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Subject: [India Thinkers Net]Sept 3rd posts - September03, 2005



[1]


From: viji <viji123@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Sep 2, 2005
Subject: Dumping of US dollar could trigger 'economic September 11'  

Dumping of US dollar could trigger 'economic September 11'
The Australian
URL Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.a ... 744,16416680%255E28737,00.html
Aug 28, 2005, Clyde Prestowitz


There is a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of the global economy: the strong possibility of financial meltdown following a collapse of confidence in the greenback

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[2]

From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com
 Date: Fri Sep 2, 2005
 Subject: Joseph Rotblat Passes Away: Anti-Nuke Movement Deeply Mourns the Loss!

From: John Hallam

Rotblat was one of many distinguished signatories on our operating status appeal.

It is a sad loss.

***********************************

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rotblat Dies
- By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer Thursday, September 1, 2005

(09-01) 07:53 PDT LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project and who later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to rid the world of atomic weapons, has died at the age of 96, his spokesman said Thursday.

Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the group he founded to promote nuclear disarmament, received the prestigious prize in
1995.

Rotblat, who was born in Warsaw, died peacefully in his sleep in London on Wednesday night, the group said.

-------------------------

[3]

From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Sep 2, 2005
Subject: Bush Is The Real Threat (and Tony Blair Is His Toady)  


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1559492,00.html

Comment

Bush is the real threat

Tony Benn
Wednesday August 31, 2005
The Guardian

Now that the US president has announced that he has
not ruled out an attack on Iran, if it does not
abandon its nuclear programme, the Middle East faces a
crisis that could dwarf even the dangers arising from
the war in Iraq.

Even a conventional weapon fired at a nuclear research
centre - whether or not a bomb was being made there -
would almost certainly release radioactivity into the
atmosphere, with consequences seen worldwide as a
mini-Hiroshima.

-----------------------------

[4]

From: kalyan panda <kalyan_panda@yahoo.co.in
Date: Fri Sep 2, 2005
Subject: Mangal Pandey

I did not understand some of the points. Hindu means upper caste?. Bengal UP Bihar etc was having upper cast dominated sipoys meaning from poor class?. Cow n Pig could have destroyed the religion(dharma) at that time and not the caste only. Were Hindu and Muslim sipoys were staying seperate?. Was kitchen seperate for different castes. What are the authentic sources for knowing these?. Otherwise we would fall prey to wishful thinking and taking inputs of 'masala khichdi' and thereby bring another form of intolerance and hatred. Let us forget the past atrocities and be wise from the applied history and be concerned for the current flaws. Hindus are now atleast able to or trying to come out of these menace. But see how Islamic conflict is creating havoc amongst Shia, Sunni and Kurds in Iraq. Muslims have also many Islamic castes with different form of untouchability. Instead of fighting on this count we must resolve amity by discarding animocity. Muslim countries are facing distrust from the entire world due to some handful of Islamists. They are also strengthening the radical hindutwa force. Like sometime I think that why the muslims in J&K are kept different from the 15-20 crores brethren in India. Art. 370 was a temporary measure. Or this is a secret/suppressed desire of the Islamists(I do not mean muslims). Muslims should also speak on these issue to express solidarity. Or make make the country a FEDERAL one. If I write these I may invariably be termed as a RSS/BJP man coloring saffron. We have degraded the color also which is the symbol of sacrifice and sannyas. regards panda

KALYAN PANDA MUMBAI INDIA 91 9323782617

----------------------------

[5]


From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Sep 2, 2005
Subject: A Declaration Of (World) War  

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050831/a_declaration_of_war.php

A Declaration Of War
Phyllis Bennis
August 31, 2005



Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy
Studies , is the author of the forthcoming Challenging
Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy
U.S. Power (Interlink Publishing, Northampton MA,
October 2005

The Bush administration has declared war on the world.

The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the
action agenda that will culminate at the September
2005 United Nations summit don??™t represent U.N.
reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move
that could strengthen the United Nations or
international law.

The upcoming summit was supposed to focus on
strengthening and reforming the U.N. and address
issues of aid and development, with a particular
emphasis on implementing the U.N.'s five-year-old
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Most assumed this
would be a forum for dialogue and debate, involving
civil society activists from around the world
challenging governments from the impoverished South
and the wealthy North and the United Nations to create
a viable global campaign against poverty and for
internationalism.

But now, there??™s a different and even greater
challenge. This is a declaration of U.S.
unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The
United States has issued an open threat to the 190
other U.N. member states, the social movements and
peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations
itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially
collaborative effort between all three of those
elements to challenge the Bush administration
juggernaut.

The General Assembly's package of proposed reforms,
emerging after nine months of negotiations ahead of
the summit, begins with new commitments to implement
the Millennium Development Goals??”established in 2000
as a set of international commitments aimed at
reducing poverty by 2015. They were always
insufficient, yet as weak as they are, they have yet
to be implemented. The 2005 Millennium Plus Five
summit intended to shore up the unmet commitments to
those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005,
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on
governments north and south to see the implementation
of the MDGs as a minimum requirement. Without at least
that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said,
conflicts within and between states could spiral so
far out of control that even a strengthened and
reformed United Nations of the future would not be
able to control the threats to international peace and
security.

When John Bolton, Bush's hotly contested but newly
appointed ambassador to the United Nations announced
the U.S. proposed response, it was easy to assume this
was just John Bolton running amok. After all, Bolton,
a longtime U.N.-basher, has said: "There is no United
Nations." He has written in The Wall Street Journal
that the United States has no legal obligation to
abide by international treaties, even when they are
signed and ratified. So it was no surprise when Bolton
showed up three weeks before the summit, demanding a
package of 450 changes in the document that had been
painstakingly negotiated for almost a year.

But, in fact, this isn't about Bolton. This Bush
administration??™s position was vetted and approved in
what the U.S. Mission to the U.N. bragged was a
"thorough interagency process"??”meaning the White
House, the State Department, the Pentagon and many
more agencies all signed off. This is a clear
statement of official U.S. policy??”not the wish- ist of
some marginalized extremist faction of neocon
ideologues who will soon be reined in by the realists
in charge. This time the extremist faction is in
charge.

The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the
world to accept as its own the U.S. strategy of
abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, rejecting
international law, privileging ruthless market forces
over any attempted regulation, sidelining the role of
international institutions except for the IMF, the
World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps
fatally, the United Nations itself.

It begins by systematically deleting every one of the
35 specific references to the Millennium Development
Goals. Every reference to concrete obligations for
implementation of commitments is deleted. Setting a
target figure of just 0.7 percent of GNP for wealthy
countries to spend on aid? Deleted. Increasing aid for
agriculture and trade opportunities in poor countries?
Deleted. Helping the poorest countries, especially
those in Africa, to deal with the impact of climate
change? Deleted.

The proposal puts at great risk treaties to which the
United States is already a party, including the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.N. Summit
draft referred to the NPT's "three pillars:
disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of
nuclear energy." That means that states without nukes
would agree never to build or obtain them, but in
return they would be guaranteed the right to produce
nuclear energy for peaceful use. In return recognized
nuclear weapons states??”the United States, Britain,
France, China and Russia??”would commit, in Article VI
of the NPT, to move toward "nuclear disarmament with
the objective of eliminating all such weapons." The
proposed U.S. changes deleted all references to the
three pillars and to Article VI.

The U.S. deleted the statement that: "The use of force
should be considered as an instrument of last resort."
That??™s also not surprising given the Bush
administration's ???invade first, choose your
justifications later??? mode of crisis resolution.

Throughout the document, the United States demands
changes that redefine and narrow what should be
universal and binding rights and obligations. In the
clearest reference to Iraq and Palestine, Washington
narrowed the definition of the "right of
self-determination of peoples" to eliminate those who
"remain under colonial domination and foreign
occupation."

Much of the U.S. effort aims to undermine the power of
the U.N. in favor of absolute national sovereignty. On
migration, for instance, the original language focused
on enhancing international cooperation, linking
migrant worker issues and development, and the human
rights of migrants. The U.S. wants to scrap it all,
replacing it with "the sovereign right of states to
formulate and enforce national migration policies,"
with international cooperation only to facilitate
national laws. Human rights were deleted altogether.

In the document's section on strengthening the United
Nations, the U.S. deleted all mention of enhancing the
U.N.'s authority, focusing instead only on U.N.
efficiency. Regarding the General Assembly the most
democratic organ of the U.N. system??”the United States
deleted references to the Assembly's centrality, its
role in codifying international law, and, ultimately
its authority, relegating it to a toothless talking
shop. It even deleted reference to the Assembly's role
in Washington's own pet project??”management oversight
of the U.N. secretariat??”leaving the U.S.-dominated and
undemocratic Security Council, along with the U.S.
itself (in the person of a State Department official
recently appointed head of management in Kofi Annan's
office) to play watchdog.

The Bush administration has given the United Nations
what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the U.S.
changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of
Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes
and be consigned to insignificance.

But the United Nations could choose a third option. It
should not be forgotten that the U.N. itself has some
practice in dealing with U.S. threats. President
George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices
once before??”in September 2002, when he threatened the
global body with "irrelevance" if the U.N. did not
embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion,
the United Nations made the third choice??”the choice to
grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join
with people and governments around the world who were
mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of
eight months of triumph, in which governments and
peoples and the U.N. stood together to defy the U.S.
drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created
what The New York Times called "the second
super-power."

This time, as before, the United States has threatened
and declared war on the United Nations and the world.
As before, it's time for that three-part superpower to
rise again, to defend the U.N., and to say no to
empire.

-----------------------

 



 








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