The two countries I know best are India and the US. I spent the first 22 years of my life in the former, and the following 24 in the latter, where I continue to live. Recently I returned home, after spending three months in India. The combination of what I saw there in plain view, and what I see here in America, may shed some light on why we have arrived at the climate impasse.
Soon I’ll get to what is climate impasse, but first, here is what got me motivated to write this piece, before even I could recover from …
To the uninitiated, nothing may be more boring than economics, and especially international trade talks. I know that because 15 years ago I was one of the uninitiated.
I was pretty typical of the type – fairly well-educated, pretty good job, regular follower of the news via “respectable” sources such as the BBC and The Times. I remember fifteen years ago noticing my news sources telling me about some violent protests that were happening thousands of miles away in Seattle, Washington. Ordinarily I tended to sympathise with protestors, feeling sure they were probably right, but what intrigued me about these protests …
“The caste system gave us 3,000 years of pain,” Ram Niwas told us. “But slowly, slowly, we are moving beyond it.” He then began to tell me about women who are still subjected to the manual labor of cleaning dry toilets. They load slop from the village latrines and toilets into jars which they then carry, on their heads, to a dumping ground outside the village. The job is as dangerous as it is demeaning. People who do this work suffer infections and other illnesses. From age 13-15, this was how Ram Niwas earned a living.
Transfield Services is a diversified corporation with fingers in many a pie. This month, it was announced that Australia’s Abbott government had awarded a $1.22 billion government contract to the company to run detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. The ethicists moaned as the shareholders cheered: shares rose by 20.81 per cent on the announcement. For 20 months, the contract will cover “garrison and welfare services”, an interesting choice of words showing how well the fortress culture has been entrenched.
Transfield steps into the muddied shoes of the UK-listed G4S security firm, which did its best to botch …
Time waits for no one, but apparently will wait for Crimea. The speaker of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, has confirmed there will be a referendum on greater autonomy from Ukraine on May 25.
Until then, Crimea will be as hot and steamy as carnival in Rio because Crimea is all about Sevastopol, the port of call for the Russian Black Sea fleet.
If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a bull, this is the red flag to end all red flags. Even if you’re deep in alcohol nirvana dancin’ your troubles away at carnival in Rio — or New Orleans, or …
President Maduro, slanderous Western media, promoting war and violence for capital gains of the mercilessly amoral, automaton functioning, speculative interest banking industry, has put you in their spotlight to better target you with defamation. This is, then, your opportunity to be heard world-wide. In telling the truth about the USA, you will be protecting all of us, Venezuela included.
Please don’t argue with the likes of Obama, or McCain, John Kerry or others guilty of so many documented murderous crimes against humanity. Remember, their handlers on Wall Street control most of the world’s media, which will twist whatever you say about …
I have long thought that Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the PLO’s Executive Committee and the Palestine Legislative Council, is the most articulate spokesperson in Israeli occupied territory for her cause. Her latest comment is a bleak assessment of the prospects for getting a real peace process going. She was responding to a statement by an Obama administration official that both Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Abbas will be able to “express reservations about individual provisions” in the framework document Secretary of State Kerry is preparing. Here’s what Ashrawi said:
This is the last in a four part series leading up to the 10th anniversary of the February 29 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government in Haiti.
Why did Canada help overthrow Haiti’s elected government? That’s a question I heard over and over when speaking about Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, a book I co-authored with Anthony Fenton. Most people had difficulty understanding why their country — and the U.S. to some extent — would intervene in a country so poor, so seemingly marginal to world affairs. Why would they bother?
Along the Global Color Line from the U.S-Mexico Borderlands to Yemen
by Joseph Nevins / February 27th, 2014
Around 6:40am on Tuesday, February 19, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed Jesus Flores-Cruz, a 41-year-old Mexican national, four miles east of the Otay Mesa port of entry in southern San Diego. Employing what has become an all-too-familiar explanation, authorities asserted that Mr. Flores Cruz, an unauthorized migrant, pelted the agent with rocks. Reportedly fearing for his well-being, the agent, Daniel Basinger,shot his pistol twice, fatally wounding the alleged attacker.
Two days later, Human Rights Watch released a report on a U.S. drone attack on an 11-vehicle convoy—a wedding procession—in Yemen on …
American Militarism, War Culture, and Police Brutality
by Colin Jenkins / February 27th, 2014
President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon…
— Malcolm X, December 1, 1963
“Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle… you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight!” The thundering voice rang out from the large box speakers situated across the damp, cement floor. ” Americans love a winner! Americans will not tolerate a loser! Americans despise cowards! Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. …
Parliament is too middle class and doesn’t have the diversity that it needs to have.
— Ed Miliband, The House Magazine, January 31, 2014
David Cameron’s government is not popular. An IpsosMori poll last September found that 70 per cent of voters found the prime minister “out of touch”, making him the least popular Tory leader in 35 years. Murmurings of leadership challenges have been made. The coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, look set for a slaughter. The time has come for a mixture of hard headed thinking and mandatory populism.
Populism can get the better of you. The degree of desperation in …
There has been an intense collaboration and cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Islamists forces like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and others that determine the course of events in the Middle East till today. These forces not only collaborated with the Nazi regime but they also provided thousands of Nazis with a safe haven after the war.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husaini, was a Jew hater and an advocate of Islamist radicalism who spent the war years in Berlin where he lived in luxury. He was the only Muslim …
On 24 February 2014 US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel held a press conference to announce some of the details of Pentagon’s 2015 budget. Beyond the news of cuts in war fighting machinery and personnel — and the pox of “irresponsible” sequestration on the federal government — Hagel made a point of indicating that the world is becoming an increasingly volatile place. He also seemed to express a bit of disgust for nation building of the type attempted by the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those sentiments are directly at odds with the core element of US national and global security …
You occasionally read a totally mind bending book that opens up a whole new world for you. The Failure of Nonviolence by Peter Gelderloos is one of them, owing to its unique evidence-based perspective on both “nonviolent” and “violent” resistance. It differs from Gelderloos’s 2007 How Nonviolence Protects the State in its heavy emphasis on indigenous, minority, and working class resistance. A major feature of the new book is an extensive catalog of “combative” rebellions that the corporate elite has whitewashed out of history.
In 2009, my home was attacked by a drone. My brother and son were martyred. My son’s name was Hafiz Zahinullah. My brother’s name was Asif Iqbal. There was a third person who was a stone mason. He was a Pakistani. His name was Khaliq Dad…. Their bodies were covered with wounds. Later, I found some of their fingers in the rubble.
– Kareem Khan, a Pakistani journalist, speaking of his personal experience with civilians killed by Americans, in the documentary “Wounds of Waziristan,” 2013
… it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, …
Following parts one, two and three of the Global Power Project’s Group of Thirty series, this fourth and final installment focuses on a few of the G30 members who have played outsized roles both in creating and managing various financial crises, providing a window on to the ideas, institutions and individuals who help steer this powerful global group.
The Assassin of Argentina
Prior to 2008, one of the most notable examples of a highly destructive financial crisis took place in Argentina which, heavily in debt, faced a large default and was brutally punished by financial markets and the speculative assault of global finance, otherwise …
For too long in this country, people supporting human rights and international law in relation to the Palestinian/Israeli issue have been reluctant to speak out. Many university faculty members didn’t want to get involved in an issue that they believed might cost them their jobs or tenure.
Politicians were afraid of the power of the Israel Lobby. For example, in 1974 funding from the Lobby played a major role in ousting Senator J. William Fulbright, one of the more powerful and courageous senators, and his defeat sent a loud message to others. He had earned the enmity of the Lobby by exposing …
Omar is a 7-year-old boy from Gaza. His family managed to obtain the necessary permits that allowed him to cross the Erez checkpoint to Jerusalem, through the West Bank, in order to undergo surgery. He was accompanied by his father. On the way back, the boy and his father were stopped at the Qalanidya checkpoint, separating occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank. The father needed another permit from the Israeli military to take his son, whose wounds were still fresh hours after the surgery, back to the strip. But the soldiers were in no obliging mood.
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 26th, 2014
Rev. Kapya Kaoma: New Ugandan law that makes homosexual acts punishable by life imprisonment was modeled after the talking points of right-wing U.S. evangelicals.
Reported around the world by major news service Reuters, but not reported by CBC, RDI, CTV, Global, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Montreal Gazette, La Presse or any other mainstream media in Canada. Will any Member of Parliament mention this in House of Commons?
My neighbor Warren doesn’t understand high finance. He’s a physician, and they’re usually pretty savvy market-wise, but he’s an exception. Yesterday over the back fence he was expressing alarm over what he thought was a dangerous development in the banking sector.
“It seems that the next big thing on Wall Street,” said Warren, “is banks and other players bundling rental housing into a new product, that is a rent-backed security, similar to the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were at the root of the big crisis in ’09.”
The 24-hour visit by German chancellor Angela Merkel to Israel this week came as relations between the two countries hit rock bottom. According to a report in Der Spiegel magazine last week, Merkel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been drawn into shouting matches when discussing by phone the faltering peace process.
Despite their smiles to the cameras during the visit, tension behind the scenes has been heightened by a diplomatic bust-up earlier this month when Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament and himself German, gave a speech to the Israeli parliament.
Providence College (PC) in Rhode Island is a small Catholic institution perhaps more famous for its prowess in basketball than for graduating former US Senator Chris Dodd (CT-D) and six term Chicago Mayor Richard Daly. Founded by Dominican Friars in 1917, the college lately finds itself split between its Catholic identity and its commitment to academic freedom and inquiry, especially on issues such as LGBTQ rights. The motto of PC is “Veritas” but truth is sometimes difficult to determine when science and society butt up against religion and dogma.
PC found itself in a bit of a kerfuffle last Fall when …
In returning to my dissertation studies on environmental and ecological history, I’ve noticed something peculiar in my research on the Great Migration—the early twentieth century migration of African Americans from the American South to the northern industrial urban centers—that I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around. The issue concerns historical causality and why populations migrate from one place to another. In explaining the issue, I hope to also indicate where this issue might pose problems from those of us who wish to cling to a mechanical view of capitalism as an internally logically consistent system which of course also happens …
When one considers the complexity of climate modelling, the surprise, to me, is that “97% of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities”; IPCC defines ‘very likely’ as 95% certainty.
As computing power increases, the predictions will become more accurate. Incorporating climate data and observations as they become available into the model helps refine the results and predictions. An example of this is the failure of the model to explain why global average surface air temperatures did not rise as expected between 2001 and 2013, in spite of enormous …
Rain forests around the world are rapidly disappearing due to illegal logging, the growth of palm oil and other plantations, and clearance for cattle raising and other forms of commercial agriculture. Now scientists warn of another threat to the rain forests of Central America — especially those in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and some of their neighbors — this according to a news report in Science Daily for January 30, 2014 (“Drug trafficking leads to deforestation in Central America”).
It seems that the drug war in Mexico, fueled by the misguided anti-drug policies of the United States and the Mexican government (relying …
An epic struggle is currently taking place that will determine the fate, and perhaps the survival, of our species. It is a collision between natural limits and rational awareness of the need to respect those limits, on the one hand, and the forces of blind greed, on the other.
Over the next few years, fundamental questions about who we are as a species really will be answered: Are we fundamentally sane, rational? Or are we a self-destructive failure that will end in the evolutionary dustbin?
As former Conservative energy minister Charles Hendry says, the recent UK floods “have ended political debate …
Bill Moyers of Moyers & Company, on February 21, 2014, interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member, who, during the interview, confirmed what many Americans already suspect: America has become a corporate state, or to use Lofgren’s words, a “Deep State,” which he defines as a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state.
By all appearances, the Deep State that Lofgren references is somewhat similar to the Machtergreifung, aka: seizure of power, in March 1933 in Germany, which meant the government could legislate contrary to the constitution, thereby condemning the constitution to irrelevancy.
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 24th, 2014
Keane Bhatt, a Washington, D.C.-based activist and writer, and a contributing editor to the North American Congress on Latin America: Elite forces in Venezuela and the US are determined to undermine the accomplishments of the Bolivarian revolution.
Who’s in charge? Certainly not the bought-and-paid-for-moderates that Washington and the EU hoped to install as the new government of Ukraine. The agreement that the Washington and EU supported opposition concluded with President Yanukovich to end the crisis did not last an hour. Even the former boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko, who was riding high as an opposition leader until a few hours ago has been booed by the rioters and shoved aside. The newly appointed president by what is perhaps an irrelevant parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov, has no support base among those who overthrew the government. As the BBC reports, “like …
