The Group of Thirty (or G-30) describes itself as “a private, nonprofit, international body composed of very senior representatives of the private and public sectors and academia,” which “aims to deepen understanding of international economic and financial issues, to explore the international repercussions of decisions taken in the public and private sectors, and to examine the choices available to market practitioners and policymakers.”
Its membership consists of roughly thirty major figures in the global financial world, from central banks, academia, international institutions and major private financial institutions. These figures hold regular meetings, conduct research and produce highly-influential reports through various “working …
Chances are dim that elections will be held in Yemen next February. Yet without elections, the push for reforms and change that were inspired by the Yemeni revolution would become devoid of any real value. Yemenis might find themselves back on the street, repeating the original demands that echoed in the country’s many impoverished cities, streets and at every corner.
It is not easy to navigate the convoluted circumstances that govern Yemeni politics, which seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis. When millions of Yemenis started taking to the streets on January 27, 2011, a sense of hope prevailed …
If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.
— Eduardo Galeano
What do you think of this as an argument to use when speaking to those who don’t accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena are man-made?
Well, we can proceed in one of two ways:
We can do our best to limit the greenhouse effect by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were not, in fact, the cause of all the extreme weather phenomena, then we’ve wasted a lot of time, effort and money …
Last week in Switzerland big money staved off an important challenge to big paychecks. But the sentiment that spurred a Swiss effort to tie executive compensation to common workers’ wages will not be defeated so easily.
A Sunday ago Swiss voters said no to a referendum question that would have capped executive compensation at 12 times the lowest paid worker in the firm. After gaining over 130,000 signatures to put the question to voters, proponents of the initiative were overwhelmed by a flood of money claiming a ‘yes’ vote would drive companies away. Early polls found 46% of the Swiss public …
This question arose as part of a conversation about convincing members of Canada’s newest union, Unifor, to make saving the planet from climate change a priority.
“You’ll run up against working class culture,” said a friend who considers himself an anarchist.
“What do you mean?” I responded.
“Consumerism. High paying jobs with lots of overtime to buy ever more stuff, two cars, a big house in the suburbs with NASCAR and hockey on the two big screens in the basement, plus Housewives of Vancouver on the TV in the kitchen,” he said. “And how many thousands of your members …
The Mexican Revolution by Adolfo Gilly is an exhaustive analysis of the Mexican Revolution from a Marxist perspective. Gilly, himself a revolutionary, was introduced to this history while incarcerated at Mexico’s infamous Lecumberri prison in the 1960s. Friedrich Katz describes the radical milieu in the foreword:
The prisoners discussed social, political, and economic problems, lectures were given, and manuscripts were scrutinized and criticized. Octavio Paz concurred with the opinion of U.S. historian, John Womack, when he called the prison… ‘our Institute of Political Science.’
The result of these remarkable conclaves was The Mexican Revolution (2006), first published in Spanish …
Four national parties now endorse dispossession in the Negev
by Dru Oja Jay / December 4th, 2013
Elizabeth May made enemies on both sides of the Israeli-Palestine conflict this week when she accepted to speak at an event organized by Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East (CPJME), then derided that organization as “anti-Israel” in an interview with the B’nai Brith-run Jewish Tribune, then issued a denial that she had called CPJME anti-Israel, provoking the wrath of the Tribune editors, who released a full transcript and recording in which she does in fact denounce CPJME as “anti-Israel.” CPJME then cancelled her speaking event. It was surprisingly flat-footed for someone …
Creating a humanitarian crisis in Syria, whether real or fabricated, and holding the Syrian government responsible for it as a casus belli for foreign military intervention under the UN 2005 so-called “responsibility to protect” initiative was from the very eruption of the Syrian conflict the goal of the US-led “Friends of Syria’ coalition.
Foreign military intervention is now ruled out as impossible, but what the Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin described on last November 29 as “the biggest humanitarian crisis in a decade” was created and this crisis “is worsening and no end is in sight” according to the International Federation of …
Ben Swann Truth in Media takes a look at Vaccine Court established by Congress in 1985 and what that court has meant for families of vaccine injured children. Plus, has HHS secretly awarded families of autistic children damages while publicly stating there is no connection between autism and vaccines.
The PISA scores are out and American students are ranking pretty low. All who follow the corporate line are up in arms and blaming our educational system. For once they are right. Although American students have never scored high in these international tests, it only goes to show that the billions upon billions of dollars spent the last dozen years on testing, testing, testing, curriculum writing by non-teachers, privatization, charter schools, etc. have failed in their mission to remake our public school system for the better. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are abject failures, except for …
Comic relief has become an industry, its own self-justifying premise. In January this year, BBC2 hosted its Great Comic Relief Bake Off. It had four million viewers, meaning that 16.3 percent of the audience was nabbed between 8pm and 9pm on one specific viewing day. The object of this bakeoff – raising funds for the indigent and needy – were the spectres of the moment.
Comic Relief’s origins were not necessarily intended that way. As its website tells readers, “Comic Relief was launched from a refugee camp in Sudan on Christmas Day in 1985, live on BBC One. At that time, …
CALGARY, CANADA — Oil and natural gas drilling in the province of Alberta has turned Calgary in a boomtown. Glittering skyscrapers, monuments to the obscene profits amassed by a fossil fuel industry that is exploiting the tar sands and the vast oil and natural gas fields in Alberta, have transformed Calgary into a mecca for money, dirty politics, greed and industry jobs. The city is as soulless and sterile as Houston. The death of the planet, for a few, is very good for business.
The man who waged North America’s first significant war against hydraulic fracturing was from Alberta, an …
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Holed Below the Water Line
by Felicity Arbuthnot / December 2nd, 2013
Diplomacy: “Tact and skill in dealing with people. The art or practice of conducting international relations, alliances, treaties and agreements … relations between nations.”
As Ministers utter inane, ill-considered, uninformed statements, they also appear to compete as to who can construct the most idiotic policy.
The Minister for Health committed to Health Service of national pride, then shut down a swathe of practical, popular, walk-in health centres — open before and after working hours — with a great public satisfaction rating and which took the burden off overstretched hospital Accident and Emergency Units.
National Health Direct, an excellent medical help line, which advised …
In the late 1990s, the Human Resource rep at the paper mill where I used to work called me at home (I was the union president) and said she had something very serious to discuss. When I asked for a hint as to what the problem was, so I wouldn’t be blind-sided, she demurred. She said this was something she “wasn’t comfortable” discussing over the phone. That alarmed me.
When I arrived, she told me that someone in the mill had stolen coupons out of several bags of Huggies disposable diapers. What made it a serious offense (not that all incidences …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 2nd, 2013
Demonstrations in Israel/Palestine and around the world protest The Prawer-Begin Plan aimed at annexing Bedouin lands for Jewish newcomers in Israel’s Negev Desert.
This is the pathetic nature of this Bennington Ad Cut-out Obama. Truly, a defining moment here, and one there, well, compiled, yes, Obama is rotten to the core, but it’s easy to play the current events and cultural consumerism game with this poser, this little Big Man. What was it, Eisenhower – that beastly thing – pardoned how many in his tenure as CEO of Corporate Amerika? Over 1,100. How many did Ray-Gun Committee on un-American (sic) Activities Ronald pardon? Over 300? We’re talking about incarcerated humans.
Gilad Atzmon and Ken O’Keefe scrutinize the role of language in political discussion and Palestine solidarity discourse in particular. In this segment they examine Zionism, Israel, Jewish tribalism and the usage of the “J word.”
In light of the continued siege on the Gaza Strip, and the silence on the humanitarian crises there, the government realized the need to give a detailed picture of the exacerbating electricity crisis:
The electricity problem is not a problem of the day; it’s an old, sequential one, but its severity differed in relation to the number of cut hours.
1. The focal point of the problem dates back to the first days of the PA’s establishment of the Power Generation Company, as the electricity generated had not been enough to meet the need of the overall population of the Gaza Strip …
Riding his dramatic Iranian breakthrough, President Obama aims to re-ignite his faltering presidency with a Christmas miracle. Interrupting the White House press briefing, Mr. Obama brashly challenged right wing nullification, calling for “a no-holds-barred summit to resolve the most serious and enduring threat to American prosperity: Tea Party Republicans.”
Mindful of past appeasement, Mr. Obama was resolute, like a war-president in the fight of his life:
The Tea Party may not yet boast nuclear centrifuges. But are its endlessly spinning subterfuges any less perilous, any less needy for exposure? My pledge against a nuclear Iran goes double for any insurgent group mounting …
The greatest challenge facing socialist organizations is learning how not to split. A veteran socialist said that in the 1970s. If we had we learned this lesson, the socialist left would be much, much larger today. But we have not learned it, and we remain relatively tiny. Since our primary goal is to grow, we need to examine what are we doing wrong, and what we must do differently.
The following is a contribution to preventing unproductive conflict that compels comrades to leave socialist organizations. It does not apply to productive conflict that clarifies differences and moves things forward. And it …
Militarism, False Patriotism and Remembrance Lead to a Lack of Peace
by Lesley Docksey / November 30th, 2013
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
— John McCrae, In Flanders Fields, May 1915
It was that time of year again, when sellers of poppies knock at the door and veterans line the streets of the local town with collecting tins and trays of fake red flowers sold in aid of the Royal British Legion; a time when, if you don’t buy or wear a poppy, you would be made to feel ‘unpatriotic’. But times they are a-changing.
The ‘Remembrance’ poppy grew out of WWI and became a symbol for that dire and catastrophic war. Catastrophic, that is, …
SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO — Over the last few years, the Zapatistas in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas have garnered very little media attention and been infamously secretive. But although they’ve shifted away from their militant stance of the 1990s and their national political campaigning of the early 2000s, the movement itself isn’t dead.
This summer the Zapatistas opened their communities to teach outsiders what it really means to be a Zapatista today—their day-to-day life and acts of resistance, and their struggles in maintaining autonomy.
From August 11 to 17, Zapatistas ran the first Escuelita Zapatista (Little Zapatista School), a week-long …
This is the season of death, when we celebrate the dying of the sun with an orgiastic burst of consumption and environmental destruction. This is the season of rebirth when we spend time with loved ones and reach out to help others we don’t know.
Now would be an appropriate time to come to grips with public murder and make a public investment in peace. If I were summoning back ghosts of governments past for a press conference at the National Press Club, my first inclination — lasting only a split second — would be to bring the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, …
Simultaneous protests took place on Saturday in Hifa, Tayibe and Jerusalem over Praver Bill — a plan to evict Bedouin communities in the Negev. The Bill has provoked a storm not only amid the Arab MKs who voted against it, but mainly among those it is aimed against, the Bedouin residents of southern Israel.
It seems as if Israel is testing the water examining the reaction to another mass expulsion of Palestinians. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said today “Nothing has changed since the Tower and Stockade days. We are fighting for the lands of the Jewish people and there are those …
This documentary 9/11 in the Academic Community by the producer and filmmaker Adnan Zuberi was bestowed with the “Documentary Achievement Award” at this year’s University of Toronto Film Festival. The documentary focuses on the surprising reluctance of the academic community to examine the events of September 11, 2001. Virtually the entire academic community adopted immediately and uncritically the official narrative about these events. Academics did not ask some of the most elementary questions: What happened on that day? Who planned and executed this complex operation? And who benefited from it?
First Nation divided as RCMP, government give order to vacate
by Meagan Wohlberg / November 30th, 2013
Eagle Watch rebukes the CBC for their failure to cover the unfolding events at Lubicon Lake. “We support the real leadership of Bernard Ominayak. We denounce the puppet regime of Joe Laboucan … Indigenous are fed up. We are fed up with the lies told about us and the white washed history. We are fed up with the destruction of our territories, our land, water and the very air we breathe. We are fed up with being the poorest in the land while foreigners take all the wealth … Jenn Tsun, Anishnaabe Nokomis
I am a graduate of Skidmore College. I majored in social work. I chose to major in social work because there was little else offered that I could relate to personally and politically. Most courses and majors prepared students ideologically and professionally to manage the affairs of US imperialism. By the time I had to declare a major, I was more interested in plotting and planning how to destroy this system rather then learning how to manage its affairs. It did not take very long in the social work program for me to realize social work’s historical and …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / November 29th, 2013
James S. Henry, a leading economist, attorney and investigative journalist who has written extensively about global issues: Sandinista National Liberation Front leader Daniel Ortega is accumulating power and giving tax breaks to the rich instead of addressing inequality.
The greatest danger to Israel is not the putative Iranian nuclear bomb. The greatest danger is the stupidity of our leaders.
This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. A great many of the world’s leaders are plain stupid, and always have been. Enough to look at what happened in Europe in July 1914, when an incredible accumulation of stupid politicians and incompetent generals plunged humanity into World War I.
But lately, Binyamin Netanyahu and almost the entire Israeli political establishment have achieved a new record in foolishness.
Let us start from the end.
Iran is the great victor. It has been warmly welcomed back …
