Baobab
Baobab's JournalThe fall of the Berlin Wall - 25 Anniversary - Declassified Documents tell the incredible story!
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB490/Washington, DC, November 9, 2014 – The iconic fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago today shocked international leaders from Washington to Moscow, London to Warsaw, as East German crowds took advantage of Communist Party fumbles to break down the Cold War's most symbolic barrier, according to formerly secret documents from Soviet, German, U.S., Czechoslovak and Hungarian files posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).
The historic events of the night of November 9, 1989 came about from accident and contingency, rather than conspiracy or strategy, according to the documents. Crowds of East Berliners, already conditioned by months of refugee flights to the West and weeks of peaceful mass protests in cities like Leipzig, seized on media reports of immediate changes in travel restrictions — based on a bumbled briefing by a Politburo member, Günter Schabowski — and inundated the Wall's checkpoints demanding passage. Television coverage of the first crossing that yielded to the self-fulfilling media prophecy then created a multiplier effect and more crowds came, ultimately to dance on the Wall.
Why did Bill Clinton decide to ignore Rwandan genocide? Would Hillary do likewise?
Lets assume the country, like Rwanda, has no oil or other conspicuously valuable extractables.
See
The US and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/
"Despite overwhelming evidence of genocide and knowledge as to its perpetrators, United States officials decided against taking a leading role in confronting the slaughter in Rwanda. Rather, US officials confined themselves to public statements, diplomatic demarches, initiatives for a ceasefire, and attempts to contact both the interim government perpetrating the killing and the RPF. The US did use its influence, however, at the United Nations, but did so to discourage a robust UN response (Document 4 and Document 13). In late July, however, with the evidence of genocide littering the ground in Rwanda, the US did launch substantial operations—again, in a supporting role—to assist humanitarian relief efforts for those displaced by the genocide."
See also:
The Shroud Over Rwanda's Nightmare
By Michael Dobbs, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/opinion/the-shroud-over-rwandas-nightmare.html?_r=2
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: The Assassination of the Presidents and the Beginning of the "Apocalypse"
April 7, 2004 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB119/
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Information, Intelligence and the U.S. Response
March 4, 2004 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction
August 20, 2001 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda
US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide: Classified papers show Clinton was aware of 'final solution' to eliminate Tutsis
Rory Carroll in Johannesburg
@rorycarroll72
Wednesday 31 March 2004 10.59 EST
Last modified on Thursday 1 April 2004 10.59 EST
President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.
Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.
Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.
It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington's top policymakers.
The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.
"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.
The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.
It discovered that the CIA's national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south".
Three days later the state department's intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted "genocide and partition" and reported declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".
However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".
Ms Des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination."
The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of US intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting. It also felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.
William Ferroggiaro, of the National Security Archive, said the system had worked. "Diplomats, intelligence agencies, defence and military officials - even aid workers - provided timely information up the chain," he said.
"That the Clinton administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda."
Many analysts and historians fault Washington and other western capitals not just for failing to support the token force of overwhelmed UN peacekeepers but for failing to speak out more forcefully during the slaughter.
Some of the Hutu extremists orchestrating events might have heeded such warnings, they have suggested.
Mr Clinton has apologised for those failures but the declassified documents undermine his defence of ignorance. "The level of US intelligence is really amazing," said Mr Ferroggiaro. "A vast array of information was available."
On a visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1998 Mr Clinton apologised for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes genocide.
In what was widely seen as an attempt to diminish his responsibility, he said: "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
A spokesperson for the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation in New York said the allegations would be relayed to the former president
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Ethics Daily: Bill Clinton's Failure to Confront Rwandan Genocide as Genocide
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/bill-clintons-failure-to-confront-rwandan-genocide-as-genocide-cms-22584
US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide Classified papers show Clinton was aware of 'final solution' to
US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide: Classified papers show Clinton was aware of 'final solution' to eliminate Tutsis
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda
See also:
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: The Assassination of the Presidents and the Beginning of the "Apocalypse"
April 7, 2004 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB119/
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Information, Intelligence and the U.S. Response
March 4, 2004 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/
The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction
August 20, 2001 : http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/
The Rwanda "Genocide Fax": What We Know Now
New Documentation Paints Complex Picture of Informant and his Warnings
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB452/
First Publication of "#Rwanda20yrs" project by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Security Archive
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 452
The lack of women in tech is more than a pipeline problem
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-is-more-than-a-pipeline-problem/At first glance, it’s easy to characterize the lack of women in technology and entrepreneurship as a pipeline problem.
The statistics are tellingly bleak — Girls Who Code reports that about 74 percent of young girls express interest in STEM fields and computer science. And yet, by the time they make decisions about what to study and where to start their careers, something happens.
Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women."
The GATS and South Africa's National Health Act | Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/gats-and-south-africas-national-health-actA One Party System is Unacceptable for This Nation, its Unacceptable to Go On Like We Are Now Too
So what should be done. Its clear that the Clinton era ushered in a new dishonesty in the form of so called "triangulation" where the Democratic and now Republican Parties attempt to distinguish themselves from one another by various tricks, not policy, and as such its a contemptible dragging of our nation through their dirt.
Frankly, this nation has enough problems as it is and the selfishness and dishonesty of this gaming has crossed some kind of line. It needs to be rejected by a bipartisan alliance of Americans who wish to see democracy restored without gaming.
Perhaps the solution is a shift to a multiple choice voting system where people can vote for a first and second and third choice candidate, or simply vote for one if they do not want to vote for a second choice. We also should encourage parties based on issues and not people. So that way when people went off the edge of a parties platform, they would be on their own and there would be no implied expectation that either the party or any particular people would follow them.
I vote for the Democratic Party in its pre-Clintonian state - a hope that we could get back to being the party of people and common sense has been keeping me here, but I feel that with her soliciting of GOP support Clinton has abandoned us. I do not feel comfortable giving my vote to a neoliberal neocon who is a de-facto militarist and supporter of intolerable policies which turn the Party into an oligarchy.
Also, Hillary's much vaunted health care plan was a cover up of negotiations on a contemporaneous scheme to make affordable health care impossible forever with a little known allegedly irreversible world services deal. Which has largely worked to BLOCK needed changes in policy there and also in education and innumerable other services. It is a defacto preemptive war on the future policy space of the entire human race for corporations benefit only.
Which the Party is hiding for her, leading to decades of dysfunction and a lot of needless deaths. (Nobody should trust her or the Democratic OR Republican Parties for BOTH hiding that.)
If this is the Democratic Party now, it should be left to sink or swim on its own. If it doesn't care about Americans or the core values that made it a great party in the past, it doesn't need our votes, and we don't need it.
We would be smarter voting for somebody who does.
Despite Gains Trump is Still Losing Against Both "D" Identified Candidates.
This is the Huffington Post tracking poll
Trump vs. Clinton
Trump v. Sanders
Market Spiral Pricing of Cancer Drugs
http://www.pharmamyths.net/_market_spiral_pricing_of_cancer_drugs__120860.htmWhat would Politics Without Politicians Look Like?
If you could create a system that was totally based on democratic government without politicians what would it look like?
lets assume that people - everybody- has a lot more time than today, because society basically is automated. We have the Internet and virtual reality so people can "be" anywhere at any time, so we could create a system of direct democracy.
How would that work?
Would it work?
Suppose some people want one system and some people want another?
Direct democracy could shift the balance of power away from corporations and give people some power again, give people standing, when now we increasingly have none..
It could in theory eliminate the principal agent problem posed by politicians and corruption and regulatory and state capture..
What is Clinton's Position n the Trade In Services Agreement (TiSA) pending in Geneva- and Education
Education should not be a commodity that is treated like a product- it is a public god which all society should support-
However, formally continuing and endorsing the disturbing trend of privatization promoted by the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services - the new plurilateral Trade in Services Agreement pits corporatized education against public education and attempts to covert the latter into the former by a incrementally tightening "ratchet" .
To do so it buys into a ideology that says that the government, state, local or federal should never compete with business in any area where some business services are sold, and so it basically attempts to - as its says "capture" each and every law or policy that can be said to change towards deregulation the "autonomous level of liberalisation" mandates that the direction always be towards privatization, and never back towards the public services which it frames as a theft from corporations.
Instead it mandates that governments - especially governments in developed countries which are deemed beyond the need for public services, (and beyond laws regulating business relations of any kind, instead relying on the free market) privatize those areas, things like health care, education, water, etc, that may be partly private and partly public now, it mandates a set of incremental changes to make them fully private. This push is incredibly controversial and millions of peope worldwide have spoken out against these "US style" trade agreements modeled on GATS and NAFTA.
See http://www.eua.be/activities-services/news/newsitem/15-02-05/EUA_Council_statement_on_TTIP_and_TISA.aspx for a statement on such deals in the context of education. and http://www.world-psi.org/sites/default/files/eng_the_really_good_friends_report_tisa.pdf for more on the deal generally. It is expected to cause a boom in international temping as businesses rush to take advantage of the larger wage gradient (key phrase "maximize the value in the supply chains"
(This also applies to other services, and effectuates the changes by putting the work up for public bidding internationally, so the winning low bids may be from foreign firms, in the case of the US, bidding for school contracts would likely be done by US, UK and Australian firms as well as other member countries with a high number of English speakers.)
Health care in the US, for example, might be shifted to use far more foreign services and service workers. patients could be sent overseas for care even thouse who had the lower tiers of insurance - another alternative is care delivered over the Internet using remote technology.
Same thing for businesses, many businesses are expected to source some or all of their office services across borders, giving the term "back office" a whole new meaning. this will allow US businesses to concentrate on high value products like smart bombs, and shift low value services to globalized firms to maintain and enhance profitability.
The talks in Geneva started in 2006 and are almost completed. they represent an extension of the 1995 GATS agreement on services, but are "plurilateral" which means they include just a subset of WTO members, approximately 50 nations led by the US which is the strongest and most aggressive advocate for globalization and privatization of services.
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