Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
4.5 Million Orphans in Iraq: Protests Over Food and Shelter
Orphans join Iraq protests over food, shelter. Orphans join protests in Iraq to call for a better standard of living. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.
BAGHDAD — Fadel Mohammad Ra'ad, 10, is one of thousands of children who have lost their parents to the endless violence that has been gripping Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.
"My parents were killed in an explosion at the center of Baghdad last year, leaving me and my sister to no one," the child told IslamOnline.net in a Baghdad orphanage. "I have relatives but all of them have refused to take us in," he added choking at the memory. "We were forced to work to survive."
Children, like many other civilians, are the silent victims of violence in war-torn Iraq. "Violence in Iraq has vast characteristics. Sectarian violence, resistance against US troops, traditional behaviors and the fight against the hungry," explains Haydar Hassan Kareem, a sociologist.
The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs estimate that around 4,5 million children are orphans. Nearly 70 percent of them lost their parents since the invasion and the ensuing violence. From the total number, around 600,000 children are living in the streets without a house or food to survive. Only 700 children are living in the 18 orphanages existing in the country, lacking their most essential needs.
"Unfortunately the budget allocated to projects that help street children and orphans is decreasing day in and day out," notes an Iraqi Red Crescent employee refusing to give his name. "Worse still, almost no NGO is dedicating itself to this group of kids who are subject to trafficking and sexual abuses in the streets."
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/02/45-million-orphans-iraq-protests-over-food-and-shelter
Monday, July 19, 2010
America: Hooked on War and Getting Poorer
With record foreclosures and child poverty at a shameful level, can we really afford to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for 10 years?
I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP's pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.
I've learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.
Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.
Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to "nation-build" in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?
Iraq was George Bush's war. But, as Republican party chairman Michael Steele correctly says, "Afghanistan is Obama's war of choice", and a losing proposition. Historically, Bush and Dick Cheney merely toyed with Afghanistan while visiting shock and awe on Iraq. But President Obama is really, really serious about it. He told us so on his campaign trail, but most of us refused to believe him. We told ourselves: oh, he's a closet pacifist, or he'll somehow find a way out of the impasse, thus sealing a devil's pact with our own consciences.
Obama's "way out" is to dig deeper in so that he'll be able to get out, it's said. Where have we heard that before? Exit strategy, my foot. Obama is a willing prisoner of his generals, the latest four-star foot-in-mouther being General George Casey, army chief of staff, who a few days ago confessed to CBS News that the US could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He then fudged it, but the cat was out of the bag.)
Our Afghanistan war, which began in 1980 under the Democrats (by weaponising Afghan resistance to the Soviets), and is now truly a bipartisan war, is as bankrupt as our economy. No connection? None that I can hear from Republicans or Democrats and the "liberal base". The war without purpose or common sense is simply a given, like the weather. Other than a few lonely members of Congress, like Florida's Alan Grayson (who introduced a bill titled "The War Is Making You Poor"), the antiwar Texas libertarian Ron Paul and Illinois's Tim Johnson, hardly anybody in public life dares to make a connection between teachers' pink slips, personal bankruptcies (6,000 a day now), our rotting infrastructure, lengthening queues at unemployment offices, child poverty … and the war. Source
I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP's pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.
I've learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.
Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.
Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to "nation-build" in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?
Iraq was George Bush's war. But, as Republican party chairman Michael Steele correctly says, "Afghanistan is Obama's war of choice", and a losing proposition. Historically, Bush and Dick Cheney merely toyed with Afghanistan while visiting shock and awe on Iraq. But President Obama is really, really serious about it. He told us so on his campaign trail, but most of us refused to believe him. We told ourselves: oh, he's a closet pacifist, or he'll somehow find a way out of the impasse, thus sealing a devil's pact with our own consciences.
Obama's "way out" is to dig deeper in so that he'll be able to get out, it's said. Where have we heard that before? Exit strategy, my foot. Obama is a willing prisoner of his generals, the latest four-star foot-in-mouther being General George Casey, army chief of staff, who a few days ago confessed to CBS News that the US could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He then fudged it, but the cat was out of the bag.)
Our Afghanistan war, which began in 1980 under the Democrats (by weaponising Afghan resistance to the Soviets), and is now truly a bipartisan war, is as bankrupt as our economy. No connection? None that I can hear from Republicans or Democrats and the "liberal base". The war without purpose or common sense is simply a given, like the weather. Other than a few lonely members of Congress, like Florida's Alan Grayson (who introduced a bill titled "The War Is Making You Poor"), the antiwar Texas libertarian Ron Paul and Illinois's Tim Johnson, hardly anybody in public life dares to make a connection between teachers' pink slips, personal bankruptcies (6,000 a day now), our rotting infrastructure, lengthening queues at unemployment offices, child poverty … and the war. Source
Friday, March 19, 2010
Why the west should heed Japan's economic lead
So Japan's a regimented country, with a cowed people fearful of breaking rules? Hardly. I've never seen so many people laughing, smiling and relaxed. Japan is the most equal society on earth. The top 10% of earners have 4.5 times the income of the bottom 10%. In Britain the top 10% grab 13.8 times the share taken by the lowest 10%.
I suppose I was experiencing a street-level view of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's superb book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Yet in a week spent visiting companies, speaking to economists and interrogating investment analysts, I think I was supposed to reach a rather different conclusion.
The Anglo-American school of capitalism scoffs at Japan. It's a bubble economy that burst and which, two decades later, still can't revive. Companies won't shed labour or cut costs. Runaway public spending floods into pork-barrel construction projects creating a fiscal deficit that makes even Greece look prudent. The country is, they say, quite literally on a road (and a bridge, and a tunnel) to nowhere. Meanwhile in the west – but especially in the US – dynamic capitalism destroys but then renews.
If your head never left the pages of right-wing economic textbooks (and you swallow the guff that manufacturing doesn't matter any more) you might believe all this. Indeed, World Bank figures show that back in 1995, Japan's nominal GDP was $5.3tn (£3.5tn), or not that far short of the US's $7.3tn. Since then, Japan's nominal GDP has actually fallen to $5.1tn, while the US is now at $14.3tn. The economic evidence is clear: Japan is a basket case, and the US is our only model.
Yet there are no Detroits in this supposedly failing economy. Instead you realise the price we pay for winner-takes-all capitalism. Arriving back in Britain, I came through BAA's gruesome Heathrow terminal three (thank you, the money makers behind its debt-laden takeover). In the underground, I shoved coins into the ticket vending machine. Of course it was broken. The District, Circle and Jubilee lines were all out of action (thank you, public/private partnership). At Victoria, I boarded a depressingly dirty train (thank you, train-leasing financiers).
Japan has its problems, not least its 200%-plus public sector debt. But it has a lot to teach us about social cohesion, while still producing world-class companies – and bosses who take pay cuts rather than make redundancies.
Source 1
I suppose I was experiencing a street-level view of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's superb book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Yet in a week spent visiting companies, speaking to economists and interrogating investment analysts, I think I was supposed to reach a rather different conclusion.
The Anglo-American school of capitalism scoffs at Japan. It's a bubble economy that burst and which, two decades later, still can't revive. Companies won't shed labour or cut costs. Runaway public spending floods into pork-barrel construction projects creating a fiscal deficit that makes even Greece look prudent. The country is, they say, quite literally on a road (and a bridge, and a tunnel) to nowhere. Meanwhile in the west – but especially in the US – dynamic capitalism destroys but then renews.
If your head never left the pages of right-wing economic textbooks (and you swallow the guff that manufacturing doesn't matter any more) you might believe all this. Indeed, World Bank figures show that back in 1995, Japan's nominal GDP was $5.3tn (£3.5tn), or not that far short of the US's $7.3tn. Since then, Japan's nominal GDP has actually fallen to $5.1tn, while the US is now at $14.3tn. The economic evidence is clear: Japan is a basket case, and the US is our only model.
Yet there are no Detroits in this supposedly failing economy. Instead you realise the price we pay for winner-takes-all capitalism. Arriving back in Britain, I came through BAA's gruesome Heathrow terminal three (thank you, the money makers behind its debt-laden takeover). In the underground, I shoved coins into the ticket vending machine. Of course it was broken. The District, Circle and Jubilee lines were all out of action (thank you, public/private partnership). At Victoria, I boarded a depressingly dirty train (thank you, train-leasing financiers).
Japan has its problems, not least its 200%-plus public sector debt. But it has a lot to teach us about social cohesion, while still producing world-class companies – and bosses who take pay cuts rather than make redundancies.
Source 1
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