Life is good if you’re a member of the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, officially known as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). You can crush the Arab Spring at will. You can hire goons all across dar-al-Islam to advance a sectarian Sunni-Shi’ite divide. You can be deeply implicated in the destruction of Syria. You can treat a significant part of your own population as third-class citizens.
Not only you get away with it; you get rewarded with expensive toys. And in one particular case – Saudi Arabia – even with a two-year seat at the UN Security Council.
US relations with Venezuela illustrate the specific mechanisms with which an imperial power seeks to sustain client states and overthrow independent nationalist governments. By examining US strategic goals and its tactical measures, we can set forth several propositions about (1) the nature and instruments of imperial politics, (2) the shifting context and contingencies influencing the successes and failures of specific policies, and (3) the importance of regional and global political alignments and priorities. ((James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Imperialism and Capitalism in the 21st Century (Ashgate: London 2013).))
Developing divisions
Participation is a cornerstone of the democratic ideal. It sits alongside those other marginalized tenets: social justice, freedom, and equality. Forgotten principles in a world of corporate politics driven by the quest for endless economic growth and maximum market share. Hailed as the world’s largest democracy and touted as ‘an emerging economic powerhouse’, India’s economy is beginning to cough and splutter with the rupee trading at an all time low, and the ‘current account’ showing an $88 billion deficit.
A decade of 9% growth has created 55 US$ billionaires, a new and burgeoning middle class and a vast …
[Note: Since the lifting of the federal court gag order on October 2, Ladar Levison and his company, Lavabit, have been getting some media attention (including a somewhat snide and incomplete story on page one of the New York Times). What follows in an effort to reconstruct at least the outline of a personal nightmare inflicted by our government on a small business owner who had done no wrong, even in the government’s eyes – at least until he started taking his constitutional rights seriously.]
The Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution is anti-police-state
I am now hot on the trail of another story, around smart justice, those alternatives to counties and municipalities building more unconstitutional prisons for profit, prisons for putting in jail people who have very little resemblance to criminals. You know, recently houseless, or those with some big life force that has jiggered with their emotional and psychological anti-tilting qualities in their heads that sometimes take them off the “path.” You know, people in transition and people facing problems, much of them created by a society that scoffs at the very real and only-life saving philosophy and action plan: “It takes …
Reuters recently released an investigative report on the practice of “re-homing” adopted children. The five-part series reverberated throughout media outlets exposing a dirty little secret within the adoption community. The articles describe adoptive parents, who – sometimes within months, even days, of adopting – become disenchanted or overwhelmed and turn to Internet websites, social media, and discussion boards where they place ads offering up their unwanted sons and daughters to total strangers willing to take them off their hands.
Within hours or days of meeting online, trade-offs occur in hotel and MacDonald’s parking lots. Terrified, innocent children are dropped off …
From the narrow windows of New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, 24-year-old anarchist Jerry Koch can see the last place he stood as a free person.
The federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street is a familiar setting where Koch spent much of his time over the past several years providing legal support to New York activists. During Occupy Wall Street, Koch gained a reputation as the go-to person for help contacting lawyers, raising bail, and organizing supporters to be there when someone had a hearing or was released. This, his supporters say, is why he now has a view of the …
In Canada it is illegal to restrict the sale of property to certain ethnic or religious groups but many of our business people and politicians promote an organization that does exactly that in Israel.
Into the 1950s restrictive land covenants in many exclusive neighbourhoods and communities across Canada made it impossible for Jews, Blacks, Chinese, Aboriginals and others deemed to be non-’white’ to buy property. It was not until after World War II that these policies began to be successfully challenged in court.
In 1948 Annie Noble decided to sell a cottage in the exclusive Beach O’ Pines subdivision on Lake Huron …
For over two weeks now, a coalition of people including local Mi’kmaq residents, and anglophone and Acadian settlers, have blockaded the road leading to an equipment compound leased to South Western Energy or SWN.
To start, click on the above video box.
SWN is a Texas based energy company, that has been attempting to conduct natural gas exploration in the area’s shale formations. It is believed that if significant deposits of gas are found, SWN would then employ the controversial extraction method of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. But since this past summer, protests, direct actions and sabotage have thwarted their work, …
US and world political and economic leaders are faced with what they describe as a ‘systemic catastrophe’: the inability to pay global creditors, including domestic and foreign banks, investors and governments, who hold $16.7 trillion in US Treasury notes. There is a related crisis: the government cannot secure passage of a budget to finance its military and civilian agencies and activities, including large-scale payments to military contractors, the financing of business, agriculture and banking operations and social programs. The raising of the debt-ceiling is central to the functioning of the financial ruling class as it extracts hundreds …
Why are greenhouse gas emissions not being drastically curtailed? As carbon dioxide levels rise, temperatures rise, oceans become more acidic, polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, the atmosphere absorbs more water. Floods, hurricanes and droughts become more frequent and more destructive.
Science makes it clear that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—and biofuels.
In September 2013 scientists on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their conclusion: the burning of fossil fuels at current levels will lead to devastating warming within this century. In 2012, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study reached the …
by Medea Benjamin and Pam Bailey / October 17th, 2013
The negotiations this week in Geneva between Iran and the “P5+1” (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany) offer a promising vehicle for avoiding another destructive war. The talks came on the heels of a virtual uprising by the American people that stopped President Barack Obama’s plan to attack Syria, clearly demonstrating their desire to solve conflicts at the negotiation table rather than at the point of a gun.
However, Israel and its allies in the U.S. Congress continue to lobby against a deal that would …
When the Coders come marching home again, Hurrah! Hurrah! We’ll give them a hearty welcome then Hurrah! Hurrah! The unemployed men will cheer and the boys and girls will Tweet The ladies they will all turn on their apps And we’ll all feel gay and dead when the Coders come marching home.
Data-data-data-. Big data. How many ways to study, self-correct, study, crunch numbers, survey, monkey-around with more data, report data, white paper the things, have conferences, daily meetings on data, and new ways to collect data. Oh, the Coders are doing their job, helping the Administrative Class and the Gates Foundation and …
Is the U.S. Government working on a program to…well…program the way you view religion?
A whistleblower who has worked on that program says yes and he wants you to know exactly what has been going on.
The first step towards truth is to be informed.
http://youtu.be/19u2twNseXo
If I told you that the Defense Department was using taxpayer dollars to learn how to influence people with religious beliefs in order to control those beliefs, would it really surprise you?
Would you think that I am a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist?
Would you care if I told you that the program was aimed at controlling fundamentalist …
A hermit back from deep forest haunts, perusing the wings of online punditry, would be staggered by pervasive, oddly-parallel End of Times bombshells. Throw in frazzled ecosystem scientists for a third homily on looming Armageddon. While right wingers with crackers for brains bewail how Obamacare and ruinous debts are sure to bankrupt American, if not western civilization, left wing voices snicker, “what civilization”?
Hail the Age of Apocalypse, a step up from the 20th C.’s Age of Anxiety or the 19th C.’s Great Awakening. While belief systems diverge widely, partisans rounding out the edges sound a similar drumbeat: our world is …
Our family legal system is built around inheritance rights. Yet it considers those rights only in monetary terms. Medical science is imploring us to rethink genetic inheritance rights as well. Reproductive technologies force us to consider if our genetic material is ours – solely – once it has been shared through natural reproduction or in a laboratory resulting in another life. If your genetic material, your DNA, becomes part of another human being, what right of privacy do you have, whether you raise the child or …
Two recent images encapsulate the message behind the dry statistics of last week’s report by the World Bank on the state of the Palestinian economy.
The first is a poster from the campaigning group Visualising Palestine that shows a photoshopped image of Central Park, eerily naked. Amid New York’s skyscrapers, the park has been sheared of its trees by bulldozers. A caption reveals that since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has uprooted 800,000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians, enough to fill 33 Central Parks.
The second, a photograph widely published last month in Israel, is of a French diplomat lying on …
Late at night, I sit alone in the office of The Afghan Peace Volunteer’s house in Kabul. The mountain cold wrapped itself around me. I finally got the Internet to work and found a message from Rashad, a good friend of mine in Sudan. I feel all the muscles in my chest tighten. Rashad wrote that in the protests in the streets of Khartoum our dear friend Mousaab had been shot and murdered by the police. I froze. Below his words is a picture of Mousaab bathed in his own blood in the back of a pickup truck. I …
Something about the Canucks versus Canadiens game last weekend has stayed with me, producing a mental itch that won’t go away.
No, it wasn’t the Canucks scoring on their own net, although that was one of the most ridiculous own goals in the history of professional hockey.
It was in a break from the action when my TV screen filled with beautiful images of crystal clear streams, healthy salmon and pristine British Columbia back country. A kind and gentle voice praised the incredible environment that Mother Nature has bestowed on this province. One felt a sense of soothing comfort, tinged with pride …
The election for mayor of New York City is less that a month away and Bill de Blasio’s lead in the polls appears insurmountable (about a 50 point lead), Joe Lhota’s attempts to curry favor with New Yorkers by red baiting de Blasio’s progressive activism has back fired on the Republican as the Democrat’s favorable rating has increased since the initial attack.
Lhota has now taken a new tack– to denounce de Blasio’s plan to guarantee a living wage to New Yorkers who work at projects that are subsidized by the city. This proposal has aroused the ire of the business …
Wow. Hurricane. Didn’t do any damage to Bushwick, Brooklyn (nothing does) except blow apart the lawn-chairs and roof-garden. X. still lives with her parents in New Jersey. I was there only days before the hurricane; weather-wise it was “Spring.”
Enter: Climate Change, stage Extreme Right. Blow apart the “burbs” and lower Manhattan. NYU was shutdown for a week, giving X. a much-needed vacation. She said trees had been scattered all over the Garden State, as well as the looser parts of peoples homes — outdoor lighting fixtures, shutters, lawn furniture, etc. My sister, her husband, and my three-year-old nephew were without …
Warning! The Lab contains war-porn and hard-core evil; watch and weep.
Yotam Feldman’s documentary, released in August, is one of the most important exposés of the obscene rationale and execution of Israel’s hugely lucrative arms and security industries through the voices of some of its ex-military key operators: Amos Golan, Shimon Naveh, Leo Gleser, and Yoav Galant.
Israel’s armament juggernaut currently turns over $7 billion p.a. and its phenomenal success is, as Feldman reveals, due to experience, that is, the testing of weaponry on the Palestinian population in the Israeli military ‘labs’ of Gaza and the West Bank:
On October 12, tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets of Eden in the South of the country, mostly demanding secession from the north. The date is significant, for it marks the 1967 independence of South Yemen, ending several decades of British colonialism. But for nearly five decades since then, Yemen is yet to find political stability, a semblance of economic prosperity, and, most importantly, settle the question of its national identity.
It has been two years and nine months since a large protest has occurred in the Yemeni capital. Sana’a initiated what was quickly named the Yemeni revolution …
Narcissism, the Veracity of Information, and MOOCs
The craze of “social media” shows no sign of abating despite its obvious flaws. I bracket the term with some hesitation since it is somewhat of a misnomer. The term as it is used denotes electronic technology which permits nearly real time exchanges of text, images, video, and audio, but such exchanges are not without precedent as older technologies, such as the telephone, television, radio, and email have permitted such exchanges: albeit separately depending upon the media appropriate to the domain of the older technologies. The single distinguishing factor of social media such as …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 16th, 2013
On October 3 2013, Ecuador’s National Assembly authorized the project to drill for oil in the Yasuni National forest, which is a biosphere reserve and home of endemic tribes and unique animal species.
Should the “right” of a foreign corporation to make a profit trump governments’ attempts to create local jobs, improve environmental regulations, or establish laws that raise royalty rates? Most Canadians would say no.
But that’s what the Conservative government is pushing poor countries to accept if they want Canadian investment.
Barely noticed in the media, Canada recently concluded negotiations on a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement (FIPA) with the West African country of Côte d’Ivoire. In a press release Minister for La Francophonie Christian Paradis said: “The investment agreement announced today will provide better protection for Canadian companies operating in Côte …
Some of the corporate interests that are steering the U.S.-Canada Beyond the Border integration agenda are not quite satisfied with its progress so far and they would like the implementation process to be accelerated. The bilateral initiative which was launched almost two years ago promotes a shared vision for perimeter security. It seeks to improve information sharing between security agencies. Under the agreement, both countries are moving towards a coordinated entry/exit system and are developing a harmonized cargo security strategy. In addition, the U.S. and Canada are strengthening integrated cross-border intelligence sharing and law enforcement operations. Canada’s own electronic eavesdropping …
The adage, a picture is worth a thousand words, well, funny stuff in our collective simpleton world of quips. In the end, though, we have to be quip thinkers, lovers of the football-mainstream mush, just to understand these folk. Look hard at these Guardian photos — the death masks of politics, poli-trick-tians, pols.
The most insulated people on earth, and, well, sure, there is that prime sick thing, Zuckerberg (scroll down to the troll) , and his values, his marriage, his backdoor to the government, to the corporation for proctology 101 fun.
