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Once elected to the US senate in 2004, Obama supported Bush’s calls for unconditional funding for the war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006.
He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as US secretary of state, despite evidence that she had presented false testimonies to congress and the fact that she was a central part of the Bush’s team that pushed through the Iraq war.
In June 2006, Obama voted against an amendment demanding a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, despite having previously called for such a timetable in the senate.
And during the 2006 Democratic Party congressional primaries Obama backed pro-war candidates such as Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont.
Obama is also in favour of maintaining a US occupation in Iraq. He has directly linked US troop withdrawal from Iraq to redeployment in Afghanistan.
In November 2006, Obama stated, “Drawing down our troops in Iraq will allow us to redeploy additional troops to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the region as an over-the-horizon force.
“Perhaps most importantly, some of these troops could be redeployed to Afghanistan.
It is for all these reasons that Ralph Nader has announced a left wing challenge for the presidential elections.
The Democrats will attack him for splitting the “progressive” vote and attempt to stop him from standing. But socialists back both his right to stand and his criticisms of US corporate power and the two main parties.
The promise of a new, progressive US, domestically and internationally, is something very different from the politics offered by Obama and the Democrats. Historically, the Democrats and the Republicans have had very similar policies. They are both parties of big business.
But today, in the curious structures of the US’s institutional party politics, the social base of a new movement is finding some expression in the hopeful anticipation of a new type of leadership of the Democratic Party.
Reliance on these structures will inevitably prove painfully disappointing. If a better world is indeed possible, it will be mass movements from below that make it a reality.
ALEXIS SANCHEZ says Mesut Ozil is his best friend at Arsenal.
The Chilean winger has been at the Emirates for two seasons now, and he says in that time he’s grown closer to the German than any of his other team-mates.
“I get on the best with Ozil,” Sanchez said.
“I enjoy playing with everyone but I get on even better with him.
“We don’t need to say anything to each other, it just takes a glance.
“Having a player like Ozil in midfield and doing one-twos with him is fantastic because he is a quality player going forward.
ARSENAL travel to Old Trafford tomorrow looking for their first Premier League win there for a decade.
Sanchez and Ozil have formed one of the most prolific partnerships in the league this season, with the former having scored eight goals and provided seven assists in all competitions.
Ozil is not far behind with seven goals and four assists in one less game.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Sales of new single-family homes plunged 33% in May to a record-low level after a federal subsidy for home buyers expired, according to data released Wednesday by the Commerce Department.
Sales dropped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 300,000, the lowest since records began in 1963. April's sales pace was revised down to 446,000 compared with the 504,000 originally reported. March's sales were also revised lower.
The results were much worse than expected, and economists had expected a 20% decline to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 405,000. See complete economic calendar and consensus forecast.
U.S. stock markets dropped quickly on the news. Gold prices also fell. See full story on the market reaction.
That sales fell was "not at all surprising," wrote Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. "However, we would be lying if we said the size of the drop was not shocking."
"By the fall, we expect the very favorable affordability picture to start pulling people back into the market, but the next few months are likely to be very grim," wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. domestic economist for High Frequency Economics, who predicted the number precisely.
Sales fell sharply in all four regions, with sales down more than 50% in the West.
The median sales price in May was $200,900, down 9.6% from a year earlier and the lowest since December 2003.
Home builders continued to shed inventories in May, cutting the number of unsold homes by 0.5% to 213,000, the lowest level in 39 years. In the past year, inventories are down 27%, while sales are down 18%.
The inventory of unsold homes represented an 8.5-month supply at the depressed May sales pace, up from 5.8 months in April and the highest in nearly a year.
Home builders are facing stiff competition from a glut of inventory of existing homes, fueled by pent-up demand to move and by high levels of foreclosures and short sales.
In order to qualify for the federal tax credit of up to $8,000, a buyer needed to sign a sales contract on a home by the end of April. New-home sales are recorded at the time of the contract signing.
The tax credit likely pulled many sales forward into the first four months of the year. Sales increased a cumulative 29% between February and April. But once the credit expired, sales collapsed in May.
The big question for housing, and perhaps for the economy, is whether housing will strengthen significantly from here. If sales remain weak, home prices could fall further, which would in turn depress consumer spending, increase foreclosures and lead to more losses at banks.
Government statisticians have low confidence in the monthly report, which is subject to large revisions, and large sampling and other statistical errors.
In most months, the government isn't sure whether sales rose or fell. The standard error in May, for instance, was plus or minus 9.9%. Read the full government report.
The government says it can take up to four months to establish a statistically significant trend in sales. Over the past four months, sales have been on a 371,000 seasonally adjusted annual pace, little changed from the 367,000 pace in the four months leading up to January.
On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes fell 2% in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.66 million. Sales of existing homes are recorded at the time of the closing. Buyers have until June 30 to close on the sale to qualify for the tax credit. See full story on exi...
Housing data in May have been dismal. Housing starts fell 10%, building permits fell 5.9%, mortgage applications dropped, and the home builders' index fell by five points. The only bright spot was mortgage rates, which stayed very low.
"A housing market with the ability to stand on its own requires the improvement in the job market to continue and for mortgage rates to stay low," wrote Jennifer Lee, senior economist for BMO Capital Markets.
Spc. Sierra Brown, a human intelligence collector from Miami, Fla., assigned to C Company, 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, 500th Military Intelligence Brigade-Theater, gives a holiday greeting to her mother in Fort Bragg, N.C.
This work, Spc. Sierra Brown Holiday Greeting, by SSG Shameeka Stanley, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
After investing over $100 million to elect Barack Obama and a pro-union Congress, the American labor movement saw 2009 as a year of historic opportunity. Topping labor’s priorities was passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would boost union membership by restricting management practices that undermined ...
Today, labor’s top legislative priorities remain unmet, and EFCA is in limbo. But there is an election this week at California’s Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (SRMH) that could end labor’s year on a triumphant note. Over 600 workers vote on Thursday and Friday whether to join a union, with a victory potentially paving t...
While the American labor movement is no longer on the defensive, and clearly has allies friend in President Obama and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, unions had few legislative gains in 2009.
The AFL-CIO selected a new leadership team headed by Richard Trumka, and has won results on some trade and workplace issues, but its top legislative priorities are stymied. Both the AFL-CIO and SEIU ran field campaigns for health care reform, but labor’s impact on the final outcome remains unclear.
SEIU followed Obama’s inauguration speech by putting its third largest local, SEIU-UHW, in trusteeship. SEIU has since devoted far more resources battling against the former staffers and worker supporters of this local (now in NUHW) than in organizing new workers.
SEIU also got distracted in April when it launched an all-out attack on its former close ally, UNITE HERE. This also squandered resources that should have gone elsewhere, and isolated SEIU from other unions, as labor leaders lined up to publicly support UNITE HERE against SEIU raids.
Andy Stern has little to show from his fight with John Wilhelm and UNITE HERE, and SEIU’s absorption of locals affiliated with the pre-merger UNITE has been a financial drain. Unfortunately, the SEIU-UNITE HERE struggle divided the labor movement at a time when unity was essential to pass EFCA and other measures.
But SEIU’s President does hope to end the year on a winning note by preventing workers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (SRMH) from unionizing. Unfortunately, the rest of the labor movement will likely see this as a defeat, both for that hospital’s workers and for future efforts to unionize the 9000 other non-union work...
SRMH workers begin casting ballots Thursday, with votes tabulated Friday night. The outcome hinges on whether the massive anti-union campaign jointly waged by SEIU and management convinces enough workers to reject the demonstrable financial benefits and increased job security that comes with joining a union.
As I recently wrote, SEIU’s Santa Rosa campaign has been almost entirely a massive attack on NUHW. SEIU has combined full-page newspaper ads, mailers, and flyers with an estimated forty organizers on the ground this week – most wearing yellow t-shirts with slogans attacking NUHW – to prevent an NUHW victory.
SEIU even scheduled a statewide rank and file training for Petaluma to coincide with the SRMH election. It brought about 400 workers to a rally in front of SRMH, but they made no effort to meet with SRMH workers or to persuade anyone to vote for SEIU.
SEIU’s weak support among workers apparently led it to ask the NLRB last Thursday about the process for removing its name from the ballot. This would prevent SEIU from suffering an embarrassing third place finish, but had two potential downsides.
First, it would prevent SEIU from bashing NUHW during the crucial final week.
Second, since management had agreed to fair election ground rules so long as all parties to the election did likewise (SEIU had refused), SEIU’s departure would also prevent management from engaging in anti-union conduct in the lead-up to the election.
After rumors spread that SEIU was leaving the contest, its local officials were reportedly overruled by SEIU staff in Washington DC on Friday morning, though the cause of SEIU’s reversal cannot be confirmed.
SEIU has pulled out all stops in Santa Rosa because it fears than an NUHW victory will open the door for its rival to organize the remaining 9000 workers in the St. Joseph’s chain. An NUHW victory also gives it more resources and momentum to compete with SEIU at Kaiser Hospital and in other elections next year.
But the union has paid a steep price for its struggles against UNITE HERE, and against efforts by SRMH workers to join a union. In recent months, SEIU has gotten in fights with Labor Councils in the North Bay, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and even threatened the state’s leading labor hero, California Democratic Part...
After preventing NUHW from winning a major victory throughout 2009, SEIU does not want to see its rival enter 2010 with a full head of steam by winning in Santa Rosa.
With the Democratic Party needing union money and volunteers for the November 2010 elections, it will have to start delivering for labor soon. This means that Congress will enact some changes in union election rules, though expedited elections rather than card check appears to be where the debate is headed. The type of...
Expect the labor movement to take a much harder line with the Obama Administration on immigration reform than they have on other legislative issues.
After 2009, next year for organized labor can only be an improvement.
Another six records were broken by swimmers from the United States today as action came to an end at the World Para Swimming World Series event in Indianapolis.
United States athletes again set the standard on day two of the World Para Swimming World Series event in Indianapolis.
American Julia Gaffney set a world record in the women’s 100 metres backstroke S7 to open the World Para Swimming World Series event in Indianapolis today.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has claimed there is "no place for Israeli athletes" in his country which is due to host this year's World Para Swimming Championships.
The 2019 World Para Swimming Series will feature events in eight countries across four continents, making it "the largest to date", World Para Swimming (WPS) have announced.
A major test for the new classification system in Paralympic swimming will unfold when the European Championships open tomorrow in Dublin.
World Para Swimming have announced the upcoming European Championships will be streamed on their website and Facebook page.
Brazil’s 14-time Paralympic champion Daniel Dias claimed his second title of the competition on the final day of the World Para Swimming World Series in Sheffield.
Britain’s Alice Tai achieved a world record on the opening day of the World Para Swimming World Series event in Sheffield.
Brazil's Daniel Dias will hope to move closer to defending the World Para Swimming World Series title when he takes to the pool in Sheffield tomorrow.
Many Asian countries face huge financial costs to clean up the environment because of a lack of investment in sanitation, which is causing massive water pollution, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Tuesday.
The Manila-based ADB noted that some 2 billion Asians - roughly 66 per cent of the population in the region - lack access to adequate sanitation, such as toilets, pit latrines, septic tanks and sewerage systems.
This accounts for nearly three-quarters of all those in the world without such facilities.
The bank warned that the financial cost of cleaning a river once it is already polluted with industrial waste or sewage is far higher than the cost of building the infrastructure needed to dispose of the pollutants properly.
"Sanitation must get top priority from the political leadership everywhere," Arjun Thapan, chair of ADB's Water Committee, said ahead of the World Water Week, a global conference on sanitation and other water issues to be held in Stockholm on August 12-18.
"They need to see sanitation as paying its way and not as being either unaffordable or a luxury," he added. "Politicians must also understand that postponing action is not an option. To do so, will cost a great deal more."
In Shanghai, for example, Chinese authorities had to spend 1 billion dollars to clean Suzhou Creek, which runs through the metropolis and used to be a health risk to residents.
Chinese officials admitted that the clean-up costs were many times what would have been needed to prevent it in the first place, the ADB said.
"Failure to act on sanitation and wastewater eventually comes home to roost when the problem results in a smelly, foul river that despoils a city and surround areas," Amy Leung, ADB principal urban development specialist, said.
"But the real horror is the outbreak of typhoid and cholera caused by inadequate sanitation," she added.
Such adverse health consequences hit the impoverished the hardest, and damaged entire economies with increased strain on health systems, decline in tourism income and loss of productivity.
India, for example, is estimated to lose more than 230 million dollars each year in tourism revenue because of perceptions of poor sanitation.
Last year China announced plans to invest 125 billion dollars in sanitation and wastewater treatment, a major step forward but still not enough to meet its people's needs, the ADB said.
The ADB said it has about 1.6 billion dollars in the pipeline for investments in sanitation between now and 2010. It has also dedicated an extra 20 million dollars as grant money to help governments and utilities improve their sanitation programmes.
MHX Activity Timer is a simple stand alone tool to monitor and keep track of time for activities in the classroom. Designed for the classroom, this versatile timer has adjustable settings such as countdown time and pop messages to show up at a given time. The vibrant colors and usage of the common "green, yellow, and r...
CANCER patients are being offered beauty makeovers to help them rediscover their femininity.
The Look Good Feel Better charity, based at Colchester General Hospital, invited 16 ladies suffering from the disease for a day of beautifying and pampering.
The event marked the charity’s fourth anniversary and the opening of a second service in Springfield, near Chelmsford.
Top beauty brands, including Estee Lauder and Chanel, donated products.
The ladies who attend the sessions see them as a way of rediscovering their feminine identities and counteracting the physical effects of the disease.
It is also a chance for them to meet people going through the same experiences as them.
Alex Pace, 46, of Lexden Road, has recently undergone surgery due a second bout of breast cancer, diagnosed at Easter.
She said: “There are a lot of mental and psychological issues you go through.
“This gives you a lift and something to look forward to.
“The treatment can make an attack on your femininity, even if the effects are not as visible as others. It can feel like a very serious change to how you view yourself.
Look Good Feel Better originated in America in 1996, with an Essex branch opening four years ago.