In Baghdad as I write this it is early Thursday evening, about 7:00 pm Thursday November 27, 2008. Add 8 hours to current US eastern standard time to calculate Baghdad time.

It is also about five and half years since George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, claiming falsely to want to “liberate” Iraq, while beginning the occupation that has resulted in the deaths of more than a million Iraqis and more than four thousand Americans.

Since the invasion Iraqis belonging to all social factions and walks of life have been trying to throw their occupiers out of the country. They may finally, after all these years, be on the verge of doing exactly that.

But at what cost?

Yesterday the Iraqi parliament delayed a vote on the SOFA pact until today, then earlier today passed the agreement, but subject to a national referendum of Iraqis that could very well finally result in the end of the occupation because of the power and persistence of popular resistance.

Yesterday, in US-Iraq: The Big Picture: “Professor Michael Schwartz compare[d] the terms of the US-Iraq security pact – assuming the US will abide by them – with the initial, grandiose neocon plan which would have Iraq as an American colony peppered with US military bases projecting power all over the Middle East. He stresse[d] it’s unlikely the Pentagon and US Big Oil will abandon their dreams of Iraq domination.”

Operation Iraq Liberation (OIL) would have been an apt codename for Bush’s invasion, but under any codename and whatever the lies and justification used, Iraqis have had enough, and the whole criminal adventure has also resulted in the repudiation and collapse of all the grand plans of Bush, the neocons, and PNAC, although it has yet to result in the arrest and trial of George Bush for war crimes. But grand plans or no, the oil men will not quit, and are still determined to control whatever oil resources in Iraq they can.

Neither will Iraqis quit, however, and the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama would do well to remember the power and persistence of popular resistance movements, both in Iraq, and at home, and not make a similar mistake in Afghanistan, and remember that it was not the oil companies who won him election, but popular movement.

On the flip The Real News and Michael Schwartz examine Iraq popular movement resistance to the US-Iraq security pact and how instrumental it has been for years in blocking the Bush administration agenda.

The easiest way is to steal $26,000 from you. And then steal $26,000 from everyone you know. And then steal $26,000 from everyone you don’t know.

Nomi Prins is a journalist and Senior Fellow at Demos. She writes about politics, money and relationships.

Nomi is the author of Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and also author of Jacked: How “Conservatives” are Picking your Pocket.

Before becoming a journalist, Nomi worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and running the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London.

Financial “bailouts” spending your money just since Monday this week… yes, since two days ago… have been over One Trillion Dollars.

With the credit crisis continuing to worsen, the US federal government is pledging a seemingly endless amount of money to shore up failing institutions hit hard by toxic assets. Federal government pledges now top $8 trillion with the most recent $800 billion announced Tuesday.

The Real News Network spoke to journalist and author Nomi Prins.

Real News: November 26, 2008 – 8 min 54 sec

Bailout costs $8.5 trillion

The US Federal Government has pledged $8.56 trillion in economic bailout for financial institutions so far

The Ploughshares Fund pools contributions from individuals, families and foundations and directs those funds to initiatives aimed at preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons and promoting regional stability, in the pursuit of a safe, secure and nuclear weapon-free world.

Can Obama untangle the Iranian challenge?

by Alexandra Bell

The Ploughshares Fund, November 18, 2008

People were turned away at the door at a standing room-only event at the Hart Senate Office Building titled, “Can Obama Untangle the Iranian Challenge: Prospects for a New Policy,” hosted by the Ploughshares-funded National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

NIAC’s president, Dr. Trita Parsi, welcomed a panel that included Former Assistant Secretary of State Ambassador James Dobbins, Dr. Farideh Fari of the University of Hawaii and Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, who discussed the future of U.S.- Iran policy and the agenda for change.

The consensus of the entire panel was that current actions are failing to thwart the nuclear ambitions of Iran and the U.S. cannot keep doing the same thing, expecting a different result.  They all agreed that now is the time for engagement.  

The panelists answered press questions and were followed by Representative John Tierney (D-MA) who also stressed the need for enhanced diplomacy with Iran.  Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) agreed and pointed out that uranium enrichment cessation was an object of the negotiations and therefore could not be a precondition.

Pepe Escobar and The Real News reports on the event and analyzes the situation and current US foreign policy towards Iran, and what Obama can and should be focusing on in relations with Iran.

Joseph Cirincione: “The best way to seek regime change in Iran is not to seek regime change“.

One of the key foreign policy challenges of the Barack Obama presidency will be to elaborate a new approach towards Iran. A spirited, informed debate is already on in Washington – where a special presentation to the Senate has outlined crucial American and Iranian points of view; and also in academic and diplomatic circles, as a Joint Experts’ Statement on Iran recommends the President-elect adopts a bold new strategy, focused on dialogue and mutual respect.

November 25, 2008 – 9 min 37 sec

Obama and Iran

Diplomats and scholars encourage Obama to invest in change instead of regime change

Joe Lieberman faced a secret ballot vote from the Democratic caucus last Tuesday, who in spite of his support for John McCain during the presidential election campaign, yielded to the wishes of President-elect Barack Obama and allowed him to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.

Why?

Once Senator Joe Lieberman was Senator Barack Obama’s mentor and urged him to “reach for the stars”. Then he fiercely campaigned against Obama alongside his close friend, Republican Senator John McCain. He lost his bet.

Many a Democrat believed there was only way out as far as Lieberman was concerned: heavy punishment by the Democratic party. The President-elect ordered otherwise.

Pepe Escobar argues this is a political marriage of convenience.

Real News: November 22 – 5 min 46 sec

Joe and Barack: who owns who?

The President-elect’s calculation: valuable asset Senator Joe Lieberman should be kept in the fold

Judah Freed at the Examiner the other day also analyzes and makes a prediction…

They are unfeeling metal monsters. They’ve taken over the world. They have us surrounded. They’re everywhere. They remorselessly kill and maim more people every year, at least in North America, than all the terrorists ever dreamed of in all the worst nightmares sold to us by politicians, and in all the wars going on around the world.

They are bankrupting our economy and destroying our planet. They show no respect for human life. There’s a good chance one or more of them will kill you or someone in your family soon, if they haven’t already done so.

They are dirty bombs that have polluted and poisoned the entire earth. Besides our homes, they consume the largest part of our disposable income, and produce the largest portion of the personal debt carried by most people.

Yet over the past century they have become our life. We can’t live with them. But we can’t live without them, it seems.

When the Apollo astronauts were making their trips to the moon in our first foray to another astronomical body, one of the first things they took with them was.. a car. A car. To the moon, for fucks sake.

They divide us from each other, and make us hate each other. But we love them. Even though they kill us.

They’re not just part of popular culture, there can probably be good arguments made that they are our culture. We all want to own one, and some of us own as many as we can, but in reality they own us, and we organize our lives around them.

But we sure love our cars. So much so that many of us even lose our virginity in them. Many of us have certainly lost our innocence in them.

And ever faster and faster, we’re going nowhere except to hell in them.

On Tuesday LIFE Magazine released two million photos from the 1750s to today, from the LIFE magazine archives. Most of them have never before been seen by the public, apparently never published.

From the announcement on GoogleBlog Tuesday of the release:

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today.

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive – about 10 million photos.

…

Once you are in the archive, you’ll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button.

The full Google LIFE photo archive is here:

You can also search them directly on google.com. Just add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. For example: computer source:life

Tuesday in Beverly Hills, California, hundreds of attendees gathered from more than 50 states, provinces and countries at a “Governors’ Global Climate Summit” hosted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The summit continues through today.

According to Environmental News Service:

The summit has already led to a signed agreement between U.S. governors and governors from Brazil and Indonesia to reduce forestry-related greenhouse gas emissions. It is the first state-to-state, sub-national agreement focused on reducing emissions from deforestation and land degradation.

“Tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of all human-caused carbon emissions in the world, and the governors signing these MOUs with us manage more than 60 percent of the world’s tropical forest lands,” Governor Schwarzenegger said.

“With this agreement, we are focusing our collective efforts on the problem and requiring our states to jointly develop rules, incentives and tools to ensure reduced emissions from deforestation and land degradation,” Schwarzenegger said. “We are also sending a strong message that this issue should be front and center during negotiations for the next global agreement on climate change.”

The agreement commits the U.S. States of California, Illinois and Wisconsin to work with the governors of six states and provinces within Indonesia and Brazil to help slow and stop tropical deforestation, the cutting and burning of trees to convert land to grow crops and raise livestock, and land degradation through joint projects and incentive programs.

It was signed by Governor Antônio Waldez Góes da Silva, Amapa, Brazil; Governor Eduardo Braga, Amazonas, Brazil; Governor Blario Maggi, Mato Grosso, Brazil; Governor Ana Júla de Vasconcelos Carepa, Para, Brazil; Governor Yusof Irwandi, Aceh, Indonesia; and Governor Barnamas Suebu, Papua, Indonesia.

…

The summit is intended to create opportunities for consensus on climate issues ahead of next month’s UN climate change conference in Poland where governments will work towards a climate accord to take effect after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Barack Obama will not be attending the conference in Poland next month since he will not take office as President until January, “but he has asked members of Congress who are attending the conference as observers to report back to him on what they learn there”, the ENS report says, and Obama did record a message to the summit attendees, which was posted on Change.gov yesterday.

UPDATE: A Siegel has posted the video of Obama’s message to the conference, with a great point by point analysis of what Obama had to say, here this morning in his essay Obama speaks out against Global Warming. Be sure to check it out.

How long it will last is anybody’s guess.

The Real News analyzes the agreement in a discussion with Sabah al-Nasseri, Professor of Political Science (Middle East Politics) at York University, Toronto, and previously Lecturer of Political Science at the J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt.

Real News: November 18, 2008 – 12 minutes

Iraqi cabinet accepts US agreement

Sabah al-Nasseri: Strong nationalist movement has mobilized against the agreement, and they have guns.

The Iraqi cabinet agreed by a vote of 27-1 on Sunday to approve the newest US draft of the Status of Forces Agreement between the two countries.

The agreement speaks to a variety of issues concerning the occupation, including the complete withdrawal from Iraq of US forces by the end of 2011. Moreover, it includes a promise from the US to not use Iraqi territory as a launch pad to attack inside other Middle-eastern countries, as it did in late October during a raid on a village inside Syria.

Sabah al-Nasseri believes that the Iraqi parliament will eventually turn down the agreement for political reasons, in the interests of securing one with Barack Obama when he comes to power in January.

The timing is important as the Iraqi provincial elections, which are extremely significant given the power granted provinces under the Iraqi constitution, will take place on January 31.

Sabah believes that the importance of fairing well in those elections will force the parliament to reject an agreement which has received the rebuke of numerous groups, both religious and secular, who have organized massive protests over recent weeks.

One piece of the agreement that very few people are talking about, which Sabah believes has angered many nationalists of all stripes, is the labeling of any armed resistance against occupation forces as terrorists, thereby criminalizing their activities under Iraqi law.

Sabah believes that the most recent violence in Iraq was carried out by secular nationalists who are opposed to the deal, given that the targets of the attacks were all US and Iraqi government elements.

Sabah, who was born and raised in the Southern Iraqi city of Basra, reiterates his support for an immediate withdrawal of all foreign occupiers, believing that the violence in Iraq stems from the occupation.

On the flip, Tina Susman reporting from Baghdad for the LA Times, has put together A guide to the U.S. security agreement with Iraq:

The apparently dire straits that the big three automakers are facing is a loss of revenue due to dropping sales greatly exacerbated by less availability of credit due to banking mismanagement encouraged by deregulation over the past couple of decades.

The problem is a symptom of a larger “disease”, and not the cause of the disease.

Throwing billions of dollars of taxpayer money at the automakers while their customers remain in large part unable to buy the cars they produce will not increase their sales and thus not solve any problem other than keeping the management from going bust.

Treating the symptoms of any life threatening systemic disease without addressing the causes will result in temporary comfort but the patient will die.

A simple answer just will not do.

A few hours ago today Marc Ash posted this at Truthout. There is little if anything that I could add that would do justice to Marc’s words…

Monday 17 November 2008

by: Marc Ash, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

An American soldier lies on an operating table. in Ramadi after being wounded in an IED blast. Iraq 2006. (Photo: Lucian Read / battlespaceonline.org)

   When they say to you that “mistakes were made,” never believe that. Mistakes are always made, but mistakes did not lead us on the road to Baghdad. We were taken to Iraq by those who knew exactly, precisely what they were doing. Or believed so anyway.

   Do not be persuaded to believe that “bad intelligence” was the problem and war was the unfortunate result. No one who made this war believed themselves what they told the nation. They knew quite well and they went anyway. And they took us with them.

   When it is said that an “insurgent” has killed or been killed always ask who that was, and why. More often than not, it was someone who lived there, but would not live under foreign rule.

   Do not be seduced into thinking of torture as harsh interrogation. The hour is late and we must confront the torturers among us.

   If you are the slightest bit concerned that we have crushed freedom here and in other lands in the name of freedom, be more concerned. We have.

   Never forget or let your children forget that it was all a lie, told with purpose.

   Many of us believed that Vietnam was a catharsis, a moving beyond a point to which we could never return. It took only 28 years to get from Saigon to Baghdad. And we took the exact same road. Don’t be too ashamed the trick we fell for was the same one Mark Twain warned of when he wrote, “Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor …” “All you have to do …,” said Hermann Goering “… is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

   It has worked in our country. Again.

   At the end of any battle, the last man holding a sword is the judge. But Nuremberg forgot Dresden. Will we forget Abu Ghraib? Will the world forget what we have done? In the year 2001, we believed that it did not matter who won the presidential election. What do we believe now?

   We have sacked Babylon. Only a fool would believe there will be no day of atonement.

   We stand at the precipice of a new age of political pragmatism. Realists, making realistic decisions. Let it be listed among those things that are real the danger of ignoring the enormous crimes of these last eight years. Lest we come to ask for whom the bell tolls.