Benazir Bhutto: Pakistan's Cleopatra

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated February 5, 2008:

Via Joachim Martillo, we offer CIA: Mehsud behind Benazir killing? There's a lot of pretty interesting stuff here. When I wrote my post Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan three weeks ago, I said that I thought that Al Qaeda did it. We still do not have a whole lot of evidence that this is true. I have now changed my mind; I think that the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Agency) killed Bhutto.

But that is sort of like saying that Al Qaeda did it, since AQ, the Taliban and the ISI are all sort of interlocking entities in some ways. More precisely, the are individuals and even powerful factions inside the ISI that have very close ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I am certain that the ISI knows exactly where Osama bin Laden is most of the time and is just refusing to turn him in to the US.

The CIA blamed Baitullah Mehsud, a major Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan, for the killing. But Mehsud himself is generally considered to be an ISI asset. The only evidence that the Pakistani government has against Mehsud is a phone call after she was killed. The call supposedly takes responsibility for the killing, but instead it is more congratulatory than anything else.

The Pakistani government says that at the time of the call, Mehsud could not have known about the killing, but that is ridiculous, since it was all over the TV screens of most of the nation by that time.

The Pakistani government called Scotland Yard in to determine the cause of death, but not, notably, to investigate who did it. The investigation proved that the Pakistani government lied after she was killed when they said she fell and hit her head on the shaft of her limousine cover.

Scotland Yard proved that she was killed by a gunshot, as was clear from some of the videos released later, which showed the gunman firing a gun and Bhutto's body jerking backwards right afterwards, whereupon she fell into the limo. That the Pakistani government deliberately lied about how she died is telling.

So is the fact that they immediately washed down the street afterwards, destroying all evidence, supposedly because it was a main street that got hit and it needed to be open for traffic immediately.

What garbage. I assure you that if Hilary Clinton of John McCain was hit by a closeup gunshot followed by a suicide bomber that killed 20 supporters on Madison Avenue in New York, that street would be shut down for a bit, possibly even days. The press would be dogging all over LE to not miss a thing as the conspiracy theories immediately sprouted all over the Internets.

So, she was shot several times by the shooter, apparently from only a 5-10 feet away. That right there suggests it in not Al Qaeda, since Al Qaeda usually does not use a single asset like that, or if they do, they have him blow himself up with a sui-bomb, destroying both evidence and the chance that he will be interrogated and spill.

A single shooter is more like the ISI - this is one of their favorite ways to kill people. Bhutto pretty much deserved to be killed anyway, but not by the ISI. She deserved to be killed by the supporters and relatives of her very own brother, whom Benazir had murdered because he was a threat to her feudal-like dictatorship at the head of her Pakistani People's Party.

Yes, in 1996 under Bhutto's reign, a shooter killed her own brother while he was surrounded by 200 Pakistani police and security forces in front to a home. By the way, all of the surrounding streets were sealed off by the same security guys, who of course had nothing to do with the killing.

Well, anyway, the shooter somehow penetrated the cordon blocks around the area, then mingled inconspicuously with army of 200 cops, then he shot Bhutto's brother and close range, and then, get this! He escaped! He escaped from a 200-cop crowd and made his getaway through the locked-down security cordon! I mean, these Pakistani killers are positive Houdinis.

Well, of course, Benazir, who hated her brother, denied having anything to do with the killing. Benazir is just as nasty as the Ptolemaic Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt, of which Cleopatra was a member. This glorious dynasty consisted of inbred and racially pure Macedonian Nazis.

The Afrocentric fools who say that Cleopatra was Blacks are silly - the Ptolemaic line guarded their Macedonianness better than Nazis guarded Germanness - and they hated all other races like good little Nazis too.

The Egyptian city Alexandria, of which the Macedonian Queen Cleopatra held sway as Queen of the Macedonian colony of Egypt, was a racially pure Macedonians-only city, and the despised Egyptian "niggers" were not allowed entry, or perhaps only as slaves.

So despised were the dark-skinned Egyptians that it was inconceivable that any Macedonian monarchical supremacist would father a child by one. It is true that in the declining days of the Egyptian Empire, say the last 100 years - imagine the collapse of Rome in the Lower Nile - Black, or actually Mulatto Nubians, ruled Egypt. But this is a far cry from the Black Egypt the Afrocentrists pitifully claim.

Cleopatra's Ptolemaics spent most of their time having wild incestuous sex with each other and then, Praying Mantis-like, killing their own brothers, sisters, Moms and Dads to grab the loot. This is who Cleopatra was! Nice person! an exhaustive review of the non-Blackness of Cleopatra via Black author Eugene Stovall, see here.

If you haven't noticed, this excursion was intended to obliquely compare these Ptolemaic animals with the various feudal clans (called politicians) that have ruled and poisoned Pakistan since its founding, and to compare Benazir to Cleopatra. Like the Ptolemaics they are addicted to offing the opposition - its positively a Pakistani pastime, like tea and cricket.

The only Ptolemaic thing I guess the Pakistani elite doesn't do is have tons of incestuous sex with each other, being good Muslims and all. Benazir has the equivalent of slaves in the debt peonage farmers on her feudal estate. And like Cleopatra, Benazir is being preposterously eulogized and virtually worshiped in her demise.

Immediately after the shots that killed Benazir, there was a suicide bombing to kill the shooter and destroy the evidence in the shooter and everything around him. This once again is more ISI style, as Al Qaeda usually doesn't do it this way.

Scotland Yard was only there to tell us that the Pakistani government lied about how she was killed, not to investigate who done it, because it's the Pakistani government that done it. Scotland Yard detectives, off the record of course, said that the Pakistani government, possibly the ISI, killed her. CIA guys are saying the same thing off the record.

The investigation of who done it will be done by Pakistan itself, which means they will never find the true authors of the crime. But it's kind of like asking OJ to find "the real killer" anyway.

Prior to this, the Pakistani government tried to kill her as soon as she got off the plane. Her welcome home rally on a major street in Karachi was hit by several simultaneous blasts, apparently suicide bombers and then multiple bomb cars or suicide bomb cars.

Once again the Houdinis and the most incompetent police on Earth were skillfully utilized by the would-be assassins. This attempt killed about 140 of Bhutto's supporters, a horrible crime, but I guess they deserved it for supporting her, right?

You think penetrating a mob of 200 cops takes skill? Forget it. In this attack the devious little assassins penetrated ~7000 security forces. These 7000 security forces were deliberately chosen from the dumbest classes of all, because all 7000 decided to go on dinner break simultaneously right before the killing!

Then someone screwed up and all of the lights "accidentally" went out. It was one darn thing after another. Then the bomb cars and sui-bomb dudes all went off one after the other.

Of course the government had absolutely nothing to do with this attempt either. These opposition candidates just have the darnedest luck! The Pakistani government first said it was those evil jihadi dudes that done it, then noted that there will be no investigation of the attempt. Why no investigation? Who knows, probably a practical joke of some sort. Wow, what a madcap bunch these Pakistani government guys are.

Right after the Bhutto killing, there was a serious attempt on the life of Nawaz Sharif, also running against Musharaff. The government had nothing to do with that either, of course.

What's clear is that the Pakistani government is trying to kill of lots of its most threatening opposition candidates, and with the article below showing how the CIA is outrageously supporting the Pakistani government in these nefarious deeds, the US is behind the project. Would anyone sell life insurance to any Pakistani opposition politician.

So, get this. The US is backing up the ISI-Al Qaeda-Taliban as they try to Final Solution all of the opposition candidates to Musharaff. Why? God knows. Probably another of those cases where the US just blindly supports an ally no matter what they do, because the alternative is considered to be so much worse.

It's said the US government supported Bhutto, but that is not really true. It's more like they wanted her to be some figurehead in Musharaff's dictatorship, but not to unseat him.

It's said that Bhutto is the champion of women's rights in Pakistan. Well, maybe today, but yesterday she was as bad as the Saudi monarchy. Under President Zia and Bhutto, there was an Islamization campaign, mostly to build up a fundamentalist guerrilla base to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980's.

This had the effect of littering Pakistan with idiotic madrassas that now churn out fundamentalist cretins by the busfull, ready to go fight for Osama bin Laden. It also set off the Sunni-Shia wars in Pakistan, which had been relatively quiescent before.

This is because Saudi Wahhabi preachers were brought in to teach Saudi Islamo-Nazism to the gullible ignoramuses in the "schools", where religion only was taught, all else being the work of the Devil and all.

As the Saudis are the main force in back of the mass slaughter of Shiites around the world that has been going on for decades now since the Iranian revolution, Shia-hatred was spread in these schools, morphed into the usual Sunni Shia-killing death squads, and Shia Sunni-killing death squads formed in retaliation.

As is the case in most of the Muslim World, Shia bodies piled up more than the reverse. The Pakistani government, mostly Sunni, has more or less supported the mass slaughter of Shia due to the common Sunni Nazi-like hatred of Shia Muslims.

During the Islamization campaign, a set of laws called Hudood Laws were put into place, which were horribly anti-woman. Women were imprisoned after they had been raped, a sort of an honor killing reaction cultivated by the Arab woman-hating, male chauvinist values of family honor that marinated the Islamic stew in Pakistan for centuries.

This is part of a larger cultural area infected with the negative aspect of Arab cultural values, possibly extending to what Carroll Quigley called the Pakistani-Peruvian Axis. It's more sensible to see this area as a crucible of Arab culture than as one of Islamic culture, as the two are not the equivalent. Pakistani feminists protested these evil laws, but Bhutto refused to amend them during her term. Some feminist.

Although the PPP was formed as a socialist and secular party and is a member of the Socialist International, that was mostly campaign fodder to get elected. Once they got in, they didn't do much of anything to redistribute wealth in this semi-feudal land, Benazir being a feudal lordess herself and all.

She also helped form the Taliban that took over Afghanistan and horrified the world. Under Taliban reign, Pakistan was one of only three countries on Earth that recognized the Taliban.

After she returned to Pakistan this year, this histrionic political actress had morphed into a fighter for secularism and her former Taliban buddies were now her worst enemies. All the socialist talk had been dropped long as per US demands during her administration of the 1990's.

So why was she killed? Well, because she said that several high-ranking members of the Pakistani government wanted her dead, and she pledged to go after the ISI's "jihadi asset" option. More to the point, Pakistani Islamic nationalists saw her as bringing the US into Pakistan in the form of a large US land invasion, from Afghanistan, of the Pakistani tribal territories in the West.

Along with this was the fear that USreal (the US and Israel joined at the hip) would concomitantly conspire to neuter Pakistan's prize atomic weapon arsenal. A US invasion of the Territories, not necessarily such a bad idea in theory, is deadly in terms of Pakistani Islamic nationalism - the public will not support such an affront to their sovereignty.

The neutering of the nuke option is also deadly to Pakistani nationalists in the military, as it castrates their best defense against the Indian enemy - the principal enemy around which most Pakistani foreign and military policy revolves. So Bhutto was seen as an agent of the US neoconservatives and probably Israel at a more remote level. A good argument then is that the Pakistani military itself had her killed.

Robert Fisk and Juan Cole (here, here and here ) have both suggested that the Pakistani government killed Bhutto, and that's expert testimony enough for me. An essential website for inside dope about Pakistan, especially the Al Qaeda-infested Western Territories, is here.

On January 18, dozens of Islamists were killed in battles right inside Dera Ismail Khan, a major city which is outside of the FATA agencies where the problems are worse and into the much more civilized NWFP districts.

A recent NY Times article talked about how the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Mehsud's grouping of all of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and allied Islamists in the West) now controls some of the outer suburbs in Peshawar itself, and stages one attack a week in this major Peshawar District city.

Here is a very nice copy of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies. In FATA, the Pak Taliban now control the North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Mohmand and Bajour Agencies. They have de facto control over the Tank, Bannu, Swat, Dir and Shangla Districts in the NWFP. The Kyber, Orakzai and Kurram Agencies are threatened in the FATA.

In the NWFP, the Dera Ismail Khan, Larki Marwat, Karak, Hangu, Kohat, Peshawar, Charsadda, Nowshera, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Kohistan Districts are all threatened.

Click on the map for better resolution.

That the Pakistani Taliban are deep into these two major cities is terrifying, and indicates there is a real insurgency in Pakistan, somewhat akin to the Sendero Luminoso insurgency in the 1980's in Peru in intensity. There's been some very heavy fighting in the NWFP and especially South Waziristan Agency lately, with ~120 jihadis being killed on January 19 alone. Great up-to-date details of this war are on Roggio's site, Long War Journal - no one does it better.

Martillo's title below suggests that the CIA killed Bhutto. It's always a blast to accuse the CIA of killing someone, but in this case it's a bad call. The CIA had absolutely no sane reason to eliminate Benazir Bhutto. Recent anti-Semitic claims that nefarious US Jews called Zionist neoconservatives had Bhutto killed are even more absurd. As Martillo's piece notes, Bhutto was the neocons' best hope for Pakistan.

CIA: Mehsud Behind Benazir Killing?
The CIA Had More Reason!

by Joachim Martillo

The January 19, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe published a CIA claim that South Waziristan tribal leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who maintains strong ties to al-Qaeda and an alliance with the Taliban, was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The article is entitled CIA Says Pakistan Tribal Head Behind Assassination.

Because Neocons want the CIA to have a free hand to operate in South Waziristan fingering Mehsud serves the interests of at least some US government officials even if there are many reasons why assassinating a possible opponent of Pervez Musharraf or Nawaz Sharif is not obviously in the interests of either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

The politics of Pakistan and of the assassination of Benazir are no clearer today than they were when Who Killed Benazir Bhutto? appeared on Jan. 1, and the apparent attempt of Fatima Bhutto to reach out to other factions of her family (Fatima Bhutto: Farewell to Wadi Bua*) seems to have failed (Fatima Bhutto Breaks Her Silence, Questions Benazir's Will, Bilawal Being the PPP Chief).

Not only is the intra-family conflict deep and complex (The Other Bhutto), but there is also an Islamic sectarian aspect to the national politics of the Bhutto family, which has Shiite origins. (Zulfikar, which is Benazir's father's name, is the name of Ali's famous sword and is rarely found as a name among Sunni Muslims. Benazir was, in fact, half-Iranian through her mother.)

In majority Sunni Pakistan, the Bhutto's were almost forced into secularist politics, and naturally the Saudis favored Nawaz Sharif over Benazir.

In terms of her international politics, Benazir was directly involved with Neoliberals as Benazir and the Jews: A Love Story from The New York Jewish Week reports. She was also indirectly involved with Neoconservatives through Husain Haqqani, who served both as spokesman and also as top aide to her for over a decade.

Haqqani is an important figure at the Hudson Institute, which is a fanatic Neoconservative think-tank associated with racist ethnic Ashkenazi American ideologues and subversives like Norman "Bomb-Iran" Podhoretz. (See Poverty Fuels Extremism by Husain Haqqani [War on Terror in Pakistan].)

Notes

* Fatima was probably sincere. Sometimes it is hard to remember that the Bhutto clan are actually a real family.

From Daughter of Destiny, An Autobiography, by Benazir Bhutto, pp. 257-8.

The phone rings constantly from Los Angeles, London, Paris -- my mother's friends and relatives calling to congratulate her on my release [in 1984 from prison in Pakistan]. I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet, and only spoke to Yasmin and Dr. Niazi in London. Ardeshir Zahedi, a friend of my parents and Iran's former ambassador to the United States, arrived with caviar.

My mother, Sunny, and I stayed up talking through the night. It all seemed so unbelievable. Yesterday I had been a prisoner. Today I was free, with my mother and sister. We were together. We were all alive.

Mir! A little brown-haired girl pulling at my coat! "Meet your niece, Fathi [Fatima]," Mir told me, standing in my mother's flat on my second day of freedom. Was my brother really standing in front of me? I saw his lips moving, heard my own voice responding. The noise of our reunion must have been deafening, but I can't remember a thing we said.

At twenty-nine, Mir looked so handsome, his dark eyes flashing one minute, gentling the next as he lifted his eighteen-month-old daughter to give me a kiss. "Wait till you see Shah," Mir laughed. Shah had been eighteen the last time I'd seen him, just a boy. Now he was twenty-five with a longed-for mustache.

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Ron Paul as Israeli-Lobby Killer

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 18:

Via fellow blogger Joachim Martillo. Martillo dissects the Ron Paul phenomenon, then follows with a piece by his wife, Karin Friedemann. Both are Jews who converted to Islam.

Martillo makes some interesting points.

First of all, Paul obviously has serious xenophobic tendencies. It's preposterous to eliminate all student visas from "terrorist nations", whatever that means. It's hard enough to get any kind of a visa from the Muslim World these days anyway.

Martillo seems to be correct that Paul used to be a segregationist, and it is very disturbing that Paul is the favorite candidate of the White Racist Far Right. Paul has made some statements against Blacks that were regarded as racist in 1992. I have reviewed those remarks and do not find them to be racist, in general, though I am not certain that "95% of young Black males in Washington, DC are semi-criminal or criminal".

Of course free market libertarianism not only leads to monopolies, but it is also impossible. At least Marxism can be implemented. Libertarianism simply cannot be implemented, due to its internal contradictions.

While promoting laissez faire capitalism, it opposes imperialism. Yet all major capitalist nations must be imperialist, as all major transnational corporations must support imperialist foreign policies of various types. A major capitalist nation that renounces imperialism would be gobbled alive by the other capitalist states that quite reasonably refuse to renounce imperialism, their best weapon.

Foreign policy is but a battle for markets, and alliances between nations are no more possible than alliances between competing corporations. Wars for resources and markets are not only inevitable but are actually mandated by capitalism.

The sad realization that capitalism is not possible without imperialist appendages is one of the reasons I think that the whole system must be junked as fatally flawed, regardless of how poorly the competing models produce wealth and grow the economy.

How many proponents of capitalism realize this? How many know that capitalism mandates imperialism? How many know that a libertarian philosophy of non-aggression is as logically impossible in capitalism as it is in house full of cats? Capitalism leads inexorably to war with no exceptions.

The brutal analysis of capitalism above, which is utterly factual, by the way, is one reason that anyone interested in capitalism needs to understand Marx. Marx was wrong about a lot of things in his analysis of capitalism, but on the score above, he hits it right on target.

To be a capitalist nowadays is to be a deluded human being. The modern capitalist rejects the necessary linkage of capitalism and imperialism in the same way man rejects his mortality - spitting in the face of the obvious.

A return to the Gold Standard and getting rid of the Federal Reserve, which Paul advocates, will not do anything positive. We went off the standard and set up the reserve for some excellent reasons. Diving off Paul's radical rightwing deep end is like diving into a pool blindfolded. One that may have been drained.

Mr. Paul also hates gay marriage and Roe vs. Wade. That is, he wants to throw all this back to the states. While in the case of gay marriage that may be positive, it runs afoul the Truth in Credit aspects of the Constitution, whereby states must recognize things, like marriages, recognized in other states. So gay marriage can't be tossed back to the states without a Constitutional amendment, which is not forthcoming.

Tossing abortion back to the states would of course be a total disaster, but I guess that is what the reactionaries want.

Friedemann's column is naive at best. Muslims make alliance with White racists and fascists at their severe peril. Some of my friends, one of whom is still a Communist though he just implausibly converted to Islam, are also supporting Ron Paul for the same cynical and what-the-heck reasons that Friedemann espouses.

To these folks, the Israel-Palestine conflict is all, Israel needs to be screwed, and Paul is the man to do it. Forget it. The Israeli Lobby runs this damned country, and opposition to it is no more than ~15% of the population. Paul doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of getting in. How a Communist could vote for any reactionary is beyond me, but converting to Islam does funny things to your brain.

If you hate Israel (or even Jews) more than anything else in the US, go ahead and waste a vote on Ron Paul, a man who cannot but lose anyway. Personally, my votes are guided by progressive radar, and you can't pay me enough to vote for any reactionary, and this is clearly what Mr. Paul is.

I mean, come on, look at Ron Paul's MySpace page. He proudly states that he has a 100% rating from the John Birch Society! A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for the Birchers. Those of you who are ok with Birchers will find that cheering, but why would anyone even remotely liberal, Centrist, not to mention progressive, throw their vote away in the chilling direction of, of all things, the John Birch Society?

I have to admit some reservations about Ron Paul.

This video evinces xenophobic tendencies.The promise to eliminate student visas from terrorist nations is the sort of sloganeering that I expect from Neocons. In other contexts, Paul has rejected the concept of a terrorist nation and has shown good understanding of the hatred and blowback that US foreign policy has created over the last 60 years.

Paul supports free market libertarian capitalism even though mathematical analysis can demonstrate that such economic systems lead to monopoly dominance and exploitation. Some of his supporters seem to argue from the standpoint that the power of big business is okay while the power of government is not. The belief is at best naive.

I doubt that a return to the gold standard and the elimination of the Federal Reserve will bring economic salvation.

I suspect Ron Paul was a segregationist in the 60s, but such was the nature of southern US culture back then, and he has probably changed. His intention to remove US troops from Iraq as quickly as possible is as pro-minority as it gets because of the disproportionately large representation of African and Hispanic Americans in the military.

I am less concerned about Roe vs. Wade and gay marriage than most of the progressive Boston Cambridge crowd, but making abortion and marriage matters of state legislation -- as Paul wishes -- probably means that freedom of choice and gay marriage might survive in various states in the USA while any attempt at national legislation or constitution change in these areas could easily backfire.

At this point, I would probably support a candidate that opposed women's suffrage and supported a new prohibition as long as he would end the Iraq occupation and work for the repeal of the Patriot Act. On these questions Ron Paul is the only game in town.


November 18, 2007
Muslims discover Ron Paul
by Karin Friedemann

After the Republican debate on Tuesday evening in Dearborn, Mich., a reporter from the Arab-American News asked Ron Paul what he thought of the term “Islamic fascism.”

“It’s a false term to make people think we’re fighting Hitler,” Paul responded. “It’s war propaganda designed to generate fear so that the war has to be spread.”

The call has gone out to all the Muslim Americans to hurry up and register to vote Republican so that they can vote in the Republican Primary to support Ron Paul, the anti-interventionist, non-isolationist candidate for President of the United States. Muslims are opening their wallets and joining teaparty07.com as well.

An anonymous Ron Paul supporter posted the following message on the internet:

Muslims and Americans have an unique window of opportunity for the 2008 election. There is a candidate running as a Republican that would work to completely cut off the funding to Israel, remove ALL US troops from Arab lands, and repeal the Patriot Act. He’s a Republican with Libertarian views named Ron Paul. Ron Paul’s policies ranging from monetary to foreign are top notch.

Till now Muslims and Americans have not had an American Presidential candidate that really suited their best interests. This election is unique in that we have a man running as a Republican that speaks the truth…We know the current policies in the Middle East are failing, not only making it less safe in the world but hurting and killing innocent Muslims, which our media callously calls collateral damage.

It is our duty as Muslims to follow the truth regardless of how futile it may seem. Ron Paul is the only candidate that does not seem to be swayed by the influential lobbies that the other candidates are catering to.

Ron Paul stood up in Congress in 2006 and opposed a resolution that sided with Israel in the Lebanon-Israel conflict. He stated the following.

Ron Paul:

Mr. Speaker, I follow a policy in foreign affairs called non-interventionism. I do not believe we are making the United States more secure when we involve ourselves in conflicts overseas. The Constitution really doesn’t authorize us to be the policemen of the world, much less to favor one side over another in foreign conflicts.

It is very clear, reading this resolution objectively, that all the terrorists are on one side and all the victims and the innocents are on the other side. I find this unfair, particularly considering the significantly higher number of civilian casualties among Lebanese civilians. I would rather advocate neutrality rather than picking sides, which is what this resolution does.

Ron Paul has also sponsored a bill to overturn the Patriot Act. He is one of the few members of Congress from either of the major houses that is speaking rationally about these issues. How can we get everyone, and I mean everyone, to join the Ron Paul Republican voter sign-up campaign?

There is general frustration with politicians these days, and the unwillingness to believe that supporting a particular candidate will make a difference.

But whether Ron Paul wins or loses, Ron Paul's Meetup site is a great way to meet your neighbors who are against the war and organize the community on a grassroots level. If something like Katrina ever happened to us, knowing our neighbors could mean the difference between life and death to our families.

The common thread I’ve been reading lately about leftists and Jews is that they are having trouble getting more than a dozen people to come to their stuff (whether anti-Zionist or Zionist). The anti-Israel movement is not moving forward, because “protest Zionist imperialism” is just not a catchy slogan.

By contrast, there are over 400 RP activists against war taxes in Boston alone. Every day the list of passionate anti-war activists grows. Very few of them agree with every single RP position, they just want to get the Lobby out of the way and pull the troops out of Iraq.

One reason it’s working is because of the software. They made the Meetup site almost like a dating site, where you can make friends with people in or near your zip code. They made it very easy to get together with new people to join the activism. You can’t beat technology, may as well use it.

In the event that RP actually won the election and got the Hamas treatment, his supporters are fully in support of the Right to Bear Arms. It would be interesting to see what followed.

If anti-war protesters want to continue to focus on the genocidal machinations of the global Zionist-imperialist military, industrial, financial, political, neoliberal, media complex, they have to be willing to meet with anyone any time to hear what ideas people have to address this, which is our primary responsibility - even if they are Republicans.

If you ever saw Ron Paul in an interview it cannot be said that he avoids discussing vital issues. He is someone who is willing to make a statement and stick by it even when no one agrees with him. I don’t “believe” in electoral politics but it’s not that much sweat off my brow to go and vote to end war.

I think the fact that NO pro-Israel group will let Ron Paul speak at their convention, not even peace Zionists, is evidence enough that he is the only person to put in charge as commander-in-chief. And, even if he loses, making all these contacts with local anti-interventionists is priceless.

If you want to expand the peace movement so that it overlaps with the freedom movement like ripples in a pond, you just have to respect the fact that people might agree with you, but for different reasons.

Ron Paul's Muslim Supporters Yahoo Group

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Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan

I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.

By now many of you may have heard the news that Benazir Bhutto has been killed by a shooter - suicide bomber in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Rawalpindi is one of Pakistan's major cities over in the East.

She got back in her car after a wild rally in the city, then stood up inside the bulletproof vehicle to wave to the crowd. A man raced through the crowd, pulled out a gun and fired two shots, killing Bhutto. Then he blew himself up, just to make sure she was dead.

Bhutto's vehicle sped off to the hospital, where it was originally reported that she had two bullet wounds, one in the head and one in the neck. Later reports said that there were no bullets or shrapnel wounds in her head.

Even later reports said that she died when her head hit the lever of the sun roof of her vehicle. However, Bhutto's family and supporters are continuing to say that she had gunshot wounds.

The most recent news, via Juan Cole's fantastic blog, is that the Pakistani government is wildly backtracking from its claim that Bhutto died of a concussion after video surfaced showing a shooter firing at her from only a few feet away, after which her body heaves up and falls down as if it had been hit by bullets - all of this before the explosion hits.

Footage of Bhutto's assassination is here , and the gunman can be seen in the video firing several shots. The gunman is circled in red in the video. In this video, you can see a man in sunglasses pointing a gun at Bhutto from a very short distance away. 20 people were killed in the blast.

The assassination occurred just 12 days before a major election that President Musharaff was expected to lose. Benazir's supporters were quick to blame Musharaff for the blast, and Bhutto herself had previously said that she would blame Musharaff if she were killed.

Bhutto's entourage had repeatedly requested a greater security detail, but the requests had all been denied. Nevertheless, a bit too much is being made of this, as Bhutto was surrounded by bodyguards and was traveling in a bulletproof vehicle. She also had a security detail of up to 700-800 men, five of whom were killed in the attack.

The greater security they requested was along the lines of bombproof vehicles and jammers to stop bombings. But jammers are no good against a suicide bomber.

The day before, shots had been fired at Nawaz Sharif, another opposition candidate. The shots missed Sharif, but killed four of his bodyguards.

Bhutto had just returned from exile to contest the elections in the first democratic opening since Musharaff seized power in 2001. On October 18, soon after her return from exile, another suicide bomber had attacked her entourage, killing 140 people but narrowly missing Bhutto. In that attack, she had a security detail of up to 5,000-6,000, in multiple layers, yet a multi-pronged attack got through anyway.

Another Al Qaeda banner, this one with Bin Laden and a map of Iraq done in the colors of the Iraqi flag. bin Laden is an Arab nationalist in addition to being an Islamist. This paints his hatred for Iran in vivid colors. You can't understand bin Laden well until you grasp his Arab nationalist dimension.

Al Qaeda was suspected in that attack, and Al Qaeda quickly claimed responsibility for this attack on one of their websites and in a phone call to a Greek newspaper. In addition, the head of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Yazid said that a Punjabi who was a former member of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a fanatical Sunni group dedicated to killing Shiites, was part of a three man squad that carried out the operation on Al Qaeda's orders. One man was the shooter and bomber, a second played an unknown role, and a third was possibly a spotter.

The operation was highly professional, but Al Qaeda is a professional military organization, and furthermore, there are many Pakistanis, including former Pakistani military, including Special Forces, in its ranks. Al Qaeda and related Islamists have been threatening to kill Bhutto since 1992.

An arrest in Karachi revealed a plot involving hundreds of cells throughout Pakistan involved in tracking targets and sending out death squads to kill them. The targets included Bhutto, Musharaff and other top government figures.

An Al Qaeda banner from an Al Qaeda website, tajdeed.net. I doubt if it is up anymore. Note the emphasis on Saudi Arabia with bin Laden next to it. AQ is first and foremost a Saudi organization.

Bhutto was considered even more of an enemy to AQ and Pakistan's Islamists than Musharaff, but Al Qaeda has tried to kill Musharaff a few times already in the past couple of years, since Musharaff has decided to wage war on Pakistan's armed Islamists. But Musharaff has really only gone after the Islamists to do Washington's bidding.

A classic Al Qaeda banner, with the Arabian Peninsula, the crossed swords, and the black flag of Islam. These motifs are all frequently seen in Al Qaeda banners.

Every now and again, Pakistan seems to catch these major AQ operatives out of the blue, as if they were pulling them out of a hat. I am convinced that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knows where most of the top AQ operatives are, but only arrests them once in a while as a show to show the US that it is cooperating in the Terror War.

Another Al Qaeda banner from the same site, this one picturing Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man and the one who has significantly radicalized him and set him into motion that he may as well be called "the brains behind bin Laden". Zawahiri can generally be found in the Bajour Agency or across the border in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has pretty much ceded a number of its Western Frontier Provinces and agencies to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Particularly strong formations exist in North and South Waziristan and the Bajour Agency.

Another Al Qaeda logo. Note the horse. This horse is often seen on AQ logos. I am not sure what it means, but it is one of their motifs.

The Dir District is basically off-limits to US and Pakistani forces, and I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden has been for the past couple of years, where he is being protected by a radical Wahhabi preacher. No one can go near that province without AQ knowing about it.

The bodies of spies hang in the trees for months on the main roads into the area. Mercenaries tracking bin Laden are convinced he is there (in fact, there have been photos of him posing with the radical preacher in the past few years).

A street scene in Dir, the main city in the Dir District. A PBS crew went here to film "In Search of Bin Laden" a couple of years back, but they left after a couple of days due to the very bad vibes in the place.

Part of the year, bin Laden goes across the border to Nuristan in Afghanistan. In the past year or so, more districts have come under AQ/Taliban control. The Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Peshawar, Bannu, Kohat, Laki Marwat and Dir Districts and the Khyber, Kurram and Mohmand Agencies have all fallen. The Orakzai Agency and the Hangu, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Charsadda Districts are all threatened.

In recent days, the Swat District fell and there was heavy fighting as government troops tried to take it back. Later, the Shangla District fell.

A really nice map of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) showing the provinces and agencies named above. Here is a great map of the Dir-Bajaur-Nuristan-Peshawar-Swat Valley area.

It is hard to say whether or not Musharaff was involved in killing Bhutto. The problem is that the ISI is completely tied up in the Taliban and possibly even Al Qaeda. Well, some of the ISI. Maybe.

Another Al Qaeda banner with a number of their martyrs. I can't really identify most of them, but Sheik Yassin of Hamas is second from right. Interesting that Yassin is revered by Al Qaeda, but while Hamas and Al Qaeda are not sister groups, they are uncomfortable close for my tastes.

But then we don't really know, because the ISI is one of the most opaque spy agencies around. For many years, Pakistan cultivated "the jihadis" as an auxiliary wing of the Pakistani armed forces. To understand why, we must understand Pakistani geopolitics.

Pakistan's number one deadly enemy is India and vice versa. The tragedy that set all of this nonsense in motion was that of Kashmir. When Pakistan and India split in 1947 after the British left, 90% of the Kashmiri population voted to go to Pakistan (the population was about 90% Muslim, but there were significant populations of Hindus called Pandits and even Buddhists).

But the governor of the province was a Hindu and he nullified the vote. Pakistan and India have fought a few wars over the Kashmir since. In 1949, the UN ruled that Kashmiris should be allowed to have a plebiscite to determine whether they want to stay with India, go independent, or go with Pakistan.

India has ignored the resolution ever since. An insurgency started in Kashmir after a couple of decades and it has smoldered ever since. Pakistan has pumped many jihadis into Kashmir, but there are also many locals who want to leave India.

Truth is, Pakistan is a lot more frightened of India than vice versa. Pakistan is terrified of India. We need to keep that in mind. All of Pakistan's military strategy revolves around the omnipresent conflict with India. It colors everything. Even support for the Taliban in Afghanistan was colored by this conflict.

Pakistan preferred anti-Indian Islamists it could control instead of the possibility of of a nationalist Pashtun government, as Pashtun nationalists have long campaigned for a Pashtunistan, encompassing Pashtun regions on both sides of the border. Such a new state would cleave off a good part of Pakistan. As Pakistan is threatened by India, she dares not lose any territory at all, as a smaller state will make her less secure.

Now that Karzai is in power, his regime is seen as pro-Indian, or at least not anti-Indian enough. Plus, he is a Pashtun. Bad. Possibility of Pashtun nationalism. So the ISI is to a greater or lesser degree running the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan for the reasons described above.

Note: After this post was published, TGGP argued on his excellent blog that my characterization of this situation in this post does not make sense. That is, since the Taliban are themselves Pashtuns, they must favor Pashtunistan, hence why would they ISI support them and dislike Karzai? But Pashtunistan has always been supported by the more secular Pashtuns.

Yes, they do exist. It is false to see the Pashtuns are all Islamists. There was a huge rally the other day for Benazir's party, the PPP, in the capital of the Bajour Agency, which is virtually run by Al Qaeda. The Pashtun areas area full of all sorts of folks, all the way from Al Qaeda Islamists to ardent secularists.

Instead of seeing Pakistan as Islamist-overrun, it is better to see all this conflict instead as a civil war inside of Pakistan, with Islamists fighting seculars.

Now onto TGGP's complaint. Karzai represents the more secular-minded Pashtuns who have tended to promote Pashtunistan. As an alternative to that and as a way to co-opt the Pashtunistan notion, the ISI promoted the Taliban. Pashtuns, yes, but so Islamist that they have had the very notion of nationalism, not to mention Pashtun nationalism, deracinated from their very being.

These guys are with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda barely believes in nation-states. They want to more or less dissolve them into a religious caliphate empire. Nation-states are secular, man-made institutions that privilege man's flawed laws and rule over God's, hence they are rejected.

As quivers in its bow in the war against India, Pakistan has long cultivated the "jihadi option". At various times in its history, Pakistan has "called in the jihadis" to perform various nefarious deeds for the state. Pakistan has always thought it could control the jihadis, but recently they have veered out of control and area attacking the host.

Training little kids to be terrorists. Wonderful! Look at the proud father beaming at his future suicide bombers. This is typical fare for an Al Qaeda site. They think child abuse like this is cool.

There is also the question of domestic Pakistani politics. This snake's nest is home to a vicious political zero-sum game where rulers have been having their rivals killed for decades now. Bhutto's father, a former prime minister, was himself arrested by a government that succeeded him.

Soon afterwards, in 1979, he was hanged by his political rivals on charges of "conspiracy to murder" and Benazir was tossed in prison for a couple of years. Bhutto's hanging led to massive riots similar to those taking place as I write this in the wake of Benazir's killing. Who knows if Bhutto was guilty of the charges, but his killers surely were.

The party founded by Bhutto, himself a wealthy semi-feudal landowner of huge plots of land, is called the Pakistan People's Party. It is nominally a leftwing socialist party, and it's probably the best large Pakistani party from a progressive point of view.

Meanwhile, Musharaff is a member of a group of people called Mohajirs. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the famous father of the Muslim nuclear bomb, is another Mohajir.

The Mohajirs , from the Arab word for refugee, immigrant or emigrant (in this case, refugee) - muhajir - are Pakistani Muslims who fled India for Pakistan during the communal slaughter in 1947 as Hindus fled Pakistan and Muslims fled India, with both sides massacring hundreds of thousands of the other side in the process. A multiracial group, the one thing that the Mohajirs had in common in India was the Urdu language.

One would think that Mohajirs, the scars of Pakistan's baptism of blood, would have been welcomed in Pakistan. Not so. They claim to have experienced long-term discrimination inside Pakistan, but the sort of discrimination they experienced is the sort that Jews, Asians and Whites in the US complain about, that is, reverse discrimination.

The Mohajirs who fled India were much more educated than the people already residing in the new state of Pakistan, hence they were overrepresented in the better jobs. A quota system that amounted to reverse discrimination was put into place to limit the Mohajirs to 7% of such jobs, the proportion of their percentage in the population.

This reverse discrimination angered the Mohajirs so much that they formed an anti-discrimination movement in 1986 that culminated in a Mohajir political party. Mutahida Quami Movement, or MQM. This party was formed by Altaf Hussein. Hussein is presently a refugee in London, and he is regarded as a political terrorist (guilty of killing his political enemies) by many rivals.

As Pakistan is one of only two nations on Earth formed as explicitly religious states - Israel the Jewish state is the other - the importance of Islam to Pakistan cannot be underestimated. The narrative of the Mohajirs is that they sacrificed all - including 1 million lives - for Islam, in fleeing India at great cost in life and suffering, all for the sake of Islam. So, in effect, they see themselves as the super-martyrs for Islam.

They also formed their own clique that looks out for its own interests and no one else's, similar to many caste-type groups in Pakistan. Hence, Mohajirs in general and Musharaff's party in particular are not well-liked by non-Mohajirs.

Now that you have some background on some of the events in the backdrop of Bhutto's assassination, you can reach your own conclusions about who killed her and why. At first I was not sure who did it, but now I am certain that Al Qaeda killed her.

The Pakistani government is blaming Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan. Mehsud had threatened to kill Bhutto before she even returned home. He is also believed to be responsible for an increasingly sophisticated and frightening series of bombings, including suicide attacks, against government and military targets.

A number of these attacks have occurred in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani military and the ISI have their headquarters. At least three of the attacks is thought to be have been against Pakistan's nuclear sites. As of this fall, Al Qaeda has vowed to target Pakistan's nuclear program.

So, yes, Al Qaeda did the attack, but were they alone? The tangled web of AQ's tentacles wrap deeply into the ISI and the "jihadi option" of the Pakistani state.

An Al Qaeda logo with bin Laden, the black flag of Islam, a photo of the planes heading into the World Trade Center and US flags at half mast after the attack. More typical Al Qaeda themes. Note that bin Laden is always beaming charismatically in all of these banners.

Charismatic portrayals of its heroes is typical of these AQ productions. One one level is humanizes them and makes them attractive, and on the other it almost makes them saint-like. To AQ's core followers, bin Laden is nearly a Mahdi.

The Pakistani state is capable of killing political rivals, and has done so in the past.

There are many Taliban and Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani military and ISI, and it is possible that elements in the military and intelligence services may have been involved in the attack due to their alliance with Al Qaeda. However, I do not believe that Bhutto's non-Islamist rivals in Pakistani politics had anything to do with her murder. That includes Musharaff.

An excellent piece by Pakistani Leftist Tariq Ali goes into a lot more details about Pakistani politics than I did here.

Meanwhile, as we ponder this mystery, Pakistan, an extremely unstable state with 50 nuclear weapons, is convulsed with wild riots. One of the dangerous and unstable states on Earth just got a lot more so. Hang onto your seats for the wild ride.

A Cold, Wet California Winter Ahead?

Sometimes you have to wonder if nature is just smarter than humans. Even at this late date, we are so limited in our abilities to predict the weather. Yet the lesser critters, even something so stupid as a bug or a squirrel, sometimes seem to be smarter than all the world's weathermen and their computers combined. But are they really?

At the local college, the observant rural students have been coming in during the summer reporting that, based on some sort of observation involving woolly caterpillars, this coming winter is going to be very cold and wet. The forecasting has something to do with the ratio of red banding to black background on the woollybear's body.

A woolly caterpillar turns into one of these moths. This is an Isabella Moth.

In 1948, William Curran, an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York undertook a study of woollybears and subsequent winter weather. After 10 years, the woollybears showed 70% accuracy in predicting winter weather conditions, which is a pretty good rate.

However, there were problems with this study. In fact, more recent research has crushed the notion that the colors or hairs on a woollybear's back are able to predict anything about the coming winter.

Woollybears don't predict a damn thing, unfortunately. But they sure are nice to look at.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that when I was a boy, undergoing the masculine socialization that forges one into a man, my brothers and I used to torture these bugs. Specifically, we had "bullfights" with them, whereby we would put the woolybear in the "bullring" (a cleared dirt area) and then attack it by throwing "picadors" at them. That's kind of a sick joke.

Picadors are the spears the bullfighter uses to spear the bull while he fights it. Those are the spears you see hanging out of the bull's body as the fight goes on. In our case, "picadors" were, ludicrously, large, thick nails that we had stolen from the workmen building the housing tract in back of us.

It sounds gruesome, but I think this kind of trial by fire socialization is necessary for a masculine self-image. There were boys I grew up who liked to stay inside baking muffins with Mom, and I was always glad I never took that route. I figure they either ended up gay or bi or if not, they had self-image problems in adulthood. Males ignore masculinity at their peril.

Now, from Beasore Meadows east of here at 7000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we hear of some genius squirrels blessed with the gift of precognition. The squirrels at Beasore have been going "absolutely nuts", says the report. That means they have been going crazy storing up acorns and whatnot in their little stashes. They do that when they think it is going to be a cold and hard winter ahead. Smart lil critters, eh?

Jones Store at Beasore Meadows. Beautiful, huh? I had a friend a while back who was not getting along well with his wife. He had basically given up on women altogether in his late 40's by then. He could not just move out, so he took up a new residence here at Beasore in the off-season. He would drive all the way down to Oakhurst in the daytime every day and hang out at the coffee shop all day with us.

Then in the evening he would head back up to Beasore and spend the night up there at 7000 feet. He was either alone there, or sometimes there was one other guy living there too. I thought it sounded horribly lonely, but he said it was paradise. Shades of Thoreau?

Yet the American Museum of Natural History claims that not only woollybears, but no animals whatsoever, are able to predict the weather.

But then there are those tantalizing stories about fish, snowshoe hares and black bears, from Alaskan Indians, which, while we are tempted to discount them, let us recall that they are based on centuries of observation of animal behaviors, and that observation is the backbone of any scientific research.

Here it is, the second to last day of summer, and it has already been unseasonably cold for a few days now at least. Supposedly it snowed higher up, above 6000 feet, which is a little unusual for September. I took a drive up Highway 41 to Fish Camp and looked at the surrounding peaks but I could not see a trace of snow. Supposedly it all melted off right away.

This is the Marriott Hotel at Fish Camp. It's quite expensive at about $200-300 a night. I complained about that once, saying that why should only rich people be able to stay in the mountains, and a friend of mine who worked there called me a "Maoist" for saying that. America is a funny place.

A bed and breakfast in Fish Camp, California, just outside Yosemite National Park.

The Big Creek Bed and Breakfast in Fish Camp during the winter. Nice, eh?

This is what Highway 41 just south of Fish Camp looks like in wintertime. This part of the Sierra National Forest is an interesting place. The Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, an endangered species that is extremely rare in these parts, has been spotted at a campground north of Fish Camp during the 1990's.

This bird has been going extinct in the Sierras purely due to high elevation cattle grazing (an insanely destructive process here in the Sierras) and for no other reason. Forest Service "biologists" (some of the biggest liars I have ever met) have been going into contortions to deny this obvious fact for many years.


The Pacific Fisher, a rare furbearer that desperately needs to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, was recorded during the 1990's at Westfall Ranger Station, near where the snowy photo above was taken. I am amazed that fishers have survived up there at all. They are going extinct in the Sierras primarily due to loss of old growth forest habitat.

Their habitat is becoming so fragmented that either the females or the males (I forget which) are having to enlarge their territories in order to get enough food to survive. Since their territory is so much larger than it ought to be due to crappy habitat, the critters expend so much energy running around their territory stuffing their faces that they do not have enough energy left over to mate. Hell of a way to go extinct, huh? Work yourself to death and no sex either.

Even if you spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains, consider yourself lucky if you ever see a fisher.

An interesting fact about these predators is that there is just about no North American mammal that can climb trees, jump from tree to tree, etc., like these things do. Some of the reports of early naturalists are just amazing. Also, they don't have anything to do with fishing. It's just a stupid name that stuck for some reason.

Bad winter? Or good winter? We are coming off one of the worst drought years in decades. At least the fires are apparently over!

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Free Market Starvation

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated January 23, 2008:

The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism.

One hears this platitude over and over - Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990's. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world - mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America - almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces.

This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight.

The Soviet Union and China are now synonymous with starvation. There was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932 that killed 1.5 million people. Previously, during the Russian Civil War, there was a famine in 1921 that killed 9 million people. It is a simple truth that under Czardom, the peasant never had enough to eat. His life expectancy was a mere 32 years and lack of food played a role here.

Under Communism, the peasant had plenty of food to eat for the first time in centuries. In the early 1930's, the Soviet Union saw the largest harvests in its history, big harvests that continued for decades. All of this is forgotten, and all we know is famine, famine, famine. One wonders how Stalin doubled life expectancy in the USSR while the people starved.

In China again, we hear that Communism starved the people. In 1958, it is true, there was a terrible famine, the worst in modern history, mostly caused by the stupidity of over-procurement by the state, that killed an astounding 15 million people.

Yet year and year out, millions of lives were being saved every year in China. Under Communism, with the exception of 1958, the Chinese peasants finally had enough food to eat. Like the Russian peasants, starvation and lack of food had stalked the Chinese peasant for centuries.

By the early 1970's, the problem of food in China was finally solved for the first time in centuries. As with the USSR, China also doubled life expectancy under Mao. Once again, one wonders how this was achieved if the people were "starving" as the anti-Communists claim.

In Vietnam in 1944-45, 2 million died during deliberate starvation by French and Japanese capitalist forces when they seized the rice crop. One never hears of this famine. Only Communists starve people.

Cuba has recently lowered malnutrition to 2%, the lowest rate in Latin America. More here and here. It is amazing how they can do that while they starve the population, no?

Here is a Cuban newspaper about how, in Cuba, the right to eat is elevated above the right to shoot off one's mouth. In fact, the paper suggests intriguingly that the limits on free speech in Cuba are directly attributable to the government's ability to feed everyone. The suggestion is that if you let everyone shoot off their mouth, food will be snatched from the mouths of babes:

Ironically, the country that supposedly limits the freedom of its citizens is the only one in Latin America where there is not malnutrition," wrote Periodico 26, an official publication in backwater Las Tunas province, on Feb. 6, alluding to a recent United Nations report stating that only two percent of Cuban children had some kind of nutrient deficit.

"What is portrayed in the U.S. media as an aggression against an individual's free will, is in fact a synonym for nutritional security for most Cubans." The newspaper goes on to say that free meals provided at work centers and schools add another crucial component to Cubans' diets.

In Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 18% is about 1/2 the Thai rate of 36%, one positive aspect of Vietnamese socialism. When one thinks of Thailand, one never suspects that 1/3 of the population doesn't get enough food to eat. All one thinks of are tourists, skyscrapers, traffic jams, girly bars, beaches and elephants.

In Pakistan, 62% of all children are already stunted in growth by the tender age of five. But the media tells us that stunting only occurs in North Korea. After all, it is only Communism that starves the people.

Let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers.

Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 40% of children are chronically undernourished (And that is in a bountiful harvest!), where the literacy rate is a Medieval 17%, life expectancy is a tragic 44.7 years, the infant mortality rate is an outrageous 151.8 per 1000, and Niger is bested by only one other country when it comes to killing little kids under age 5.

What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids.

Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market "logic". One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry.

Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is "failed". I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those "failures" a shot.

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