaganda job we are getting here in the good ‘ol US of A!

You may ask, “What is the motive for the fear-mongering?” The answer is the US wants Pakistan to do something it does not want to do, so threatening them and calling them unstable will force them to take action they would not otherwise take. In this case, the US wants them to militarily attack the northwest territories as a backstop for the US military’s efforts in Afghanistan.

Watch Bill Moyers, Shahan Mufti, and Juan Cole Discuss Pakistan

Watch Moyers, Mufti, and Cole Discuss Pakistan

20 May 2009

“Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons”

Filed under: — Al @ 11:49 am

Amazing article by an excellent journalist Jeffrey St. Clair. It’s about a nuclear bomb that was lost off the coast of Savannah, GA in 1958 when two military planes accidentally hit each other. The government never recovered the bomb, so it sits there to this day. Instead they spent their time on a PR campaign in order to calm nerves in hopes to keep their precious nuclear program. Not to worry though, “We’ve looked into this particular issue from all angles and we’re very comfortable,” says the US Air Force. Your Department of Defense/War at work…

When We Almost Nuked Savannah
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

Read the rest here

CounterPunch - Lost Nuclear Bomb Near Savannah

On a side note, if you haven’t read it yet, check out his book Whiteout which is part of our progressive library.

15 May 2009

Timeline for “US debt on default path”

Filed under: — Administrator @ 2:23 pm

EXCERPTS:

“The US dollar will inevitably bear the full and ferocious brunt of the decidedly hyper-inflationary policies of Washington, notwithstanding the Federal Reserve’s empty promises to reverse such policies swiftly to protect the currency when inflation inevitably rears its ugly head again.”

“All the while, the strongest evidence indicates that when economic recovery finally arrives, it will be feeble at best for years to come. So the financial and economic sectors won’t be able to withstand any promised rapid reversal of Washington’s hyper-inflationary policies. But nor will the dollar be able to withstand the option of leaving such policies in place. Washington is therefore setting up the most colossal catch-22 imaginable for the dollar and for the US economy. The dollar cannot survive such a scenario intact.”

China and its Eastern partners in Asia and the Middle East, have soured on the dollar’s future beyond the short to medium term. They’ve entirely lost faith in the ability of the US to really get its monetary, financial and economic houses in order before the repercussions of shortsighted policy come home to roost with a vengeance. They’re preparing new solutions that will take two or three more years to fully enact but which will shove the dollar aside toward the margins of international finance and international monetary policy. The handwriting is therefore on the wall for dollar-denominated financial assets.”

“When the catch-22 alluded to above soon becomes fully set in place and irreversible, say in the next few months when sufficient new sovereign debt is actually racked up, and then a short distance farther down the road when Washington, the Fed and the Treasury try to withdraw the present hyper-inflationary policies and find themselves fully trapped in that catch-22 bind, with no viable way out – say within the next 12 to 24 months – then Washington may have no choice but to let the Treasury default on some flavors of sovereign debt, while simultaneously inflating away some other flavors.”

“Unless the most rosy and unrealistic scenario comes about wherein vibrant US economic growth returns very soon, unless the government toxic asset and bailout plans become renowned successes, unless securitization gets a new lease on life and America is able to quickly get its house in order in the next three to four years, the dire forecasts here for US sovereign debt defaults and a dollar crisis, with all their colossal implications and repercussions, are unavoidable in the next 24 to 36 months at most. The UK and Japan face a similar outcome.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KE07Dj02.html

-Thanks G for the excerpts and link!

Where are the US news media and leaders? Simple economics 101 teaches that massive deficits and debt will lead to inflation or default or both. People should be warned so they can take measures to protect themselves!

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