April 2010
24 posts
Venezuela: New moves to build people's power →
Chavez said on March 5: “We are not here to carry out a reform, no!
“This is a revolution, and if we are not clear about what we are dealing with, we could end up carrying out a simple reform so that nothing changes in the end.”
(via Instapaper)
Militaryspeak and the media: a suitable case for... →
Today, along with the militarisation of our politics and culture goes the militarisation of our language. Time after time, Fleet Street trots out the dull, all too predictable, unimaginative, worn-out metaphors of warfare, fighting and battle.
By Professor Richard Keeble.
(via Instapaper)
Haiti Relief Effort Needs Immediate Ramp-Up to... →
Beginning in the 1980s, subsidized U.S. rice wiped out thousands of Haitian rice farmers and made the country dependent on imported food. […]
Chemonics, which has received multiple contracts totaling tens of millions of dollars from USAID, is a subsidiary of ERLY Industries, which is also the parent company of American Rice Corporation, a major beneficiary of the policies that Clinton...
21st Century Socialism - Otto J. Reich →
This piece by coup-backer extraordinaire Otto Reich is just hilarious. You should read the whole thing, but here’s my favourite part:
Chávez has turned Venezuela over to the Castro regime. Today, there are between 40,000 and 50,000 Cubans in Venezuela on official missions, by the Chávez regime’s own admission.
Most of whom are medical personnel working in Mission Barrio Adentro, part...
NGO highlights '150,000 murders by paramilitaries' →
From Colombia Reports.
Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot →
The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused—often falsely—of assisting Goldstone’s U.N. investigators. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu...
Time is running out for victims of Colombia's... →
Naturally, because the conflict’s not over.
Washington's Indonesian Bully Boys →
According to senior Indonesian officials and police and details from government files, the US-backed Indonesian armed forces (TNI), now due for fresh American aid, assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009. The killings were part of a secret government program, authorized from Jakarta, and were coordinated in part by an active-duty, US-trained general in the special forces unit...
Higher Education and the New Philistines →
What kind of democracy is it—no less one that aspires to ‘teach’ other cultures about democracy and freedom—which, rather than widening access to higher education, chooses to turn its young people solely into ‘skilled’ workers to service the needs of the better-off? Skilled people need not be uninformed or badly-read people. The idea that skills and studying are two separate things is absurd...
NATO'S FIRE SALE - ONE DEAD AFGHAN CHILD, $2,000 →
Nothing must question the state ideology that, while “mistakes” might happen, the aims of the government are benevolent.
(via Instapaper)
A Political Correction at the NYT: Using the Wrong... →
NYT says East Jerusalem is not part of the West Bank.
What Is The Real Threat to Democracy in the U.S.A.... →
Déjà vu? Yes, you have been there before. They are trying to relive the “cold war” in Latin America, the good old days when the so-called National Security Doctrine provided the cover necessary to topple governments, and torture and massacre anyone who attempted to defend their fundamental rights when those rights got in the way of economic interests. In Central America alone it cost about...
Video: Charles Bowden on “Murder City: Ciudad...
Wow.
It’s best to watch it at full-size over at Democracy Now.
The War Next Door →
If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000...
Mexico: City of darkness →
Last week, the Financial Times went to talk to a restaurant owner it had interviewed a year ago. An employee said the proprietor had been dragged away in early January by armed men as he waited on tables one lunchtime; his bullet-ridden body was discovered the next day.
(via Instapaper)
Understanding North Korea →
How do you explain the surprising resilience of the North Korean regime? How did it manage to survive when similarly repressive regimes collapsed throughout eastern Europe?
The North Korean regime was both more repressive and more nationalist than its Eastern European counterparts. Before the Korean War, during it, and in the immediate aftermath, the regime successfully eliminated all...
Colluding With Extremists | New Left Project →
Why is analysis such as yours so marginalised? Why do we not hear similar analysis from the mainstream media?
These are inconvenient truths that the elite have no interest in revealing. Snippets of reality are often captured in part of the mainstream print media (often buried within much longer articles with a misleading title), but they are often drowned out by a chorus of more convenient...
Michelle Alexander: The Age of Obama as a Racial... →
Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually...
Community Media: The Thriving Voice of the... →
Venezuelans are making their own news, reporting their own stories and are unmasking the lies and manipulations that the corporate media has controlled for so long.
Perhaps a bit dry, but very interesting, particularly if you compare it to the situation in the UK.
In Lincoln the “community” radio station, Siren FM, has much in common with a BBC (state) local radio station (for...
Greenspan’s Nightmare Is Much of the World’s Dream →
Is there something wrong with this picture, that one of the world’s most powerful economic decision makers (at the time), dreads the decline of mass unemployment and rising wages among people making 80 cents an hour?
I love Mark Weisbrot.
(via Instapaper)
John Feffer: Can Japan Say No to Washington? →
You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa — an island prefecture almost 1,000 miles south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen U.S. bases and 75% of American forces in Japan — is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to...
“Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here, and maybe we have...”
– Martin Luther King Jr., 1968
The Science of 3d Explained →
“Either way, they still look like bloody Smurfs.”
“Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency behind the poster campaign, are also...”
– Labour’s election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon | The Guardian