By Seth Sandronsky
 

U.S. economic growth rose at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in July–September, the slowest in more than three years, the Commerce Department recently reported.  By way of comparison, the nation’s rate of growth was 2.6 percent in the second quarter.  What is happening to nearly slice the growth rate by half in an $11 trillion economy?

In brief, growth in residential housing dropped 17.4 percent in the third quarter.  Housing’s fall was 11.1 percent in the second quarter.  This downward trend has been underway for the past 12 months in the U.S. economy.

Economists have a word for two straight quarters of declining growth: recession.  Is the housing dip forecasting a 2007 recession?  That is unclear.

Clearly though, a recession is very bad news for the U.S. working class.  On that note, housing has been a motor for employment in the building, financing and furnishing of existing and new homes.  “Last year, housing could be credited for creating over 15 percent of the year's new jobs”; reports the Economic Policy Institute, “this year housing-related jobs will account for less than 5 percent of the economy's new jobs.”

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by Jeremy R. Hammond
 

The debate over what to do about the crisis in Iraq has, on one hand, those who argue for immediate withdrawal and, on the other, those who argue, justification (or lack thereof) of the initial invasion aside, that the US must remain lest the country descend further into chaos. Among the latter, the focus is on finding a "timetable for withdrawal", which would be dictated by how quickly "Iraqization" could be successfully implemented to a degree that Iraqi forces could take over the job currently being done by US troops. That this needs to occur seems to be the general consensus. This view is predicated upon a number of assumptions that are in need of serious questioning if any real solutions to the ongoing crisis are to be found.

One assumption is that the US has intended to withdraw from Iraq from the onset. The US has an enormous number of strategic military bases scattered around the globe. It never completely withdrew from either Germany or Japan after WWII. It maintains a military presence in South Korea. As a result of the war in Afghanistan, the US acquired a number of military bases in Central Asia, not only in Afghanistan but also in several neighboring former Soviet republics. It is well known, and was easily demonstrable prior to the invasion, that the principle justification for war, namely the threat of weapons of mass destruction, was a fabricated pretext. Although chosen as the selling point for public consumption, it is self-evident that the "threat" of Iraq was simply not the true motive for the invasion. Rather, if we assume the historical norm is being followed, and if we trust documents expressing the views of policymakers within the US government, the goal of the invasion was hegemony over what has been long been regarded as a region of the utmost strategic importance, primarily due to its rich resources in oil and gas. There is little reason to believe that US has any intention whatsoever of abandoning the bases in Iraq it has acquired as a result of the invasion.

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by Mike Whitney

Don Rumsfeld is not a good leader. In fact, he is a very bad leader. Leadership is predicated on three basic factors: Strong moral character, sound judgment, and the ability to learn from one’s mistakes. None of these apply to Rumsfeld. As a result, every major decision that has been made in Iraq has been wrong and has cost the lives of countless Iraqis and American servicemen. This pattern will undoubtedly continue as long as Rumsfeld is the Secretary of Defense.

Here’s a simple test: Name one part of the occupation of which has succeeded?

Security? Reconstruction? De-Ba’athification? Dismantling the Iraqi military? Protecting Saddam’s ammo-dumps? Stopping the looting? Body armor? Coalition government? Abu Ghraib? Falluja? Even oil production has been slashed in half.

Every facet of the occupation has been an unmitigated disaster. Nothing has succeeded. Everything has failed.

Everything.

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by Paul Balles

There’s no such thing as objectivity. Everything is seen through conditioned eyes. What we love or hate depends on the kind of washing our brains have been subjected to. That theory is verifiable. The practical evidence can be seen in the world’s press.

The Western mind looks at the world through the familiar eyes of CNN, BBC, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, Reuters or the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch. To the Eastern and Middle Eastern mind, much of the controlled Western perspective of the world doesn’t make sense. The Middle East TV channel Al Jazeera, broadcasting in Arabic out of Doha, Qatar, makes sense to 40 million viewers.

The channel has been the object of personal vendettas, agency closures, assassinations and vilification by a number of regimes and government organizations. The real reason for the hatred and attacks? Al Jazeera is the only completely free public broadcasting organization in the world.

Al Jazeera should be a lesson for journalists from other news organizations. Not that restrained journalists could do much to free themselves from the controls that inhibit and restrict them worldwide, but a few might realize the possibilities of truly working as the professionals that journalists should be. Because it exercises freedom from political restraints, here are some of the results experienced by Al Jazeera:

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by Chris Floyd

While the American election campaign thrashes toward the finish line with the usual spasms of witless diversion and hyper-mendacity – an echo chamber of utter bullshit roaring in a media bubble murderously detached from reality – in the actual world of flesh and blood, the destruction of Iraq engineered by George W. Bush is entering a new phase that could make the previous three years of all-devouring hell look like a sojourn in paradise.

Baghdad is under siege, as Patrick Cockburn reports in the Independent; the city has been encircled by Sunni militias who have cut almost all the roads leading into the capital. Inside the city, "the scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict," says Cockburn. And it will inevitably, inexorably grow worse, as Shiite militias consolidate their hold within Baghdad while trying to break the blockade from outside. Already, "food shortages are becoming severe" in some parts of the city, he reports, while almost a thousand Iraqis are being slaughtered each week, mostly in Baghdad. Meanwhile, at least 1.5 million internal refugees have fled the ethnic cleansing by both Sunni and Shiite militias, joining the hundreds of thousands who have fled the country altogether. Again, these numbers dwarf those in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars – while the total dead from Bush's war, a very credible estimate of at least 650,000, is approaching the level of the Rwandan genocide.

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by Mickey Z.

Every now and then, a series of events (and the reaction to those events) converge to effectively illustrate just how deeply the indoctrination runs in the home of the brave/land of the free. Senator John F. Kerry was the catalyst for the most recent such convergence. His "botched joke" laid bare the passionate cult of the soldier, America's enduring military fetish.

It has been and remains career suicide for any public figure to even hint at criticizing the men and women in uniform. Consider Kerry's apology: "I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform." It's not even an issue of actually being critical of the military. Among a war-loving people, you must be cautious to not even "wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform." Kerry himself said people were "crazy" to think he would denigrate America's military. As profound as this may be, the realities exposed by the "stuck in Iraq" affair go much deeper than that.

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