Dissent Mag

Crossfire War - US General Petraeus-Amb Crocker to Justify Attack on Iran

By Willard Payne

Night Watch: PERSIAN GULF - Events could come to quite a head this week as the U. S. commanding general in Iraq General David Petreaus and Washington’s Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker present their report to Congress Tuesday in which I assume they will openly accuse Tehran of waging war on the U. S. in Iraq. General Petreaus is already on record as stating Iran has been directly supporting not only the mortar - rocket fire on Baghdad’s International Green Zone, where the U. S. Embassy is located, but also directly supporting the Shia militia groups that attacked Iraq’s army in Sadr City, Basra and several other cities across Iraq’s east and south.

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by Paul Craig Roberts

(Lew Rockwell)

If Americans have any honor, how can they betray their Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty, by tolerating a government that claims immunity to law and the Constitution and is erecting a police state in their midst?

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by David Walsh

Global Research, April 6, 2008
wsws.org

Friday’s Labor Department report, revealing that US payrolls were cut by 80,000 jobs in March and that 232,000 jobs have been lost in the past three months, can only mean new levels of social misery and raises the specter of a severe economic slump, perhaps the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The March decline in jobs is the largest in five years. The number of private sector jobs has dropped by 300,000 since November 2007.

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By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted April 5, 2008.

The author explains, “Iranians are among the most gracious and hospitable people I’ve ever met.”

I’m in Shiraz, on the way to Esfahan.

It’s good to get out of gray, smoggy Tehran, one of the least photogenic cities in the world, where black is the new black, from the hejabs on down.

One of the attractions of Shiraz is the tomb of Hafez, a Persian poet from the 14th century. It’s thronged at night. Iranians bring flowers, then stand or kneel beside the sarcophagus and recite his poems. My personal reaction is, this is how writers should always be treated.

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By Steve McGiffen

04 April, 2008
Morning Star

The Morning Star recently reported the outrage caused in Britain by the official regulator Ofwat’s approval of increased sewage and water bills. Averaging 5.8%, or over £300, they will hit pensioners and others on low incomes hard. Some areas, including North Wales - a region hardly famed for its arid climate - will see bills rise even more.

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April 5, 2008

by Alan Bock

As if we didn’t already know, we have yet another piece of evidence that one of the major “accomplishments” of the Bush administration (and you didn’t think there were any) has been a relentless push for more executive power.

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U.S.-China and a New Cold War
by Maryann Keady
www.zmag.org, January 14, 2007

If there was any doubt about the idea that the world has clearly moved into a Cold War paradigm, the new national space policy of the United States dispelled that notion once and for all. It is worth reprinting some crucial excerpts for those that have not had the chance to look at the fine print. The report states:

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Review: Challenging Authority
by Frances Fox Piven, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, 220 pp.

April, 02 2008

By Edgey Wildchild

Frances Fox Piven’s book Challenging Authority is about how social movements are the pivotal force of social, economic, and political change in the U.S. By rising up in defiance of mundane rules that govern their social behavior and disrupting important institutions, Piven argues, ordinary people are able to wield extraordinary political power. Often through a combination of strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and riots, the oppressed force government officials to alleviate their grievances as a way to restore a sense of normalcy.

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