*Hey U.S., Welcome to the Third World!* *It's been a quick slide from economic superpower to economic basket case.*
*Rosa Brooks September 18, 2008 * * http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks18-2008sep18,0,6908905.column * *Dear United States, Welcome to the Third World! * *It**'**s not every day that a superpower makes a bid to transform itself into a Third World nation, and we here at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to be among the first to welcome you to the community of states in desperate need of international economic assistance. As you spiral into a catastrophic financial meltdown, we are delighted to respond to your Treasury Department**'**s request that we undertake a joint stability assessment of your financial sector. In these turbulent times, we can provide services ranging from subsidized loans to expert advisors willing to perform an emergency overhaul of your entire government. * *As you know, some outside intervention in your economy is overdue. Last week -- even before Wall Street**'**s latest collapse -- 13 former finance ministers convened at the University of Virginia and agreed that you must fix your "broken financial system." Australia**'**s Peter Costello noted that lately you**'**ve been "exporting instability" in world markets, and Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister of India, concluded, "The time has come. The U.S. should accept some monitoring by the IMF." * We hope you won't feel embarrassed as we assess the stability of your economy and suggest needed changes. Remember, many other countries have been in your shoes. We've bailed out the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea. But whether our work is in Sudan, Bangladesh or now the United States, our experts are committed to intervening in national economies with care and sensitivity. *We thus want to acknowledge the progress you have made in your evolution from economic superpower to economic basket case. Normally, such a process might take 100 years or more. With your oscillation between free-market extremism and nationalization of private companies, however, you have successfully achieved, in a few short years, many of the key hallmarks of Third World economies. Your policies of irresponsible government deregulation in critical sectors allowed you to rapidly develop an energy crisis, a housing crisis, a credit crisis and a financial market crisis, all at once, and accompanied (and partly caused) by impressive levels of corruption and speculation. Meanwhile, those of your political leaders charged with oversight were either napping or in bed with corporate lobbyists.* *Take John McCain, your Republican presidential nominee, whose senior staff includes half a dozen prominent former lobbyists. As he recently put it, "I was chairman of the [Senate] Commerce Committee that oversights every part of the economy." No question about it: Your leaders**'** failure to notice the damage done by irresponsible deregulation was indeed an oversight of epic proportions. * *Now you are facing the consequences. Income inequality has increased, as the rich have gotten windfalls while the middle class has seen incomes stagnate. Fewer and fewer of your citizens have access to affordable housing, healthcare or security in retirement. Even life expectancy has dropped. And when your economic woes went from chronic to acute, you responded -- like so many Third World states have -- with an extensive program of nationalizing private companies and assets. Your mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now state owned and controlled, and this week your reinsurance giant AIG was effectively nationalized, with the Federal Reserve Board seizing an 80% equity stake in the flailing company. Some might deride this as socialism. But desperate times call for desperate measures.* Admittedly, your transition to Third World status is far from over, and it won't be painless. At first, for instance, you may find it hard to get used to the shantytowns that will replace the exurban sprawl of McMansions that helped fuel the real estate speculation bubble. But in time, such shantytowns will simply become part of the landscape. Similarly, as unemployment rates continue to rise, you will initially struggle to find a use for the expanding pool of angry, jobless young men. But you will gradually realize that you can recruit them to fight in a ceaseless round of armed conflicts, a solution that has been utilized by many other Third World states before you. Indeed, with your wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you are off to an excellent start. Perhaps this letter comes as a surprise to you, and you feel you're not fully ready to join the Third World. Don't let this feeling concern you. Though you may never have realized it, you've been preparing for this moment for years. [EMAIL PROTECTED] *When Truth and Rights Are Crucified for US Security* *By Thalif Deen at the united nations* *http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080907/Columns/inside.html* NEW YORK - The time-honoured cliché is that the first casualty in any war is truth. To put it more bluntly, most wars are justified on the strength of blatant lies deployed by both warring parties in any conflict. If insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan resort to pure political hogwash to bolster their cause, are the US and NATO forces, presided over by legitimate governments, justified in resorting to similar tactics in lying about the successes and failures in the battlefield? *The Bush administration, not surprisingly, has been peddling untruth and half-truths to cover up civilian deaths, euphemistically called "collateral damage," in the ongoing conflicts in **Iraq** and **Afghanistan**. Or it has justified the killings by giving it a sinister political twist. In fact, some of the stories planted in mainstream newspapers, mostly by the Pentagon, defy credibility and, at times, insult the intelligence of readers. * *When **US** forces, for example, nab suspected armed insurgents inside ** Iraq**, the Pentagon claims that some of the insurgents were carrying passports -- specifically Iranian passports (obviously an attempt to accuse **Iran** of complicity in the insurgency). How credible is a story about insurgents going to battle carrying their passports along with them? If that defies logic, it is pure stupidity on the part of insurgents to be armed both with a deadly weapon and a passport at the same time? Mercifully, there have been no stories so far of potential suicide bombers being caught with their foreign passports.* *When some of the insurgents were killed in US attacks, the Pentagon has also been artificially boosting its victory by claiming that the insurgents were "senior leaders" of al-Qaeda. But were they so in real fact? If US forces did destroy all those "senior leaders" in **Iraq**, how come al-Qaeda insurgents still continue with their attacks after more than five years of devastation in **Iraq**? They seem to be coming off a human assembly line.* *During the first few months of the **US** invasion of **Iraq**, some of the stories had a different twist. Every Iraqi Baathist official who was killed was invariably described either as a "senior aide" to Saddam Hussein or "a right hand man" of Saddam Hussein. The Baath leadership was being decapitated. Or so we were told. The stories, put out by the Pentagon, came with such monotonous regularity that one cynic rightly asked: "What if Saddam Hussein was left-handed?" Was the body count less important?* *Last month there was yet another incredible story about a US-educated Pakistani neuro-scientist, Aafia Siddiqui, 36, who was apparently nabbed "lingering" outside the house of the governor of Ghazni province in ** Afghanistan**. The woman, who was educated in the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was apparently carrying with her not only recipes for explosives and chemical substances but also documents describing New York city landmarks ripe for bombing.* *How inane is it for an MIT graduate to walk the streets of **Afghanistan**carrying incriminating documents detailing bomb making equipment and the **Brooklyn** **Bridge** in **New York city**? Is it the ultimate insult to MIT? Siddiqui has also been charged with another offence: while she was in Afghan custody, she had apparently grabbed an "unsecured rifle" and taken shots at several US intelligence agents who were present in Afghanistan to question her. But several questions remain unanswered: why wasn**'**t such a high profile terror suspect not handcuffed? Or even kept in a prison cell?* *At the **New York** court house, her lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, posed another logical question, raising howls of laughter. "An 85-pound woman going after six guys with an M-4 rifle?" she asked sarcastically. The story just doesn**'**t pass the sniff test, she added, ridiculing the charges brought against the frail Pakistani woman accused of having links to al-Qaeda. The credibility of the story is expected to be challenged in a **New York** court house in the next few months. The biggest mystery is that the woman disappeared in **Pakistan** about five years ago around the time that US agents wanted to question her -- and suddenly surfaces in **Afghanistan**where she is arrested and brought to **New York** to face charges of terrorism.* In the fight against global terrorism, Western nations continue to ride roughshod over civil liberties, human rights and the rule of law. In a report released last week, Amnesty International said that since the September 2001 attacks on the US and in other countries, a wide range of counter-terrorism laws, policies and practices have eroded human rights protection. These include violations of freedom of expression and the use of torture -- "as governments claim the security of some can only be achieved by violating the rights of others." The UN Security Council, in pushing for the criminalisation and suppression of terrorism worldwide without taking due care for the protection of human rights, must also take some responsibility for the adverse consequences, AI said. The London-based human rights organisation also called on the Security Council to address the human rights deficit in its work by adopting strong human rights language in its resolutions dealing with terrorism and giving greater importance and resources to the protection of human rights in its counter-terrorism work.
