November 27, 2008 archive

11/26 Horror In Mumbai To Ripple Across World?

The city of Mumbai is India’s financial capital. India’s New York City.

From Magnifico in his Four at Four today:

The Guardian reports Terrorist gunmen are holed up in Mumbai hotels. “About 10 to 12 gunmen remain holed up with hostages inside two Mumbai hotels and a Jewish centre, a top Indian general said today. Major General RK Huda told New Delhi Television that the rest of the gunmen appeared to have been killed or captured.” 125 people have been killed and more than 325 wounded.


Mumbai (Marathi: ?????, Mumba?, IPA:[?mumb?i] (help·info)), formerly Bombay, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the financial capital of India. With an estimated population of 20 million, it is one of the most populous cities in the world. Along with the neighbouring suburbs of Navi Mumbai and Thane, it forms, at 19 million, the world’s fifth most populous metropolitan area. Mumbai lies on the west coast of India and has a deep natural harbour. Mumbai’s port handles over half of India’s maritime cargo.

Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment centre of India, generating 5% of India’s GDP and accounting for 25% of industrial output, 40% of maritime trade, and 70% of capital transactions to India’s economy. Mumbai is one of the world’s top ten centres of commerce by global financial flow, home to important financial institutions such as the Reserve Bank of India, the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange of India and the corporate headquarters of many Indian companies and numerous multinational corporations. The city also houses India’s hindi film and television industry, known as Bollywood. Mumbai’s business opportunities, as well as its high standard of living, attract migrants from all over India and, in turn, make the city a potpourri of many communities and cultures. –wikipedia


PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images

Indian army personnel taking position at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel on Nov. 27

The BBC says this morning:

Commandos are fighting to clear the last gunmen from two luxury hotels in Mumbai, more than 24 hours after a series of attacks across the city.



The Taj Mahal hotel was nearly free of gunmen, officials said, but operations continued at the Oberoi-Trident hotel.

At a third stand-off, at a Jewish centre, seven hostages were freed, a security official said.

Indian PM Manmohan Singh vowed to track down the attackers, who have killed at least 119 people and injured 300.

Gunmen targeted at least seven sites in Mumbai late on Wednesday, opening fire indiscriminately on crowds at a major railway station, the two hotels, the Jewish centre and a cafe frequented by foreigners.

George Friedman’s STRATFOR (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) has produced an early tentative analysis of possible geopolitical repercussions from the attacks in Mumbai.

Let’s hope that STRATFOR is not as on the mark with this analysis as they usually are:


PAL PILLAI/AFP/Getty Images

A fire in the dome of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai on Nov. 26

Red Alert: Possible Geopolitical Consequences of the Mumbai Attacks  (Open Access)

Stratfor, November 27, 2008

NOTE: As Stratfor is a paid subscription site, some of the links in this article may lead to a subscriber wall, while some will be Open Access.

Summary

If the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai were carried out by Islamist militants as it appears, the Indian government will have little choice, politically speaking, but to blame them on Pakistan. That will in turn spark a crisis between the two nuclear rivals that will draw the United States into the fray.

Analysis

At this point the situation on the ground in Mumbai remains unclear following the militant attacks of Nov. 26. But in order to understand the geopolitical significance of what is going on, it is necessary to begin looking beyond this event at what will follow. Though the situation is still in motion, the likely consequences of the attack are less murky.

Four at Four

  1. The Guardian reports Terrorist gunmen are holed up in Mumbai hotels. “About 10 to 12 gunmen remain holed up with hostages inside two Mumbai hotels and a Jewish centre, a top Indian general said today. Major General RK Huda told New Delhi Television that the rest of the gunmen appeared to have been killed or captured.” 125 people have been killed and more than 325 wounded.

    The Hindu reports the Indian Army rushes in reinforcements ahead of “final push”. “The Army personnel, forming part of the present deployment of around five columns in terror-hit south Mumbai areas, has got a boost with the arrival of the fresh batch from Pune and Nashik… ‘The flushing out operations at these hotels, being undertaken jointly with National Security Guards (NSG) may be over sooner than expected were it not for our endeavour to ensure that there is no collateral damage,’ the sources said.”

    The NY Times updates an account, reporting that Indian forces take command of two posh hotels. “Indian commandos scoured through the flame and wreckage of two posh hotels Thursday, searching for survivors and battling bands of gunmen who unleashed two days of chaos here in India’s commercial capital. A third group of gunmen, the remnants of well-organized squads of attackers, remained holed up in a Jewish community center.”

    The LA Times reports Al Qaeda is just one suspect in India terrorist attacks. “Experts cautioned that it was too early to fix responsibility for the coordinated attacks that killed dozens of people at a pair of luxury hotels, two hospitals, a train station and an upscale restaurant. They said the group that claimed responsibility, the Deccan Mujahedin, was unknown.”

Four at Four continues with updates from Iraq and Afghanistan, food prices, and Barack Obama’s transition.

It’s Full of Stars

Which is of course, the last (?) line from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which in my interpretation is about mankinds journey of discovery as we, or at least our consciousness for now, attempts to move beyond the confines of this tiny little world, in a tiny little corner of the vast universe. A universe that stretches so far beyond our world that we literally cannot comprehend it, a universe so vast that our minds tend to retreat in shock back to our little world when we attempt to contemplate it. It appears at first glance to be cold and harsh and hostile to the perceived needs of we little squirming corporeal entities, it appears to be filled mostly with what we would call nothing. And yet this cold harsh universe is what gave birth to everything….in particular, for the purposes of this essay, everything that we call beauty.

Like everything else it seems, the way we look at it and relate to it depends on our individual perception of it and how we react to it, Is it a cold and harsh universe, unforgiving and deadly? Or is it the beautiful and beneficent giver of all life and beauty as we know it? That, like everything else, depends on how we, as individuals and as the human race….. view it.

Which brings us to….Thanks Giving.

Nassau D.A. Kathleen Rice to dismiss charges against the Hempstead 15

Thanks are due to Docudharma for putting the Hempstead 15 action alert up on their front page, but that alert will now need to be modified slightly. 🙂

It is with joy that I pass on the following announcement from Matthis Chiroux:

Iraq, America, SOFA, Popular Resistance, And Real News

In Baghdad as I write this it is early Thursday evening, about 7:00 pm Thursday November 27, 2008. Add 8 hours to current US eastern standard time to calculate Baghdad time.

It is also about five and half years since George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, claiming falsely to want to “liberate” Iraq, while beginning the occupation that has resulted in the deaths of more than a million Iraqis and more than four thousand Americans.

Since the invasion Iraqis belonging to all social factions and walks of life have been trying to throw their occupiers out of the country. They may finally, after all these years, be on the verge of doing exactly that.

But at what cost?

Yesterday the Iraqi parliament delayed a vote on the SOFA pact until today, then earlier today passed the agreement, but subject to a national referendum of Iraqis that could very well finally result in the end of the occupation because of the power and persistence of popular resistance.

Yesterday, in US-Iraq: The Big Picture: “Professor Michael Schwartz compare[d] the terms of the US-Iraq security pact – assuming the US will abide by them – with the initial, grandiose neocon plan which would have Iraq as an American colony peppered with US military bases projecting power all over the Middle East. He stresse[d] it’s unlikely the Pentagon and US Big Oil will abandon their dreams of Iraq domination.

Operation Iraq Liberation (OIL) would have been an apt codename for Bush’s invasion, but under any codename and whatever the lies and justification used, Iraqis have had enough, and the whole criminal adventure has also resulted in the repudiation and collapse of all the grand plans of Bush, the neocons, and PNAC, although it has yet to result in the arrest and trial of George Bush for war crimes. But grand plans or no, the oil men will not quit, and are still determined to control whatever oil resources in Iraq they can.

Neither will Iraqis quit, however, and the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama would do well to remember the power and persistence of popular resistance movements, both in Iraq, and at home, and not make a similar mistake in Afghanistan, and remember that it was not the oil companies who won him election, but popular movement.

On the flip The Real News and Michael Schwartz examine Iraq popular movement resistance to the US-Iraq security pact and how instrumental it has been for years in blocking the Bush administration agenda.

Open Thread

 

Thanks for all the thread.

Thankful Pony Party

Photobucket

Michigan GM worker answers attack by New York Times columnist

Original article, by Jerry White, via World Socialist Web Site:

On Tuesday, November 18, the New York Times published an article by one of its leading business columnists, Andrew Ross Sorkin, which places the blame for the downfall of General Motors on the supposedly “gold-plated” and “off-the-charts” wages and benefits of auto workers.

Riddle Me This, President-Elect Obama

If you’ll forgive the unfortunate Batman reference in the title, I must say that I’m glad our worst fears haven’t yet come to pass.  We’re at a major fork in the road, and there’s still a chance that we’ll prove to be a reality-based nation after all.  For the last 60-plus years, and especially over the past 8…we haven’t so much been ‘told’, as we’ve had it jammed down our throats relentlessly that food is just another commodity best left to international commodity traders and chemical companies.  Unsurprisingly, globalization as defined by those types in this area has proven to be a massive failure, as has everything else based upon their theories.

The simple fact is that our food system is completely broken.  We’re drive-thruing ourselves to ruin while trying to drown out the sounds of our destruction with the popping of Pringles…

If we intend to remain a “first-world” nation, we need to ensure we have the bare basics to begin with.  Like food, which comes from our soil…the health of which directly impacts the nutrients contained in same.  

It’s time we had people in positions of power in Washington who understood that, people like Jim Riddle.

Crossposted as always from La Vida Locavore, jump below the fold…

Docudharma Times Thursday November 27

Happy  

Thanksgiving




Thursday’s Headlines:

Charities can’t keep up with deepening poverty

Iraqi parliament delays troop pact vote over unrelated issues

Mbeki Aids policy ‘led to 330,000 deaths’

The arms dealer who could bring down Zuma

France finally agrees to pay damages to nuclear test victims

The Big Question: Is Greenland ready for independence, and what would it mean for its people?

Thai protests shut second airport

China’s virtual vigilantes: Civic action or cyber mobs?

At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks



By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 26, 2008


MUMBAI, India – Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.

Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.

Robert Fisk: ‘Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government’

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

Thursday, 27 November 2008

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad’s “Green Zone”; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers.

 

USA

As Loan Rates Fall, Borrowers Seek ‘Taste of the Bailout Pie’

Consumers Flock to Cheaper Mortgages After Federal Action

By Dina ElBoghdady

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, November 27, 2008; Page A01


Would-be mortgage borrowers have rushed to refinance their loans and even weighed plans to buy homes following the government’s move this week to loosen consumer lending.

With interest rates suddenly plummeting, “the phone is ringing, the e-mails keep coming,” said Jennifer Du Plessis, a mortgage adviser at Prosperity Mortgage, the lending arm of Long & Foster. “Real estate agents are hovering outside our office saying: ‘I’ve got another client who wants to refinance.’ ”

“Our loan officers were here well past midnight,” Bob Walters of Internet lender Quicken Loans said regarding Tuesday, when the government announced its plan. Quicken received $400 million worth of mortgage applications that day, more than quadrupling the number of loans from the day before, he said. It was on track to meet that number yesterday, too.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

May you have a thoughtful day.

Art Link

Red and Pastel

4th Thursday in November

I sometimes wonder

why we have set aside

a day of thanksgiving

(that is, a day of giving thought,

for thank derives from think)

a day for being thankful

a day for expressing thanks

a day to remember

a day for thought

a day to reflect

What I wonder at

is why we only have

one day

for this activity

Where is it written

that we don’t treat

each new day

this way?

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–November 25, 2005

Late Night Karaoke

Oh Just Go Ahead And Say It

Buena Vista Social Club – Chan Chan

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