July 2010
33 posts
Noam Chomsky interview with Kontext (DE) →
Europe has by comparative standards pretty decent welfare systems. That wasn’t given by some gift from above. It was given because there was an adversarial culture. There were popular movements that were strong enough so that they could demand it. So that is what an adversarial culture is.
(via Instapaper)
Newsweek’s Name-Calling Neoliberal →
Hilariously biased reporting from Mac Margolis, Newsweek’s man in Latin America.
(via Instapaper)
Obama Is Secretly Deploying Elite U.S. Forces to... →
Jeremy Scahill:
The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the Philippines. These teams have also at...
The World Cup war →
Pepe Escobar:
As leading Uruguayan writer - and football fanatic - Eduardo Galeano once said, “FIFA is the IMF of football.” Much like the International Monetary Fund, the Federation Internationale de Football Association is obscenely wealthy, extremely powerful and run like a hyper-exclusive club. FIFA was founded in 1904. Only 310 people work at the headquarters in Zurich. And only around...
Seth Freedman never met a massacre he didn’t like →
@jamiesw on top form.
(via Instapaper)
The Greeks Get It →
Chris Hedges:
Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay...
“Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the...”
– Chris Hedges —This Country Needs a Few Good Communists (via Instapaper)
“With us, we’re more concerned about the casualties I think. We’re troubled more,...”
– David Leigh on Democracy Now!
Yeah, sure, you’re more concerned.
“We don’t like this war, it’s a mess.
Why are we here? It’s all gone wrong!”
– David Leigh, talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
“It’s all gone wrong”, not “the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral”. What you’d expect from a Western corporate journalist.
The doves’ Vietnam critique, part two →
A couple of quotes from the “excellent analysis” that Amy Davidson wrote for The New Yorker, which everyone seems to be linking to:
Can we expect them [the Afghans] to understand that we mean well when we hit the wrong house with a strike from one of our drones—which, according to these documents, are less effective than we’d like to think? How does our talk about democracy sound to them?
...
“If it says friendly action, however, it means an engagement in which our side —...”
– David Leigh, the Guardian
How the Guardian reports civilian casualties in... →
The Guardian:
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed “blue on white” in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.
Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result...
“On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.”
– Ernest Jones, Chartist and socialist, 1851 (in John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire)
Gunning for the money →
Good piece by Solomon Hughes looking at where British military types end up when they leave government. (Hint: They’ve got “conflict of interest” written all over them.)
Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima →
Tom Eley:
In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who...
Raoul Moat: sick in sick society | Socialist... →
Jean Charles de Menezes: shoot to kill in... →
A cracking piece by Simon Basketter about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, five years ago today. An excerpt below, but make sure you read the whole thing.
Jean Charles’ death is told as story of a regrettable but unavoidable incident. The official tale is one of “confusion” and “chaos”, with police doing their best to prevent a terrorist outrage in difficult circumstances.
According...
Bill McKibben: The World’s Biggest Environmental... →
So — whew — the bleeding seems finally to have been staunched, three months after BP stabbed its hole in the bottom of the sea.
[…]
But here’s the thing: Over that same period, if you add up all the carbon being burned in all the cars and factories and power plants, we had the equivalent of at least 5,000 Deepwater Horizons pouring carbon into the atmosphere, every minute of every day...
“We will not fight Israelis with weapons, stones or knives, but with our free...”
– “Maryam 3”, quoted in IPS: Women Prepare to Set Sail Past Israel
Belfast burning →
leninology:
Allow me to be your native informer, as I explain the three Bs to you: bog-trotting bastards in balaclavas.
“From the same lexicon of modern imperial euphemisms have come ‘good...”
– John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, 2006, page 21
‘One Long Struggle for Justice’ →
Howard Zinn, in his last broadcast interview:
It’s easy to become discouraged because you look around at the world, you look at the wars going on, you look at what’s happening to the environment, and you look at how little is being done to stop war, how little is being done to help poor people. You look at the situation in Haiti and you see how not enough has been done to help the people of...
“As I told my students at the start of my courses, “You can’t be neutral on a...”
– Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, page 17
“Not only is journalistic ‘objectivity’ impossible, the attempt to achieve it is...”
– David Edwards & David Cromwell, Newspeak in the 21st Century, pages 239-240
Chalmers Johnson · The Looting of Asia →
Why has the US pursued such divergent policies towards postwar Germany and Japan? Why was the peace treaty written in the way it was? Many reasons have been offered over the years, including that Japan was too poor to pay, that these policies were necessary to keep postwar Japan from ‘going Communist’, and that the Emperor and Japanese people had been misled into war by a cabal of insane...
A Journalist’s Responsibility →
Dahr Jamail:
I’ve been accused of being a populist. As a journalist, that’s a compliment and that’s how I’d like to be perceived. I feel it’s my job to go where the silence is, to give people a voice who are outside the government or major media outlets. I think it’s our job as journalists to monitor the centers of power and take them to task; to make them prove what they’re saying and to make...
Hugo Chávez's government: The wrecking of... →
The Economist:
[Chávez] derives his legitimacy from the ballot box. He has been elected three times, and won four referendums. …
Public opinion still matters in Venezuela. Remarkably, opinion polls show that two Venezuelans out of five still support Mr Chávez (higher than the proportion of the British electors who voted for the Conservative Party, the senior partner in the country’s new...
“When a Vietnamese official suggested (in 1975) that the U.S. send food aid to...”
– Manufacturing Consent - Herman & Chomsky (via ashleighlgray)
Such a brilliant book.
Hugo Chávez’s First Decade in Office:... →
An absolutely brilliant article. It is a very thoughtful analysis of the achievements and shortcomings of Chávez’s government. If you want to understand the current, internal situation for Venezuela’s government it is a must-read.
I must warn you that it’s from Latin American Perspectives, a scholarly journal, with the introduction and conclusion in particular using academic language. It’s also...
