Forced labor is what America stands for. Just walking in the neighborhood behind my office (Rollingwood, TX) and saw a large 4000+sqft house being built. The slate roof caught my eye as that's expensive.

And lo and behold, the 10-12 year old children of undocumented workers carrying workplace scraps to the dumpster. They're wearing flip flops in a yard littered with nails and construction debris.

So the homebuilder saves money on the construction of his house. The general contractor saves money on the choice of his subs. The sub saves money by hiring undocumented workers. And the worker saves money by using his kids.

Congratulations America!!

This is embarrassing. For a country which prides itself on the state of its democracy and its efforts to spread this democracy to others, it is disgracing to discover that the United States is one of the worst violators of the ideals of a participatory democracy.

Moreover, spending $592 million on the building of an embassy is excessive—if not criminal—amid current circumstances. Beyond the great need that exists within Iraq, there are many larger global issues that must be addressed and ought to be of a higher priority to the United States than the construction of a luxurious American embassy in Iraq. Starvation and malnutrition, for example, could be eliminated by the mere expenditure of $19 billion. Having publicly committed itself to eliminating world hunger by signing the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (which call for cutting world hunger in half by 2015 and eliminating it altogether by 2025), the United States must live up to its commitments. And with the current degraded position of the United States in the international community, it is more important now than it has even been before the America live up to its global promises. Thus, by financing such an extravagant American embassy amidst such great world need and previous commitments, the United States continues to discredit itself in the world community and must change its current path of egotistical absorption into one of fulfilling global obligations.

Here it is folks. The link that says IT ALL!
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173

"The largest, most heavily-fortified embassy in the world with over 20 buildings, it spans 104 acres-- comparable in size to the Vatican."

Funny (or not)... Vatican is an independent *state*, with its own ambassadors, institutions like banks, etc, etc... Is this where Bush and Cheney plan to wall temselves in against the people's wrath? Protected by Blackwater, perchance?

And, it's not at all surprising to hear that they had to use forced labor... According to reports, the "Embassy" is the only project in Iraq which is coming in both on time and within the original budget -- how else could it have been achieved? Rome -- or even it's Vatican part -- wasn't built in a day. Nor in two years, either.

Seen from afar, the new embassy complex looks like a (very, very large) crusader's castle. Are we back in the Dark Ages???

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=68037&mesg_id=68037..

.....The Welch Club- Who's Behind the Violence in Lebanon..

May 25th, 2007 — peoplesgeography

Well it just gets curiouser and curiouser, and so far, this piece by Franklin Lamb (appended below) has got to be the most sensational of all. The first part of this piece for Counterpunch describes his visit to two of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Nahr al-Bared and Bedawi. The indiscriminate attacks against defenceless Palestinian civilians is appalling and so is and the bigoted attitude of some Lebanese toward them.

In the second half Lamb then speculates about who is behind the fighting. We know that it is between Fatah al-Islam, a shadowy group from within the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon who are made up mostly of foreigners and not in fact Palestinians, and the Lebanese Army, but who is fact behind the group? In an earlier post we saw Seymour Hersh detail his blowback thesis — that this fighting was essentially the unintended consequences of combined US-Saudi and Lebanese government funding of fundamentalist Sunni groups to counter Hezbollah.

In this piece, Franklin Lamb gets more specific. He describes a group called the Welch Club after C. David Welch, the Munich-born US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and US Ambassador to Egypt from 2001 to 2005. Lamb introduces the Welch Club as a Lebanese coalition of political figures in cohoots with Israel who are willing to sell out the country for private gain.

You won’t yet find a search engine yielding much in the way of results on the “Welch Club”, and I would love to know how Lamb has put this information together.

Welch visited Lebanon only a week ago. In As’ad Abu Khalil’s words (of the Angry Arab News Service blog), Welch “met in an unprecedented manner with the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese army. … there was an American official announcement that the Lebanese government made a request for emergency military assistance. And yet the Lebanese government promptly denied that it made such a request.”

According to Lamb, the group also bears the imprint of that ubiquitous US neocon, Elliot Abrams, an Iran-Contra felon and currently Deputy National Security Adviser (I think he also has the title of National Security Adviser for Middle East Affairs and he is certainly the point person on Israel. He does not see himself as an underling to Secretary of State Rice — more in a forthcoming post).

Franklin Lamb’s thesis is essentially a combined neo-neo — neocon and neoliberal — explanation and here is where it becomes surreal:

… the Welch Club wants to keep some Palestinians in Lebanon for cheap labor, ship others to countries willing to take them (and be paid handsomely to do so by American taxpayers) and allow at most a few thousand to return to Palestine to settle the ‘right of return’ issue while at the same time signing a May 17th 1983 type treaty with Israel with enriches the Club members and gives Israel Lebanon’s water and much of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

http://peoplesgeography.com/2007/05/25/whos-behind-the-fighting-in-north-lebanon/.

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