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Lebanon

- - | 05.03.2005 21:25

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria today announced that Syrian troops would start a phased withdrawl from Lebanon. Syria has occupied the country since 1989 when it interceded in the civil war and imposed a ceasefire.

Assad said the withdrawl would happen in stages with occupation forces moving first to the eastern Bekaa Valley and then to the Syrian border. Syria was not against a full withdrawal, he said, stating that "The natural place for Syrian forces is Syrian land."

The United States State Department has said a gradual withdraw is not enough and that "The international community has made clear that Syria must withdraw completely and immediately all its military forces and intelligence services from Lebanon in accordance with UNSCR 1559."

As photos of celebrating Lebanese protesters are circulated around the world, it is worth remembering that Lebanon will now face the other task of resisting occupation by corporate ownership, a project which the United States has engineered throughout the old Soviet Union and elsewhere. Americanism is not freedom.

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Comments

Hide the following 10 comments

Yes but

05.03.2005 21:47

"Americanism is not freedom" - funny how so many people want it though isn't it ?

Democrat


A ruse

05.03.2005 22:58

Syria is coming under presssure from the America because they want the Jews to control the Arab world. We must fight this.

Long Live Arab Nationalism

Long Live Palestine

Resist this


yeah right on!

05.03.2005 23:59

let's all resist the attempts of the Lebanese to throw out the Syrians. They're much better off under occupation - aren't they?

..


it

06.03.2005 14:13

>>"Americanism is not freedom" - funny how so many people want it though isn't it ?

no, not surprising. people are lied to about what americanism / corporate control actually means and create fantasises about how they too can prosper in the free market if only they work hard enough and get a lucky break. this is nowhere more true than in the US itself, an utterly degraded national venue which exports misery to every corner of the globe. it makes some americans wealthy, a few very wealthy, many more poor and has the world's biggest prison population banged up in a gulag run by profit making corporations. the US national philosophy is gangsterism by another name. did the states ever get past the 20s and 30s? people think they can survive and do well in this system because thety arte happy to go along with the idea that others (iraqis, sweatshop workers, third world farmers and the like) will carry most of the cost of what they do. just because it's popular don't mean it's any good.

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right on

06.03.2005 18:02

Of course - because of America's degraded capitalist corporate society, the world is becoming poorer ... ever looked at any GDP per capita figures? And worked out in which countries people are becoming richer? And in which people poorer? Ever seen the film, 'Goodbye Lenin'? When the Berlin Wall fell, did all those poor oppressed corporate victims flee to the East? Or was it, perhaps, the other way round?

sceptic


what do you mean by richer sceptic?

06.03.2005 23:44

Where does all of this so called wealth end up?
The U.S.,the "richest" country in the world has 40 million citizens without health insurance.
Third world Cuba has higher litteracy rates and provides more for its citizens than the so called richest country in the world.

So who is richer ?
People in third world Cuba or people in the third world regions of the U.S.

gullible


literacy rates

07.03.2005 00:45

get your facts right:

 http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/indicator/indic_2_1_1.html

USA - number 7

Cuba - number 52

sceptic


facts

07.03.2005 10:20

US literacy rates and how to finance them:

"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum

"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them."

Harold Pinter


Pinter's last comment would have been correct some time back. not any more. everybody's talking about them.

 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Why_They_Hate_Us/Why_They_Hate_Us.html

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literacy

07.03.2005 17:56

From the CIA WorldFact Book:

USA Literacy:
Total 97%
male: 97%
female: 97% (1999 est.)
 http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html#People

Cuba Literacy:
Total: 97%
male: 97.2%
female: 96.9% (2003 est.)
 http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cu.html#People

hmmm


Per capita GDP

08.03.2005 17:00

Those stats about globalism making the world richer sound convincing enough. But looking at national wealth per person (per capita GDP) doesn't tell the whole story. When you have a thin layer in a country that controls most of the wealth, then simply dividing the growth in wealth by the number of people in the country gives you a misleading statistic.

Put another way, if you have 10 people in a country, and one of them earns 1000 quid a day, and the other 9 earn 1 quid a day, then their per capita wealth is 1009 divided by 10, or 100.9 quid per person, theoretically. But you can't eat a statistical average, and learning that some people in your country are getting richer year on year is no comfort when your kids are dying of preventable diseases.

The reported increases also sound really good: "average wages going up by 10 percent", and so on. But going up from a quid to 1.10 isn't much to cheer about, and again that's assuming that everybody is going up by 10 percent, not just a tiny minority who control the means of production. You need to look at income distribution, as well as looking at per capita.

The book "Globalization and its Discontents" by Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, goes into some details about this. Stiglitz agrees with anti-capitalists that globalization hasn't worked the way its main cheerleaders claim it has. Unlike anti-capitalists, he winds up by concluding that capitalism can somehow be legislated into niceness. I don't agree with that conclusion, but the book is still useful, wherever you stand politically.
 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15630

John