Two sides of Global AIDS crisis

With "World AIDS Day" marked on Monday, some experts are growing more outspoken in complaining that AIDS is eating up funding at the expense of more pressing health needs.

"AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it's just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies," said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.

Paul de Lay, a director at UNAIDS, disagrees. "We have an epidemic that has caused between 55 million and 60 million infections," de Lay said. "To suddenly pull the rug out from underneath that would be disastrous."

Others argue that closing UNAIDS would free up its $200 million annual budget for other health problems such as pneumonia, which kills more children every year than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

By 2006, AIDS funding accounted for 80 percent of all American aid for health and population issues, according to the Global Health Council. (In a 2006 report, Rwandan officials noted a "gross misallocation of resources" in health: $47 million went to HIV, $18 million went to malaria, the country's biggest killer, and $1 million went to childhood illnesses.)

"Diarrhea kills five times as many kids as AIDS," said John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes clean water and sanitation. "Everybody talks about AIDS at cocktail parties," Oldfield said. "But nobody wants to hear about diarrhea," he said.

These competing claims on public money are likely to grow louder as the world financial meltdown threatens to deplete health dollars.

[AP]

Math 101 on the Escalating Interest on U.S. National Debt

The U.S. government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which approaches a mind-numbing $11 trillion. And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.

How did we get in this fix? Suppose this month you want to spend more money than your income allows, so you borrow. The amount you borrowed (and now owe) is called your “debt”, which you need to pay interest on. If next month you don't have enough money to cover your spending, you must borrow some more, and in government terms this is another “deficit”. (BTW, some estimate that the federal deficit will exceed $1 trillion this fiscal year!). And of course you need to pay interest on these loans. If you have a deficit every month, you keep borrowing and your debt grows.

Eventually the interest payment on your loan could become bigger than any other item in your budget. So at some point, all you can do is pay the interest payment, and you don't have any money left over for anything else.

Well, each year since 1969, Congress has spent more money than its income! The total borrowed, or National Debt, is NOW nearing $11,000,000,000,000 and growing. We pay interest on that huge debt.

And this National Debt continues to increase at roughly 4 billion dollars a day. Basically, it takes ALL the taxes paid by ALL the individual taxpayers west of the Mississippi river just to pay the INTEREST on the National Debt each year.

P.S. - And in case you think this money stays in the USA and helps our economy in some way, since more than a third of the debt is owed to foreign countries, more and more of this interest, aka as your tax dollars, is going to foreigners every year.

Big Oil is a Big Cheapskate to Charity

At the same time ExxonMobil's (XOM) record-breaking profits are making news, the company is running ads touting its philanthropic support for health and education programs in the U.S. and abroad. ExxonMobil's commercials were especially evident during the 2008 Summer Olympics, when 30- to 60-second spots costing hundreds of thousands of dollars attempted to convince viewers that the company's philanthropy is as deep and rich as its oil wells.

Unfortunately, such is not the case.

Annual donations by the Big Three oil companies as measured by a percent of pretax net income (the standard yardstick for gauging corporate philanthropy) are consistently below half the national average for businesses that make tax-deductible charitable contributions.

In 2007, these three oil giants donated a combined $348 million, far short of the $1 billion the companies would have contributed if they had simply given at a level equal to Corporate America's philanthropic midpoint, which is 8/10ths of 1%.

And that $348 million is a small fraction of the $27.9 billion in net income that the three companies earned just this last quarter!

[Excerpt of an article by Curt Weeden, BusinessWeek]

Foundations pinched by markets expect to give less

Nationwide, charitable foundations, which are heavily invested in the stock market, are wringing their hands over the economic downturn that has seen the market plunge more than 40 percent since last October.

As the assets go, so does giving.

The severity of the economic turmoil has foundation leaders uneasy about their ability to give, since they rely on healthy assets to hand out greater amounts of money.

"We've never seen this in our lifetime," said Monica Wroblewski, spokeswoman with the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit association in Arlington, Va. "Who knows what ramifications this will have?"


[Akron Beacon Journal]

U.S. Security Pact passes Iraq's parliament

After months of difficult talks between U.S. and Iraqi negotiators, Iraq's parliament on Thursday approved a security pact with the United States. 149 lawmakers of Iraq's 275 seat parliament passed the deal.

This means that troops will remain in Iraq until 2012.The agreement also sets June 30, 2009, as the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from all Iraqi cities and towns. These dates are "set and fixed" and are "not subject to the circumstances on the ground," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

The pact curbs U.S. powers to arrest Iraqi citizens and conduct military operations, and is seen by the Iraqis as a way to safeguard Iraqi sovereignty. It gives Iraq authority over about 150,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Some Iraqis fear this could be the first step towards a permanent occupation. Right before the contentious parliamentary vote, the Iraqi parliament's biggest Sunni bloc said it wanted guarantees of a public referendum on a U.S. security pack.

Sunnis are also concerned their influence may wane once the Americans leave. Majority Shi'ite Iraq has a Shi'ite leadership and has good ties with neighboring Iran, a Shi'ite country.

Afghanistan demands timeline for end of military intervention

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan demanded at a meeting with a UN Security Council team that the international community set a "timeline" for ending military intervention in Afghanistan, his office said.

"If we don't have a clear idea of how long it will be, the Afghan government has no choice but to seek political solutions," Karzai's chief spokesman Homayun Hamidzada told AFP. seek a political solution to a Taliban-led insurgency.

Afghanistan: Have we learned nothing?

The United States of America is settling George Bush's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Hamid Karzai's corrupt government. 29 years ago, the Soviet Union was settling Leonid Brezhnev's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Barbrak Karmal's corrupt government.

Fast forward to 2001 – just seven years ago – and an American general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, the all but conquered Taliban. The American general was pontificating at the big US airbase at Bagram. A Russian was likewise pontificating at the big Soviet airbase at Bagram [in the previous war with Afghanistan].

This is not déjà-vu. This is déjà double-vu. And it gets worse.

Stephen Tanner’s book Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander The Great To The Fall Of The Taliban quotes General Roberts of Kandahar telling the British in 1880 that "the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself... I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us".

Memo to the Americans, the Brits, the Canadians and the rest of Humpty Dumpty's men. Read history.

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Fisk, The Independent]

America's Hidden War in Somalia

To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in a remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse, "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there — or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth—is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas. It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and — according to Isse and civil rights activists — secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

[Excerpt of an article by Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune]

The fate of the nation's Big Three automakers and their employees

We await the fate of the nation's Big Three automakers and their employees.

"One out of 10 jobs in this country are auto-related. Twenty percent of retail sales are auto-related or automobiles, so this is a national problem," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, told NBC's "Meet the Press”.

The Center for Automotive Research, a think tank in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is pushing for a bailout, estimates about 2.5 million job cuts if just half of the Big Three's manufacturing capacity shuts down.

About 240,000 of those job losses would be at the automakers; 800,000 would be at various suppliers and dealerships; and another 1.4 million job losses would come from businesses that rely on automaker spending, the think tank estimates.

CNN

Anyone remember New York governor Elliot Spitzer?

According to a February 2008 Washington Post article by New York governor Elliot Spitzer, state attorneys-general who wanted to investigate allegations of mortgage fraud were blocked from doing so by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency within the U.S. Treasury Department.

Next the issue of a selected coterie of banks receiving one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds.

One single, lonely politician stood in the way: New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer not only took on mega-mortgage company Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank that made mortgage usury their major profit centers.

The very same day the bail-out was decided, the man called ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

No federal agency was charged with regulating mortgage fraud to take up the slack. The rest is history.

[Listen to radio report]

Global Aid focus on two Clintons

President-elect Obama could put philanthropy at the heart of his foreign policy, and former President Clinton could help him do it.

If President-elect Barack Obama selects Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, she will oversee many of the U.S. government's foreign aid programs, potentially turning her and her husband into an overwhelming force in global aid.

The William J. Clinton Foundation has ballooned into a global nongovernmental organization with a staff of more than 800, addressing chronic problems such as climate change, hunger, AIDS and malaria.

If Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, she and her husband could be positioned to lead a public-private partnership on the global stage unlike any before it, one that experts say would bring with it a host of potential benefits and pitfalls for the new president.

The problem for the president-elect, it seems, is that, there would be a danger of the impression that a donation to one of Bill Clinton’s undertakings would buy some sort of quid pro quo from his wife when it came to sensitive negotiations.

[The Washington Post] [The San Francisco Chronicle]

Israel 'using food and medicines as weapons'

Israel is collectively punishing innocent civilians by withholding and controlling food and medicine to Gaza, says Christian Aid.

Despite repeated calls from the international community, Gaza remains closed to food and medicine. For almost one and a half years, 1.5 million Palestinians have endured collective punishment as a result of Israel’s tight closure of Gaza.

In recent weeks the situation has once again deteriorated further with a resurgence of violence. Last week, UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for assisting Palestinian refugees, announced that it had run out of food to distribute. With 80 per cent of the population dependent upon food aid, the situation is critical but the crossings into Gaza – the only points of entry for people and goods - remain tightly closed.

Says Costa Dabbagh, from Near East Council of Churches, a Christian Aid partner, "It is not acceptable for us to be waiting for food to come. We want to live freely with Israel and other countries in peace, we are not against any individual or government, but we are against imprisonment."

Despite an agreement on cessation of violence since June 2008, Gazans remain isolated from the world and continue to live in abject poverty. Although getting food supplies into Gaza is a vital first step, Christian Aid believes steps must be taken to resolve the political crisis before people will see a real change in their lives.

[Ekklesia]

All that money you've lost — did it even exist?

Trillions in stock market value — gone. Trillions in retirement savings — gone. ---It was never really money in the first place.

Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, puts it bluntly: The notion that you lose a pile of money whenever the stock market tanks is a "fallacy." He says the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money — it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth.

"It's in people's minds," Shiller explains. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today — who are very, very few people — are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth."
Shiller uses the example of an appraiser who values a house at $350,000, a week after saying it was worth $400,000. "In a sense, $50,000 just disappeared when he said that," he said. "But it's all in the mind."

Though something, of course, is disappearing as markets and real estate values tumble. Even if a share of stock you own isn't a wad of bills in your wallet, even if the value of your home isn't something you can redeem at will, surely you can lose potential money — that is, the money that would be yours to spend if you sold your house or emptied out your mutual funds right now.

And if you're a few months away from retirement, or hoping to sell your house and buy a smaller one to help pay for your kid's college tuition, this "potential money" is something you're counting on to get by. For people who need cash and need it now, this is as real as money gets, whether or not it meets the technical definition of the word.

Still, you run into trouble when you think of that potential money as being the same thing as the cash in your purse or your checking account. There's a key distinction here: While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can.

[Excerpt of an AP article by Eric Carvin]

Bush on the Economy: "This sucker could go down"

At the G-20 Economic Summit in Washington, President Bush, in a rare, unscripted moment, acknowledged that the extreme steps taken by the Fed and US Treasury--since Bear Stearns defaulted 17 months ago--were intended to avoid what he called "a depression greater than the Great Depression."

That's quite an admission for Bush, as well as a vindication of those who have been making the same prediction for more than 2 years.

And although Bush rejected any personal responsibility for the policies which led to the crisis, it's clear that he has some rudimentary grasp of its gravity. That's a start. As he opined to the press, "This sucker could go down".

[Mike Whitney, Internet commentator]

Consolidation Agenda by the Banking Giants

In his latest article "The Great Depression of the 21st Century: Collapse of the Real Economy" author and economist Michel Chossudovsky sheds some light on the agenda of the banking giants led by their standard-bearer at Treasury, Henry Paulson:

"Once they have consolidated their position in the banking industry, the financial giants including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, et al will use their windfall money gains and bailout money provided under TARP, to further extend their control over the real economy. The target of these acquisitions are the numerous highly productive industrial and services sector companies, which are on the verge of bankruptcy and/or whose stock values have collapsed.

“In a bitter twist, the new owners of industry are the institutional speculators and financial manipulators, … displacing not only the preexisting structures of ownership but also instating their cronies in the seats of corporate management".

Chossudovsky sums it up perfectly. The financial crisis is being used by Wall Street big-wigs to restructure the economy and create a permanent class of working poor.

[Mike Whitney, Internet commentator]

America Antipathy Paradox

Being hated is what happens to dominant empires. But who hates Americans the most? You might assume that it's people in countries that the United States has recently attacked or threatened to attack.

For example, according to a poll by Gallup's Center for Muslim Studies, 52 per cent of Iranians have an unfavorable view of the United States. But that figure is actually down from 63 per cent in 2001.

And it's significantly lower than the degree of antipathy towards the United States felt in Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Two thirds of Jordanians and Pakistanis have a negative view of the United States and a staggering 79 per cent of Saudis. Sentiment has also turned hostile in Lebanon, where 59 per cent of people now have an unfavorable opinion of the United States, compared with just 41 per cent a year ago.

The paradox: It's not America's enemies in the Muslim world who hate the United States most, it's people in countries that are supposed to be America's friends, if not allies.

[In fact, the same is true of Britain.] Back in 1999, 83 per cent of British people surveyed said that they had a favorable opinion of the United States. But by 2006, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that proportion had fallen to 56 per cent.

[The Telegraph]

The US media finally gets Georgia story right

Moscow's U.N. envoy praised The New York Times for challenging assertions that Russia started their brief war in August, saying U.S. media had finally got the story right. "It took three months for the U.S. media to start telling the truth about the August war in the Caucasus," Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

Russia invaded Georgia last August to thwart an attempt by Tbilisi to re-establish control over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The article states "the accounts suggest that Georgia's inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on August 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm."

Tough times: And last year Congress grew 13 Percent Richer

Times are tough, but don't worry about most members of Congress making ends meet.

Overall, nearly two of every three senators are millionaires. And their collective wealth grew by 13 percent last year.

Authors of the study said it's impossible to give a precise net worth for members of Congress because their individual assets and liabilities are disclosed in broad ranges. To conduct the study, the Center for Responsive Politics determined a member's minimum net worth and maximum net worth and then calculated an average, which was used to rank the members.

So the study suggests that members of Congress are in much better shape than most Americans to make it through an economic slowdown.

[McClatchy Newspapers]

America over the barrel

Robert Reich, an adviser to President-elect Obama, termed the present financial situation a “mini-depression.” And that designation might be optimistic.

His proposed solution is for the government to spend “a lot” more on infrastructure projects on top of a trillion dollar budget deficit. So who will finance the baseline trillion dollar US budget deficit, plus the additional red ink spending on infrastructure? Not Americans. The US savings rate is zero or negative.

For years, the US government’s budget has been dependent on foreigners financing the red ink. Countries such as Japan and China and OPEC suppliers of oil to the US recycle their huge export surpluses by buying US Treasury bonds, thus financing the US government’s red ink budgets.

However, the world has had enough of American irresponsibility and is taking away the reins.

At tomorrow's November 15th economic summit, the world will begin the process of imposing a new financial order on the US in exchange for continued lending to the bankrupt “superpower.”

[Excerpt of an article by Paul Craig Roberts, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury]

read more

Why wealthy kids are giving their inheritance to charity

As the great-grandson of a pawnbroker, who made his fortune buying up shops in London suburbs, Michael Amherst could have chosen to blow his inheritance on drink, drugs or a small yacht. But at 25, he chose instead to invest £300,000 in founding Avonbrook Projects Abroad, a charity that promotes sustainable educational ventures in Africa and the developing world.

His peers are cast as the “Me Generation”, for whom little exists beyond The X Factor and updating their Facebook entries. Yet now, as Live Earth concerts make climate change and social responsibility cool among 16 to 25-year-olds, a new generation is developing a social conscience and new sense of philanthropy.

A recent survey by the Future Foundation found that a fifth of teenagers questioned saw themselves as “hardcore greens”, demonstrating that climate change and eco living are no longer fringe issues and last week 45 per cent of 16 to 25 year-olds questioned by the youth volunteering outfit, vinspired.com, said that they believed the world is too materialistic.

[Excerpt of an article by Alexandra Blair, The Times ( London )]