Halliburton: Texas to Dubai

Remember Halliburton, the company who recieved billions of US government dollars in no-bid contracts to go overcharge US soldiers for food and gas in Iraq? Do you think this company whom the US trusted, via its subsidiary KBR, to wash soldier's clothes and latrines would be grateful to the government, or at least to former CEO Dick Cheney, and maintain its corporate headquarters in the US and paying US taxes?
Well, Halliburton is shifting its HQ from Texas to Dubai.

Watch a short video of the New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright in his one-man show, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” at the Culture Project, in New York City. Wright has covered Al Qaeda for the magazine; last year, he published the book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” In the course of his work on the roots and the rise of Islamic terrorism, Wright has conducted more than six hundred interviews and travelled to Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and much of Western Europe. The play, which he wrote and performs, is a first-person account of his experiences, and examines, among other themes, the tension between his roles as journalist and citizen.

Along the (soon to be) 160,000 military US troops in Iraq, there are about 100,000 private contractors, including 48,000 private security forces. That's the second largest contingent stationed in Iraq, after the US military. They do not respond to the military chain of command, and are accountable to no one. See the incisive FRONTLINE documentary on these Private Warriors.

"The Seasons Alter"

"The Seasons Alter" is a contemporary short film interpretation of a sequence from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The film reinvents classic Shakespeare for a contemporary audience but also delivers one of the most pressingly urgent environmental messages of our time: climate change. The text was only slightly adapted, the apocalyptic imagery is not due to a feud between a divine couple, but Titania's words from ACT II Scene 1 are shared to imply that our dissension, lack of care, frivolous cheer, has had disastorous consequences of which we are the parents, and it is our responsibility to ammend.

See the short movie at Futerra and read along with the text below.


Text

OBERON
Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

TITANIA
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.

OBERON
Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?

HERMIA
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
(...)I would my father look'd but with my eyes.
[He is their parent and original]

HERMIA
Rather your eyes must with his judgment look.

THESEUS
The human mortals want their winter CHEER;

TITANIA
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:

HERMIA
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set:

TITANIA
the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

OBERON
you amend it then; it lies in you:

TITANIA
No.
We are their parents and original.

US surge in Iraq

How many USAmericans are present in Iraq and taking part in its occupation and exploitation?

In the January/2007 State of the Union address, President Bush announced an increase in over twenty thousand US troops, which raise the total of boots on the ground to over 150,000 (for variation over time see Global Security).

But the Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000. The estimate is based on the Pentagon’s policy of sending additional support units alongside regular combat troops. At least 15,000 support troops would have to be sent alongside the 21,000 shipping off to Iraq. The same study also estimates the escalation could cost up $27 billion in its first year -- nearly nine times the official estimate. (ref)

To the military presence, one need also add the 100,000 contractors deployed by the Bush administration, 48,000 people working for private security firms, like Blackwater.

From: A Look Back and Ahead In An Age of Neocon Rule By Stephen Lendman

-- 47 million Americans can't afford basic health insurance.

-- Over 80 million in total have no health coverage during some portion of each year and most of them are employed.

-- The Bush administration just proposed sweeping cuts in payments to pharmacies to reduce the Medicaid benefits 50 million poor in the country rely on, can't afford to make up the difference for on their own, and may have to forego medications they vitally need if pharmacies won't fill prescriptions at lower prices.

-- The US ranks 41st in infant mortality, and the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the country 37th in the world in "overall health performance" and 54th in the fairness of health care despite spending at a current level overall of around $2 trillion a year or about double the amount per capita of the OECD countries that deliver superior health care overall to their citizens as a national priority.

-- Well over 12 millions Americans struggle daily to feed themselves, and many thousands across the country can't afford housing and are forced to sleep on the streets including in winter cold.

-- A just released December 14 US Conference of Mayors report said these conditions continue to worsen based on a survey of 23 cities showing 7% more requests for food aid in 2006 following a 12% jump in 2005 during a period of economic growth.

-- The same report showed requests for shelter rose 9% in 2006 with requests from families with children rising 5%.

-- Public education is deliberately being eroded with illiteracy in basic reading, math and computer skills shamefully high and rising.

-- The US prison population is the highest in the world at 2.2 million and increasing by 1000 a week, half of those in it are black, and half of the total prison population is there for non-violent offenses half of which are drug-related. The US prison system is a shameful Gulag and an affront to humanity. The appalling conviction and sentencing of first-time drug offender Weldon Angelos is but one of countless examples. He was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004 while in possession of a gun unrelated to the sale. Under the insane federal mandatory sentencing laws, he was sentenced to five years for the first offense and 25 years each for the other two totaling 55 years in federal prison or a likely life sentence if he's forced to serve it all because he possessed and sold a few "joints" of a substance less harmful than legal cigarettes that kill millions yearly while it's not known marijuana ever killed anyone using it. Only in America.

-- The true state of things overall is suppressed by the dominant corporate-controlled media (including the NPR and PBS parts of it) functioning as a national thought-control police controlling all mass communication and depriving the public of any real information vital to a healthy democracy and their welfare.

-- Racial segregation is as great as in the 1960s, and the national sport almost is demonizing Muslims as "terrorists, radicals, extremists and Islamofascists" and impoverished "people the color of the earth" Mexicans and Latin Americans as "illegal immigrant invaders polluting" our white western European society and culture, mindless that they only come el norte in desperate search of work because of the devastating effects of NAFTA on their lives that destroyed their ability to support their families.

Data from the Oakland Institute think tank specializing in social, economic and environmental issues shows that heavily subsidized US corn exports to Mexico have tripled since NAFTA came into force forcing two million Mexican corn farmers out of business, something that was predicted in advance but allowed to happen anyway. It also led to suicides but at a rate nowhere near the level globalized trade US-style had on farmers in India where as many as 100,000 of them have taken their own lives because "New World Order" indebtedness caused them to lose their farms and then everything else.

-- Childhood poverty in the US ranks 22nd and next to last among developed nations when there should be virtually none tolerated in the richest country in the world or toleration of any of the other listed abuses.

-- An alarming number of high-paying and other jobs have been exported abroad in a process that's gone on for decades but picked up in momentum since the 1980s and especially in recent years. Mckinsey Global Institute estimates the volume will grow 30 - 40% a year for the next five years. Forrester Research estimates 3.3 million white-collar jobs will be lost by 2015 with most affected areas in financial services and information technology, and University of California researchers estimate that "up to 14 million American jobs are at risk to outsourcing."

-- Workers almost everywhere have been harmed, including in the US, as union clout and worker rights here have declined in an age where the social contract government once had with its working people has been dismantled with less than 13% of the work force (the lowest in the industrialized world) unionized today compared to one-third of it in 1958. In an age of modern-day "robber barons," the middle class bedrock of a democratic state is slowly disappearing as the nation moves closer to becoming a banana republic at a time when 51 of the world's largest economies are corporate giants, most of them US-based.

Winning Iraq flip-flop

Time's Person of the year

Each year Time magazine selects a "Man of the Year" for their last issue. This year You were selected, the user of the World Wide Web.

If that's so why was the result of the on-line poll for "Man of the Year", conducted on the Time website so blatantly disregarded?

I just checked it and it cleary shows Hugo Chávez, the newly re-elected President of Venezuela, in the lead with 36%. The closest to Time's choice is the YouTube guys with 11%. If You is to be valued then at least Your choice should merit a reference in the cover story. I guess Time isn't so confortable with the notion of the world polling on who is really the Man of the Year if it departs from who they might deem acceptable.