US for comprehensive military ties with Lanka after reconciliation
Posted by Editor on April 17, 2014 - 10:35 am
The United States today stated that it looked forward to a resumption of a more comprehensive military relationship once the Government of Sri Lanka has made better progress toward reconciliation and accountability.
US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Nisha Biswal expressed this view while speaking at the Harvard University. She added that Sri Lanka has fortunately ended its civil war, though reconciliation has proved challenging.
Following the March UN Human Rights Council resolution in Sri Lanka, we continue to call for credible efforts to ensure accountability and justice, she said.
(Ada Derana)
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I think SL is 1000 times better with military relationships with China and India. SL will be better off without a ‘poodleship’you have offered to your best friend.
I fully agree with Indra. USA is a hypocrite along with Britain and NATO bloc. They seek to dominate the world. We do not want to be dominated by them and to live under their diktats. They will do to us what they did to Libya.
Our future is with China but certainly not with India, the most corrupt nation on earth. India is pure evil. Let us cut all trade ties with India and have better relations with China and Russia. We can get our oil again from Iran. Let us lease Trinco harbour to China for a base in return for our security from Indian invasion and to help build our infrastructure.
Agree with Mr Dias. We do not require the assistance of the US,UK,EU or India. Get help from China and Russia Iran etc. Get the Chinese to have a military presence in Trinco to guard against the wiper India
Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy.
The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
This is not news, you say.
Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here’s how they explain it:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.
The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organised interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted.
“A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time,” they write, “while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time.”
On the other hand:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.
They conclude:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
Eric Zuess, writing in Counterpunch, isn’t surprised by the survey’s results.
“American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s “news” media),” he writes. “The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious ‘electoral’ ‘democratic’ countries. We weren’t formerly, but we clearly are now.”
This is the “Duh Report”, says Death and Taxes magazine’s Robyn Pennacchia. Maybe, she writes, Americans should just accept their fate.
“Perhaps we ought to suck it up, admit we have a classist society and do like England where we have a House of Lords and a House of Commoners,” she writes, “instead of pretending as though we all have some kind of equal opportunity here.”