f Jonathan Swift traveled to the United States today, he would surely ditch the little guys, the big guys and the horses and just feature Gulliver being squashed flat by enormously fat people.

I drive across the US every year and I can report that there’s been a significant upswing in the blubbergraph. In  early October (in a 1990 Dodge 250 with five-speed and a Cummins engine)  I  drove east to west across America along Interstate 40 – much of the western portion is the old Route 66, famed in song and story –  which runs from Asheville, NC, to Nashville, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque and on through Arizona into California.

Every truck stop, every diner, every mall  offered its tumid diorama of  human hippos. We’re talking every age group here – starting with humpty-dumpty adolescents and ascending through the decades to 50-year olds, gigantic, stertorous and grey of countenance.  My friend Wilbur who runs a trailer park in South Carolina told me there’s a woman in one of his double-wides who’s up around 400 pounds and can’t get through the door even if she wanted to. She sits and watches tv all day and when she passes, Wilbur will have to get a giant can opener to rip open the side of the trailer to winch out her remains.

In Eureka, my local town here in northern California, a couple of years ago  they had to get new scales in the clinics and bigger MRI tubes. The Pentagon could probably make a buck or two for the taxpayer, selling torpedo launchers from decommissioned submarines for MRI conversion. It’s not quite what the swords-into-plowshares movement had in mind, but that’s America for you.

And it is America. I was just in Paris and in the course of a week Alya and I saw precisely one person – a young woman – who could be classed by a European as very plump. In America she’d be still dreaming of going to ballet school.

Of course there’s a lobby that says it’s all prejudice by the slim crowd, and fat people are perfectly normal – just a bit heftier. Websites devoted to this posture prate on unpersuasively about natural heftiness and the vile slurs of the diet industry. You read a lot about fat women being sexy, though not much about the kindred allurements of fat men – a discrimination  Titian and Rubens divined centuries ago. I remember picking up a magazine in the lefty book store in Pike Place, Seattle, a few years back called Fat Dykes and the Women Who Love Them and it’s true, on my observation, that a very fat Lesbian will not pine away for lack of slim young baby-dyke admirers of her inviting corpulence.

In this lobby’s tactful  thesaurus,  “fat” is the unusable f-word, and the last-resort term, “heavy”.  But the fat people I see across America don’t seem happy. Mostly they look beleaguered and sad as they chug on their carts down supermarket aisles pulling fat-enhancers off the shelves.  An 18-year old young woman waddling along, soda in one hand and a bag of cheetos in the other, would be cheerier if she was downsized by 50 per cent. The diabetics on their go-karts look absolutely wretched.

How did it happen?

Blame the obvious suspects: the fast food chains and the food industry whose chemists figure out the precise mixes of sugar and salt which will addict their customers.

Blame the decline of physical education in schools. Blame couches and tv sets. Blame the shriveled vistas of opportunity, the shrunken possibilities of political change, well understood by poor people, particularly the young.

Blame restaurants for serving monster portions. In Seligman, Arizona, I had breakfast in Westside Lilo’s Café and the huge elk-hunter draped in camo next to me at the counter devoured a breakfast that entirely covered a large dinner plate to a height of about four inches. Outside was his mighty one-ton truck with chromed shock absorbers gleaming in the morning sun, in which he would spend the next eight hours wolfing down chips and swigging diet Cokes.

Ten years ago you could go to a national park and encounter plenty of people hiking in the more remote portions. These days you’ll see no one off the major trails and most of the visitors having a brief amble near the parking lots. The black bears in Yosemite recently voted – we’re talking statistical levels of bear-break-ins here — the minivan their car of the year to break into because it’s what many Americans haul their kids around in, and the vehicles are full potato chips and kindred snacks the bears have learned to enjoy.

The Pentagon is getting alarmed. The good news for the Armed Forces has been the surge in unemployment.  In her piece on this site last week, Susan Galleymore quoted Curtis Gilroy, a senior Pentagon official, as saying  recently that  a 10 percent increase in the national unemployment rate generally translates into a 4 per cent to 6 per cent “improvement in high-quality Army enlistments.” For the first time since the creation of all-volunteer  armed forces in 1973, according to Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary for defense for military personnel policy, “all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals.”

In other words, the lack of jobs in the civilian sector, means no option for many young Americans other than enlistment.

The bad news for the Pentagon is that many would be enlistees are not “high quality” and have to be turned down because they are too fat.

The Army Times ran an article this last week by William McMichael  citing the latest government stats on America’s fat crisis. One third of the 31 million Americans between 17 and 24 are unqualified for military service because of “physical and medical issues”. Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon’s director of accessions, told the Army Times that “the major component of this is obesity. We have an obesity crisis in the country. There’s no question about it.”

The Pentagon gets its data from the US government’s Centers for Disease Control. The CDC says that 22 years ago 6 per cent of all 18-34 year olds were obese. By 2008 that number had swelled to 23 per cent – one out of four.

In 1987, according to the CDC, about 1 out of 20 18-to 34-year-olds, were obese. In 2008, 22 years later, almost 1 out of 4 — was considered to be obese.

“Kids are just not able to do push-ups,” says Gilroy. “And they can’t do pull-ups. And they can’t run.”

Increasingly, young Americans are getting too fat to fight, which is just as well – because the antiwar movement is in terrible shape, probably because yesterday’s peace marchers are all too busy on weekends jogging, careening along on their bikes or going to yoga classes.

The Pentagon now issues waivers for at least the semi-obese, no doubt reckoning that Spartan training will slim them down enough to be capable of some sort of useful military activity, though not running up and down mountains in the Hindu Kush.

Michele and Barack Obama have been making rather sotto voce remarks about America’s appalling diet and ensuing weight problems, albeit tactfully since the Fat Vote is in the millions and the Food Industry’s political purse is bulky too.

But how does Michele’s organic vegetable garden weigh against Obama’s pick as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack – a wholly-owned property of the food corporations?

Hence we get the tragic comic spectacle of a  political battle over a health “reform” bill which may make it easier for poor Americans to cover the costs of treatment for Type 2 diabetes and the health consequences of consuming prodigious amounts of high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile there is no effective political opposition to federal subsidies for the farm policies which have fattened America into macabre absurdity.  Cigarettes and booze – both the targets of ferocious public service campaigns –  lag far behind obesity in economic consequence: Roland Storm in one study reported that obesity is “associated with 36 per cent increase in inpatient and outpatient spending and a 77 percent increase in medications, compared with a 21 per cent increase in inpatient and outpatient spending and a 28 per cent increase in medications for current smokers and smaller effects for problem drinkers.

Though the theory has been downgraded, we used to learn in school that the Roman Empire collapsed because of lead pipes. (Actually the lead-pipe menace was well known by the time of Augustus, though lead lined cook pots probably did wreak a dire toll.) Half a millennium after the final overthrow  of the Roman Empire by the diet-conscious Ottomans, the American Empire is distended in a vast acreage of fatty tissue, its recruits too vast to fit into the most forgiving uniforms, the job of fighting given perforce to drones dispatched by chair-bound warriors 7,000 miles from the battlefield, but half a block from McDonalds, Carls Jr and the other Enemies Within.

Footnote:. From the UK, Peter Simmons comments: “But it’s really not such a recent development; in the sixties I bought a consignment of used denim jeans from the US, planning to repair and recycle them (this was before the days when jeans came pre-stressed and pre-faded) but when I investigated I found that they were all massive, typically, two Brits could get into one pair of American jeans, some were so large we thought they had to be joke clothing for a circus or something. We used the massive expanses of denim to make lots of different items; bags, floor cushions, sofa covers… I guess what’s new is that it’s spread to the majority of the population now. Cheech and Chong had a word for them, lardasses.

Better, But Still Far From Our Goal

As you know, assuming that you are among the tens of thousands of people around the world who check in at this  CounterPunch site every day or two, these past two weeks we’ve been featuring our annual appeal for donations and saying that without the necessary $75,00 to be raised in these weeks, we’ll have to cut back drastically on what we do and what all you site readers who don’t subscribe to our newsletter, get every day for free.

Following my observation here at the end of our first week’s fundraiser that too many of you had been too prudent in keeping your hands in your pockets, there has been a measurable up-tick in donations, for which we thank all these supporters.  But we are still far short of our target. To those who have not yet rallied to our call we say this:  Please DO believe our forecasts that times will be grim indeed for CounterPunch and CounterPunchers if you don’t reconsider seriously and click on the donation link.

Kevin Gray, Mark Rudd, Bruce Franklin…The Gang’s All Here!
Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from South Carolina Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be?

New to CounterPunch, Mark Rudd contributes an important piece on movement-building – task number one for the left today. He counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement.  H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan.

Subscribe today!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Michael Moore Says Capitalism Killed Newspaper Industry

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9pYp2M4444]

Documentarian Michael Moore argues that media executives have ‘killed’ newspapers by laying off beat reporters, dumbing down news coverage and endorsing “anti-education” Republican political candidates. “They’ve slit their own throats,” claims Moore. “They’ve eliminated the very people they need to read their paper.”

—–

Who are we and why do we behave the way that we do? Writer, director and producer Michael Moore has been trying to answer that question his entire filmmaking career. His latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, investigates the powerful forces behind the calamitous predicament in which countless Americans are finding themselves: losing their homes, jobs and savings to foot the bill for past spending.

What is the price that America – and the rest of the world – pays for its love of capitalism?

Michael Moore: What We’re Seeing is the End of Capitalism

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.

The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. Frontline reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him Director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family, and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

Ref: Counterpunch

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

<blockquote><img src=”http://english.aljazeera.net/mritems/Images//2009/10/18/2009101885120477112_8.jpg” alt=”" width=”565″ height=”300″ />
FOCUS
California ‘first failed US state’?
By Rob Reynolds in Los Angeles

More Californians rely on food handouts amid rising unemployment and state benefit cuts [EPA]

On Sunday mornings at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in the rough-edged Tenderloin district of San Francisco, the sanctuary is always rocking to old-school gospel music.

California crisis

Video: Elderly hit hard by healthcare cuts
Video: Hard times fall on America’s Golden State
“It’s so good to come together,” Pastor Cecil Williams declares. His is a diverse congregation – white and African-American, gay and straight, young and elderly.

For four decades Pastor Williams has been an outspoken advocate for the city’s poor and marginalised. On one bright October Sunday recently, he preached a sermon on compassion and the need for social justice.

“You affirm who you are when you stand up for others in need,” Williams told his flock. “And you can say, we are going to change this old world to a new world.”

But it is a harsh new world in California these days. A state once synonymous with opportunity and prosperity, sunshine and surf, Hollywood and Disneyland have fallen on bitterly hard times.

‘Land of opportunity’

The evidence is no further away than the church basement, where free meals are prepared for homeless and hungry people such as Robert Shirley. He’s been homeless, on and off, for months, he says.

“California was the land of opportunity. You could make it out here,” Shirley says. “Hey, I’m sorry, but California is not that way any more.”

The number of meals served here has jumped 21 per cent since last year. Williams says the free kitchen’s clientele has changed drastically.

“They were people [in food lines] who were carrying briefcases, people who were dressed in suits, people who were dressed up very nicely and had been a part of the middle class”

Robert Shirley, homeless California resident
“They were people who were carrying briefcases, people who were dressed in suits, people who were dressed up very nicely and people who had been a part of the middle class,” he says.

“And we were seeing them come through the lines. And that, of course, was shocking.”

California is the world’s eighth-largest economy, but its unemployment rate is over 12 per cent – the highest in 70 years.

Millions of people lost their homes when the housing bubble burst. Millions more have been thrust into poverty by the recession.

In July, the state legislature haggled for weeks over how to close a $26bn budget gap. Instead of increasing taxes for corporations or the wealthy, the budget deal that emerged to be signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state’s Republican governor, ordered deep spending cuts, laying off tens of thousands of state workers.

Reduced funding for education, coupled with big tuition increases, sparked a student and faculty strike at California’s public universities. Programmes for ex-prison inmates and parolees have been slashed.

And the social safety net of healthcare and services for the poor, children and elderly – the least powerful and least vocal members of society – has been systematically shredded.

<strong>”The people that are going to be effected first and foremost will be the poor, those who are in great need,” Williams says sadly. “They are not considered to be human beings.”</strong>

<strong>State ‘abandoning its poorest’</strong>

In Pleasant Hill, a suburb outside San Francisco, I met a remarkable young woman named Amy Fedeli. Only 24-years old, she has deferred her dream of college and a career in nursing to support her 75-year-old grandmother, Margaret, and seven-year-old niece, Emilia.

She’s keeping faith with her loved ones in a state that is systematically abandoning its poorest and least powerful people.

<strong>Schwarzenegger is fighting a legal challenge against proposed cuts in elderly care [EPA]
Margaret, who suffers from a neurological disorder and mild dementia, is too frail to be left home alone while Amy goes to her job at a medical-records company.</strong>

So she attends a state-funded adult day-care programme where she gets physical and occupational therapy, health checkups, and a chance to interact with other people and keep her mental faculties sharp.

But as part of the effort to pare down the budget deficit, California has cut many programmes for the elderly poor.

New rules would limit seniors to three days a week in adult day care. That is a big problem for the Fedeli family. Without the daily care she gets at the senior centre, Amy says, Margaret might not survive for long.

“She would probably end up in a nursing home,” Amy says. “She would probably pass. She would probably die, God forbid.”

To care for Margaret, Amy would have to quit her job, leaving the little family without any income. Why has she accepted so much responsibility at such a young age?

“It’s family, that’s all I can say,” Amy says. “Your family, you stick with them – that’s all.”

State politics ‘deadlocked’

A legal challenge has temporarily halted some of the cuts to elderly care. But Schwarzenegger is trying to overturn the court ruling and re-institute the cuts.

Donna Calame, who runs a state programme that provides in-home care for seniors, told me the attitude of Schwarzenegger and the legislature makes her livid.

“For me, it’s really obscene,” she said in an interview.

“We are a rich state. I think it is because of the wealth in California that, to me, makes the choices that have been made this year so morally reprehensible.”

<strong>”Somewhere, somehow, the public good, as a concept of governance, has disappeared in this state”</strong>

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, analyst, University of Southern California
<strong>
Critics say California’s politics are so deadlocked, its government so dysfunctional, it may become the US’s first failed state.</strong>

The state legislature is hamstrung by a law requiring a two-thirds majority vote to raise taxes and pass a budget. That makes compromise practically impossible.

I asked political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the University of Southern California what’s wrong with California.

<strong>”What is the matter with California is, that we have become politically so polarised that we can’t agree on something that will make this state work,” Bebitch Jeffe laments.</strong>

“Somewhere, somehow, the public good, as a concept of governance, has disappeared in this state.”

The failure of California’s government has bred profound cynicism among its people.

Back at the soup kitchen, Robert Shirley has some blunt advice for the people in charge of the Golden State.

<strong>”If our politicians don’t get their heads out of their asses, this state is going to be – let’s put it this way: some of those Third World countries are going to look a lot better than California.</strong>

Ref: <a href=”http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/10/2009101881543377434.html” target=”_blank”>Al jazeera</a></blockquote>

Tortured Law, a new 10-minute documentary by Alliance for Justice, examines the role U.S. lawyers played in authorizing torture. Join those calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to release the report of the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, and hold accountable those who ordered, designed, and justified torture.

You can join the call by signing Alliance for Justice’s petition: http://ga1.org/campaign/release_tortu…

And by signing up to host a screening in your area: http://www.afj.org/films-and-programs…

This week Avi Lewis visits the people behind the native movement for self-determination in Hawaii. Well over 200 years old the movement has recently been gaining on strength.
Archive footage courtesy of www.namaka.com.

In the world of academia Noam Chomsky is the most cited author alive. He talks to Inside USA about politics in the United States and this Presidential election.

It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.

“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”

I would add, “Lie is Truth.”

The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.

The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples.

The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

The Nobel committee has placed all its hopes on a bit of skin color.

“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink.
Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

When justifications for war become almost endless–oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists–war becomes the path to peace.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

Ref: counterpunch.org

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Nobel peace prize citation for Barack Obama

Barack Obama presides over a UN security council meeting on nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama at a UN security council meeting on nuclear weapons: the Nobel peace prize committee singled out his work on disarmament for praise. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP

“The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided that the Nobel peace prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges’.”