Austerity hits troops as rations are cut

The organizers of this blog have explained that US capitalism cannot afford to keep its massive military machine working at its present level without driving its working class at home into poverty. This latter is happening all around us as we see wages and benefits being slashed and services in city after city being reduced or removed altogether. Now we see the reduction of the living standards of the military in the field.  Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan are now about to lose a daily meal, causing some to fore go a hot breakfast and others to work without cooked food for six plus hours.

The midnight ration service — known there as “midrats" — supplies breakfast to Marines on midnight-to-noon shifts and dinner to Marines who are ending noon-to-midnight work periods. It's described as one of the few times the Marines at Leatherneck can be together in one place.
The base, which is located in Afghanistan’s southwestern Helmand Province, flanked by Iran and Pakistan, also will remove its 24-hour sandwich bar. While no Marine at Camp Leatherneck agreed to speak on the record, many are privately angry about the hit on base morale.

"This boils my skin. One of my entire shifts will go 6.5 hours without a meal. If we need to cut back on money I could come up with 100 other places,” one Leatherneck-based Marine wrote in an email this week to his wife and shared with NBC News. (The Marine declined to speak on the record.) “Instead, we will target the biggest contributor to morale. I must be losing my mind. What is our senior leadership thinking? I just got back from flying my ass off and in a few days, I will not have a meal to replenish me after being away for over 9 hours.”

“The fact is our force in Afghanistan is shrinking fast and all the creature comforts and services deployed military-members have grown accustomed to over the past decade are going to be reduced," A leading officer Gilmore wrote in an email to NBC News.

Back home, spouses and friends of the troops in Afghanistan are criticizing the loss of hot meals as a poor logistical choice that will impact the service members' overall nutrition, energy and spirits.

This same officer Officer Gilmore described cooked-meal reduction as part of a larger effort to “become increasingly austere” as the force shrinks, but he said the base members will not face an unhealthy calorie shortage. “The Marines here at Leatherneck may have to endure the monotony of a limited menu but they will not suffer from malnutrition unless they choose not to eat,” Gilmore callously said. At home, some military family members nonetheless called the change a mistake. The squeeze is tightening on US imperialism. This cutting of hot meals for its military who are fighting abroad for the US corporations is bringing closer the day when the US working class and the ranks of the US military will step up and fight for their own independent interests not the interests of the these profit addicted corporations.

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US war crimes in Afghanistan: The Convoy of Death

Take the time to watch this film. Think of the courage the Afghani journalist had to have to bring this to light. The Taliban remember were staunch allies of the US. The Northern Alliance, a murderous bunch, were the stooges of the US. They picked up anyone they wanted out of the way in order to satisfy their American masters. See also, The Road to Guantanamo. To think that Bradley Manning is facing life imprisonment and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush, Wolfowitz, Cheney and now Obama  and many other war criminals are all free men. 

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Syria: More disaster awaits with US foreign policy

Rumsfeld and Saddam. One criminal dead, the other a rich, free man

by Richard Mellor

I have to admit that it's a little difficult trying to figure out the Syrian situation.  When we don't have people on the ground we have to rely on the mass media which means we only get information via the Pentagon and the global media giants that represent the views of global capitalism, particularly the western imperialist kind.

The Internet has opened up a new world for us and while it may be filled with all sorts of junk, porn sites, right wing Nazis and the like, it also offers us an incredible window to the world.  Here in the US, part of the problem is that the media is so controlled and outright censored. In fact, it is the most censored media of all the advanced capitalist economies.

Most Americans would have not a clue that the US overthrew the democratic governments of Iran and Guatemala, was complicit in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Omar Torrijos and possibly JFK and MLK. They know next to nothing about the US involvement in the murder of Salvador Allende and the Chilean constitutionalist general Rene Schneider, a murder that Henry Kissinger still has to answer for.

In Syria, the CIA/Pentagon Washington crowd  is supporting Moaz al_Khatib.  And who the hell is he?  Well, is an engineer and was a manager for several large oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell's Syrian division.  So he is an oil company executive. His father was an Islamic scholar and he taught Sharia law at the at the "Dutch Institute Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Husni in Damascus, and Daawa (Call to Islam) studies at the Tahzib Institute for Sharia Sciences." according to Wikipedia.

I am not singling out Islam here (see my pieces on the Catholic Church for example) but how "Sharia and "Science" can be used in this way is certainly a contradiction in terms.  One is a rational study of the material world based on reason and the other is faith and mythology.

But no matter.  The Royal Dutch Shell group and the folks at the Pentagon have no problem with Sharia law or the ex Nazi at the Vatican and when it suits them.  The US taxpayer funded Islamic fundamentalism in Wall Street's struggle to oust the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan.  The US taxpayer, in league (unknowingly for the most part) funneled more than $3 billion to the Islamic fundamentalists that we are calling terrorists today.  The oil companies were concerned that the Russians would get a pathway to the Indian Ocean and even the Persian Gulf if a government favorable to Moscow.

The fact is that the government of Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai, which was overthrown by the Taliban and unable to get assistance after the fall of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was a government that workers and our organizations in the west should have  supported although not without criticism.  Ahmadzai was attempting to balance between the backward Islamic feudal warlords and his efforts to introduce a secular, industrial sopciety to Afghanistan.  The story is that he was dragged through the streets of Kabul by a Taliban truck, castrated and hung from a lampost.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the hated Madrases was made possible through US and Saudi money.

Nothing Changes

The imperialist nations do not intervene ion their former colonial possessions with good intentions.  The US called for the  murder of Moamar Gaddafi but British taxpayers and the British secret service trained his ruthless police forces.  All of these ruthless regimes were funded and kept in power by the good grace of their friends in Washington and London. A book worth reading on the subject of US and corporate intervention in Central Asia is Michel Chussodovsky's War and Glabalization.

But as we can see, the US is taxpayer is yet again funding an opposition in Syria that they hope will, advance the interests of Wall Street.  Being a religious zealot, no matter of what faith, doesn't conflict with one's faith in the market and capitalism and that is why the US supported Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and a Shariah law advocate in Syria. "Politics makes for strange bedfellows" the saying goes, but no so strange when you look more closely at the ties that bind.

There is an alternative for workers. There was in Libya, there is in Syria.  And there is in the entire Middle East and throughout the world. The workers of Bangladesh for example have in India and Pakistan millions of allies in the same situation.  As do the workers of Europe and Latin America and the US. We have to reject supporting the lesser of two evils, a dictator, despot, or the imperialist bourgeois democratic regimes.  We must always appeal to the independent, united movement of workers across racial, nationalist and religious lines.  The folks in Washington and London, Berlin and Beijing, have shown that that their allegiance is to their class allies first of all. They join with the most ruthless individuals and regimes, anything but appeal to the working class.  They know that this can lead to their demise, end it all.

They are forced in times of intense competition to draw us in to the struggle against their rivals which pits worker against worker.  But we must refuse this bond with the devil.

Have I heard this somewhere before or did I just come up with it?  Workers of the world unite.

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Oops!. Ten kids killed in Afghanistan. Thank you Bradley Manning.

Oh, well, looky here. I read tonight that a land mine in Afghanistan killed ten young girls.  Two others were killed in a land mine explosion. These silly girls were collecting firewood and one of them, perhaps the most "silly" hit the land mine with an axe.

The media says that most of those killed were between nine and eleven.  These unexploded devices are  a major problem in Afghanistan.  Most of these weapons were manufactured in the US.  We can be proud that we, the US, is the largest arms manufacturer in the world producing more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of thew world combined.

As a matter of fact, we feel compelled here to remind our readers of Bradley Manning, imprisoned, tortured and even faced with the death penalty.  He decided, as a matter of conscience, to releease, to share with the world and millions of us as Americans, a rather disturbing video of what our tax money and our troops were doing in Iraq.  This young man, a hero when you think about it, was doing us all a favor when he released this video. After all, we are supposed to live in a democracy and all Americans should be apprised of what out government is doing. This is what he released to the world.

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