The economist Emmanuel Saez recently crunched the numbers and found that, between 1993 and 2006, roughly half of overall income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of all families. During the expansion overseen by George W. Bush, “the top 1 percent captured almost three-quarters of income growth.” This was great for ordinary Americans, Republicans told us at the time. Except that it wasn’t. According to Saez, real income for Americans in the bottom 99 percent increased by just 1.1 percent per year between 1993 and 2006. During the Bush expansion, it fell below 1 percent per year.
[From The Nation]
[From The Nation]
Ridge’s upcoming book, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege… And How We Can Be Safe Again, accuses the Bush-Cheney White House of pushing the homeland security chief to “raise the national security alert just before the 2004 election.”
Read the full article here.
[From New American Media]
Editor’s Note: The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute, the Center for Investigative Reporting and New American Media. NAM Middle East correspondent Shane Bauer spent early 2009 reporting from Iraq This article was first published in The Nation.
Read the article here.
A list of articles covering this unfortunate end to 2008 and beginning to 2009 in the Gaza strip.
6 months later, has the world forgotten? – A brief look at Gaza and Gazans 6 months removed from the invasion. The author speaks with a number of Gazans about what it did to their lives; examines the Fatah/Hamas split and the increasing “Islamization” of Gaza by Hamas; and concludes that Gaza is missing support from the rest of the world and that the Palestinians there are exhausted and losing motivation to look for improvement.
Israeli Troops Told to ‘Shoot First’ - Discusses the approach taken to civilians during the War and then details the words battle as the IDF tries to deny claims from its own soldiers regarding its tactics. A Christian Science Monitor article on the same topic focuses a bit more on the soldiers’ claims.
Israel hits UN Relief compound – Just one of the many sights that Israel fired on that should not have been touched (beyond the fact that the invasion itself was seemingly illegal), this after the Israelis had been provided with the GPS coordinates of all UN facilities in Gaza. This “soft” target hit list also includes some hospitals and schools.
Casualties
“Amnesty International concluded that an overall figure of some 1,400[Palestinian] fatalities is accurate and that, in addition to some 300 children, 115 women and 85 men aged over 50, some 200 men aged less than 50 were unarmed civilians who took no part in the hostilities.” 13 Israeli’s are believed to have been killed, which includes 4 soldiers killed by friendly fire.
The World Health Organization lost 16 people and the UN Relief Agency lost 5.
It would be unfair not to mention the rocket attacks by Hamas and Palestinian militants into Israel, which have been significant, as an illegal action. Also significant though is the low number of Israeli deaths (8 people in 2008) as a result of these rocket attacks. The IDF named these attacks as a major factor in the invasion. Rocket attacks intensified during the Offensive, included new cities in Israel not previously targeted, and rocket attacks have continued intermittently since Israel’s withdrawal.
With new Blackwater-related news recently, it seemed like a good time to start a post about this friendly neighborhood company. More will be added later.
As a bit of an aside, I’m a little curious why there has not been any real discussion regarding the morality of using mercenary armies. They are an undoubtedly problematic and worrisome entity.
The two recent Blackwater tidbits are:
Blackwater Founded Implicated in Murder
U.S. Still Paying Blackwater Millions
[From Reuters by Douglas Hamilton]
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Some Israeli soldiers who took part in the January invasion of the Gaza Strip say they were encouraged by commanders to shoot first and worry later about civilians, and went into Gaza with guns blazing.
Testimony from 30 veterans of Operation Cast Lead, published on Wednesday by the activist group “Breaking the Silence,” lends credence to charges by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and U.N. agencies that Israeli forces inflicted civilian death and destruction on an unjustifiable scale.
Read more…
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