January 2011
27 posts
Secret Palestine documents expose sham “peace... →
The arrogance and hostility with which imperialism treats not only the Palestinians but every oppressed people and the working class all over the world was summed up in a remark by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and recorded in one of the transcripts. Dismissing claims on behalf of the millions of Palestinians condemned to exile, statelessness and bare subsistence in squalid...
Obama outlines right-wing, pro-corporate agenda in... →
Obama displayed utter callousness and indifference toward the social distress of tens of millions of Americans. There was virtually no reference to unemployment or the staggering growth of economic inequality, and no proposals for creating jobs for the 17 million workers who are jobless or forced to subsist on part-time and temporary work.
The words “poverty,” “foreclosures,” “hunger” and...
Workers take over Mérida newspapers →
“We are sure we will get the support we need at a national level,” Vega said. “People have said, ‘If you want to see a real revolution, come here, where the workers have taken over and will not leave until their rights are respected, where workers have taken over a media outlet for the first time here in Venezuela.’”
Digging in a Hole →
Robin Hahnel:
There are two important lessons to be drawn. (1) While socialists should not have to lead the charge for Keynesian policies to ameliorate capitalist crises, unfortunately that is the position we find ourselves in. Right now we must not only do our own work – explaining why all versions of capitalism are far less desirable than participatory, democratic socialism – but do the work...
Rax Interview with Media Lens →
It’s important to access a wide range of resources and perspectives. You need to be aware of the establishment view of any particular issue as propagated across newspapers, radio and television. To challenge this view, you could then see what some of the more well-known campaign groups say on the same issue – for example, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth,...
Fancy words: Osculate me, Kate | The Economist →
WE’VE moved our New York offices to a new building with one of those television screens in the elevator. You know the kind: a 3-second weather forecast, business tip of the day, capsule news, adverts.
Today there was a “Word of the Day: osculate: v. to kiss.” And weirdly, this pinched a nerve in me, and I now have to say it plain. I hate the word-of-the-day business:...
Money and the Midterms: Are the Parties Over? →
Thomas Ferguson:
People who were hailing Obama as a new FDR were viewing American politics through the wrong lens. They were treating public policy as the result of the will of voters. But in fact, American political parties are mostly bank accounts. What you are told is the voice of the people is usually the sound of money talking.
Much of my research has been devoted to showing how both...
Guest Media Alert — Tilting Towards Israel →
Jonathan Cook:
Despite the Guardian’s international reputation as the Western newspaper most savagely critical of Israel’s actions, I quickly realised that there were, in fact, very clear, and highly unusual, limitations on what could be written about Israel.
Tim Llewellyn, later:
“As far as I know, no enraged phalanx of Zionist commissars sits in on BBC editorial decision-making and...
Brazilian Troops, and MINUSTAH, Should Leave Haiti →
Mark Weisbrot:
MINUSTAH has basically replaced the hated Haitian army, which President Aristide abolished, as a repressive force. Washington will not allow democracy in Haiti, because Haitians would inevitably choose a left government.
(via Instapaper)
New Evidence Suggests Ken Saro-Wiwa Was Framed →
Spinwatch:
Fifteen years after the execution of Nigerian playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, new compelling evidence has surfaced that suggests that the Nigerian military killed the four Ogoni elders that Saro-Wiwa was later accused of murdering.
The new evidence also reveals that the soldier’s commander, the notorious Lt Col Okuntimo, who was implicated in murder and rape, was being...
Spinwatch: How BP Drafted Brussels’ Climate... →
Lobbyists for BP and other energy firms drafted climate change legislation that secured a nine billion euro subsidy from taxpayers, internal documents reveal.
The sum covers the entire cost of new technology for cutting carbon emissions from ‘dirty’ coal-fired power stations, saving energy firms from having to pay for it themselves.
Emails obtained by Spinwatch show how the industry...
Hablen español, already | The Economist →
Also unmentioned is one of the reasons relatively few people master the minority languages: Francisco Franco’s una bandera, una patria, una lengua policies, which forbade everything from Catalan names to shop-signs in Basque. These gave the minority regions enduring grievances, grievances which are inflamed when Castilian-speakers (and outsiders) treat them as pests for wanting to speak their...
Lanny Davis’ African human rights disaster →
Last April, when Democratic lobbyist Lanny Davis was hired by the government of Equatorial Guinea, he declared himself the “reform counsel” for the longtime dictator of the small, oil-rich African nation. Davis’ fee was $1 million per year plus expenses, and he and his client, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, promised widespread reforms and a new respect for human rights.
But...
Latin America Deepens Israeli Isolation →
At first, when the new string of recognitions began last month, Israel expressed “regret”, “sadness” and “disappointment”.
A Foreign Ministry statement called such moves “counterproductive” and “damaging” to peace.
I.e. “The more countries that recognise Palestine, the more Palestinians we’re going to kill.”
“What’s Not Published in Venezuela Is What Media... →
Eleazar Diaz Rangel, the editor-in-chief of Ultimas Noticias, Venezuela’s highest-circulating newspaper, stressed at a seminar on Venezuela’s democracy taking place this weekend in New York that “what’s not published in Venezuela is what media owners don’t want published.”
Rangel, who participated in the seminar’s final panel, noted that he has asked for evidence of news not being...
Honduras: Ten Murders and No Justice
But the press is not only a victim of murders in Honduras. Other problems are censorship and self-censorship, which could be aggravated if a new law aimed at regulating news coverage of violence and crime is passed.
…
The bill, which will begin to be debated in early 2011, would censor “any internationally broadcast news… that hurts the image of the country and scares off tourism and...
Bill McKibben: Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Point →
Political reality is hard to change, harder than ever since the Supreme Court delivered its Citizens United decision [which allows corporations to donate to politicians directly] and loosed floods of more money into our political world. But physics and chemistry are downright impossible to shift. Physics and chemistry don’t bargain. So the president, and all the rest of us, had really better...
2011: A Brave New Dystopia →
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia...
Vietnam: the last battle →
Pilger:
The year was 1978. Vietnam was being punished for seeing off the last US helicopter gunship, the war’s creation; the last B-52 with its ladders of bombs silhouetted against the flash of their carnage; the last C-130s that had dumped, the US Senate was told, “a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population”, causing a “foetal catastrophe”; the last of a...
Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion →
Chris Hedges:
I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our...
The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum →
“Repression does not target original thought,” Davis noted. “It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as communism may in the next stage become general paralysis of social thought.”
It is...
Washington’s “humanitarian” war and the KLA’s... →
The KLA’s crimes only came to light at all because of the unravelling of an ongoing cover-up by the US, the United Nations and other major powers. Information about KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and across the border in Albania first reached the International Centre for the Red Cross in 2000, after KLA fighters reported that Serb civilians were taken there in 1999 and their organs removed...
‘Bailout’ Capitalism: Two Years On →
Dean Baker:
These bailouts led many to become concerned about the increasing role government played in the economy. Some conservatives in the US even raised the uniquely American alarm over ‘socialism’.
Now that the world has pulled back from the financial crisis and some time has passed, it should be very clear that this spate of intervention had nothing to with socialism – or even an...
The European Central Bank Sinks Ireland →
Dean Baker:
There is no serious argument for an unaccountable central bank. While no one expects or wants parliaments to micromanage monetary policy, the ECB and other central banks should be clearly accountable to elected bodies. It would be interesting to see how they can justify their plans for subjecting Ireland and other countries to double-digit unemployment for years to come.
(via...
Recount and Review of Haiti’s Election Tally Shows... →
“This election was of questionable legitimacy to begin with because the electoral authorities banned over a dozen political parties, including the country’s most popular political party,” said Weisbrot. “But with this massive level of irregularity, fraud, and disenfranchisement, it can hardly be considered a legitimate election.”
“Put the Palestinians on a Diet” →
“No mentions in any of the major English-language newspapers or wire services of the fact that someone had revealed the actual Israeli government policy towards the Gaza Palestinians is to force a ‘deliberate reduction’ in their access to the necessities of everyday survival.”
It takes a peculiar form of social malaise for this astonishing media silence to be maintained in ostensibly free...
World Bank Complicit in Massacre →
Rights Action:
The “free” market cannot correct the damage it has done, further investing in the same actors and under the same policy framework that generated climate change cannot reverse it.
To reverse climate change, the wealthiest nations and people of the world must change how they live. Indigenous and campesino communities have more sustainable ways of life, have learned to live...