Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers.

US troops to stay in oil-rich Iraq

otherwords.org, 8/23 — The war in Iraq is over. Or so the government and most media outlets will claim on September 1….

When September 2 dawns, however, 50,000 of our troops will still be in Iraq. The mission of these “non-combat” forces…. sound[s] an awful lot like what American soldiers are supposed to have been doing for much of the last seven years. With the exceptions of the initial invasion and the 2004 assaults on Fallujah, the Iraq War has had few large-scale battles. The Army and Marines have seen plenty of action, but most of it has been in raids on insurgent strongholds, which have frequently been called “partnered and targeted counter-terrorism operations.” One difference from past years is that American troops will rarely conduct patrols, but most have already been confined to base for some time….

The close of the “combat mission” is a rebranding rather than a watershed moment….

The essential realities of the Iraq War remain the same: Iraq is oil-rich and strategically located at the head of the Persian Gulf. Its ruling elites are fractious and weak. Our continued troop presence is an insurance policy against… Iraq’s takeover by unfriendly elements….

None of the foregoing has anything to do with the reasons Americans were given for invading Iraq in the first place.

Much more than 50,000 remain

NY Daily News, 8/22 — 50,000 other American soldiers and some 95,000 private contractors… will remain in Iraq…

The new jobs: No living wage

NYT, 9/1 — The growth of… low-wage jobs began in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s and began to really take off in the 2000s. Losing out in the shuffle… were jobs… described as “middle-skill, middle-wage….” And certain blue-collar jobs, like assembly line workers and machine operators.

The recession appears to have magnified that trend…. From 2007 to 2009… there was relatively little net change in total employment for both high-skill and low-skill occupation, while employment plummeted in so-called middle-skill occupations….

“If this kind of bottom-heavy job creation continues, it could pose a real challenge to… making sure working families have a way to support themselves.”

Child marriage kills many girls

otherwords.org, 8/13 — While child marriage has decreased globally, it remains common in rural and low-income areas in parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa….

For these girls, having sex and bearing children almost always comes before they are physically or emotionally ready. They… are often powerless to abstain from sex or even use contraception.

So children deliver children, often with tragic results. Girls younger than 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than women over the age of 20. Pregnancy-related deaths are the leading cause of mortality for girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide.

BP profits by using prison labor

otherwords.org, 8/16 — In its national PR blitz to buff up its image, [BP] has loudly boasted that it has been hiring devastated, out-of-work local people to handle the clean-up….

The Nation magazine now reports…. BP has been using inmates — literally a captive workforce — to do much of the shoveling and scooping to remove oil from Louisiana beaches. What a deal for BP! It gets very cheap workers who’re (sic) guaranteed to show up on time, do what they’re told, and keep their mouths shut….

BP is getting paid for this labor. By you and me. Under a little-known tax provision passed during the Bush regime, corporations can get a “work opportunity tax credit” of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire.

Racism, sexism in pain-kill meds

NYT, 8/29 — Pain causes distress — both physical and emotional. And Thernstrom displays an admirable testiness when confronted with absurd or disturbing ideas. She’s aghast at 19th-century studies that found “civilized” whites more sensitive to pain, and dismayed that such thinking still suffuses modern medicine. Minority sufferers, one study showed, are three times more likely than whites to get insufficient pain relief and to have their requests classified as “drug-seeking behavior….” Women complaining of pain are much more likely than men to walk out of a doctor’s office with a prescription for antidepressants, while the men get opioids.

NYT, 9/8 — Mozambique: The government has decided to reverse a major increase in the price of bread that helped set off deadly riots… in a nation where poverty is widespread…

Katrina ‘recovery’ passes blacks by

GW, 9/3 — Five years on, the government has spent $143bn on the reconstruction of public buildings and private homes, roads and bridges, in one of the largest programmes of its kind in US history….

But…. more than a third of the St Bernard population has not returned. In the neighboring Lower Ninth, the predominantly working-class African-American district that bore the worst of the disaster, just one in four residents has moved back….

Only one of the five schools in the Lower Ninth has reopened. Hundreds of businesses have been abandoned…. many residents of the Lower Ninth think the city does not want the residents back.

“It’s racism… there are some who want to run us all out of here… and make it a green space with motels and gambling and casinos.” It’s a common view in the Lower Ninth….

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a third of New Orleans residents say their lives are still getting worse because of the hurricane. African Americans were more than twice as likely as whites to say they had not recovered from Katrina.

Rich world fuels Congo brutality

GW, 9/3 — Cassiterite, wolframite, coltan: they are the minerals on which laptops, mobiles and even the tin of tomatoes in the cupboard depend….

The rich world has a capacious appetite for them, and… it is fueling conflict in… the Congo. The rape of more than 150 women and children last month in… the DRC’s mineral heartland is probably… connected with the exploitation of the mines form which these minerals come….

A detailed report from Global Witness last year described a system of mutual back-scratching and callous exploitation where forced labour and rape are the daily weapons of control… while China runs scores of “comptoirs,” export houses that convey the precious minerals to Asia….

In July President Obama signed… legislation that included a clause requiring US-quoted companies to guarantee that they are not using what are coming to be known as “conflict minerals.” This will not be the end of the DRC’s tragic history of exploitation by the west.

True leftists happier than fakes!

NYT, 8/15 — According to a new British study of thousands of people in 82 countries, those who identify themselves as left wing are actually a lot more conservative when measured by their professed views on substantive issues….

The study does contain a cheering side…. Those who identified themselves as leftists and whose views reflected the same were happier than those on the right.

Poor nations grind women down

GW, 9/3 — So long as Afghan women are kept in terrified servitude and poverty, peace for that country is likely to remain a pipe dream, let alone any hope of prosperity. But it is not just Afghanistan; the same is true for women in other parts of the developing world. They are not all vulnerable to such hideous cruelty, but…. more than two-thirds of the billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day are female.

The credit crunch, which in the west has barely curtailed our luxuries and our lifestyles, has had a devastating effect on farmers in the developing world and the majority of them are women….

Girls are being pulled out of school and sent to work to earn money for their families as a result of the credit crisis.

Shut up and eat your sugar!

otherwords.org, 8/23 — One, America has a rather huge child obesity problem. Two, major food corporations constantly pitch ads to children for such stuff as sugar-saturated breakfast cereals and fat-laden “Happy Meals….” Yes, No. 2 is a cause of No. 1. It’s really not that hard to grasp, is it?

‘American century’ nears twilight

GW, 8/27 — the concentration of economic power on Wall Street, the stagnation of incomes for all but the rich, the structural trade deficit, the military overreach, the switch from being the world’s biggest creditor nation to its biggest debtor, add up to a simple conclusion: we are in the twilight years of the long American century.

Capitalists coping by not hiring

LAT, 7/31 — Big business has found a way to make big money without restoring the jobs it cut the past two years….

Profits, that is, are increasing seven times faster than revenue….

They have evolved a business model that enables them to make money even while the strapped American consumer has cut back on purchasing. For one thing, they are increasingly selling and producing overseas….

And… American workers aren’t making what they used to….

From the American worker’s perspective, the model… is an unqualified disaster…. It locks into place a generation of reducedincomes….

There are now roughly five unemployed Americans for every open job… and that ration isn’t likely to decline much…. Corporations have figured out a way to make money without resuming hiring. Their model is presumed in not resuming hiring.