December 2010
9 posts
The EU’s ugly resource grab →
Mark Curtis:
EU trade policy has long been hijacked by European business, which wants raw materials at cheap prices. EU priorities are a mirror image of positions adopted by corporate lobby groups. The commission frankly states: “We will rely on EU business to provide much of the information on the barriers which affect their trade or investment with third countries”. There is a serious risk...
The party game is over. Stand and fight →
Pilger, again:
The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public’s...
The party game is over. Stand and fight →
Pilger:
David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder. Today, they are claiming 21st-century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a “deficit crisis”. A deficit of 10 per cent is not...
Kill the panda →
Pandas are the perfect example of natural selection working perfectly. They suck at living, and should naturally go extinct. Why are we interfering?
Mexico’s New Dirty War →
The drug war serves as a convenient cover for the new repression. In Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua, numerous activists have been murdered or disappeared since 2008, the year when a war erupted between two competing cartels and the army was dispatched to ostensibly quell the violence.
(via Instapaper)
C’mon, time to rebrand your life! →
The pursuit of profit in sport now seems unrelenting. Having said goodbye to foreign sports writers and their platitudinous eulogies for the “rainbow nation”, the South African treasury reckons it put $5bn into the World Cup, while corporate sponsors took home more than $4bn in tax-free profits. All those corporate parties, free tickets, kickbacks and other “gifts” merely indulged a...
Retribution for a World Lost in Screens →
We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.
(via Instapaper)
Blackwater’s Black Ops →
Over the past several years, entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The...
High Court reprieve for UCL student occupation →
One for those who think student protests should be completely passive and peaceful:
The occupation of the Wilkin Building began on November 23 and has received widespread support, including from journalist and film-maker John Pilger and Bourne Identity director Paul Greengrass.
Mr Pilger said student resistance across Britain was “one of the most important and exciting developments in my...