August 2010
20 posts
“This guy’s like Gandhi, but better; he likes puppets. I love puppets. I...”
– Dwayne the bartender
“They’ve got their little categories, like ‘conscious’ and...”
– Mos Def
“Throughout the rich world, government has simply got too big and Mr Cameron’s...”
– The Economist, again. The cuts are necessary because “government has simply gotten too big”, they say. What a well-reasoned argument. I’m an anarchist at heart, so, generally, the smaller government the better. But the proposed cuts will wreck services and lives, strengthening private companies and...
“Teachers and doctors (many of whom supported Mr Clegg) seldom welcome change.”
– The Economist, brushing aside opposition to the cuts. Those doctors and teachers are just stuck in their ways, you see.
‘Surge’ smoke follows Petraeus to Afpak →
Pepe Escobar:
The heart of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in the south and southeast don’t want Karzai, don’t want Petraeus, don’t want surge, don’t want US and don’t want NATO. They want to be left alone to rule their local tribal land as they see fit. And to top it off, all those strands lumped as “Taliban” believe in their...
WikiLeaks has a problem going mainstream | Colin... →
For all the freedom that the internet grants users, we still ask that the kind of information in “collateral murder” be interpreted for us. That interpretation and contextualisation of the footage took place on a more traditional medium: TV news and opinion programmes. There it fell victim in the very system it tried to undermine. It became part of a homogeneous message of The Way Things Are.
...
Tom Hazeldine: The North Atlantic Counsel →
A good, thorough piece about the how the International Crisis Group pushes for war.
Only a political and media mainstream complaisant about NATO adventurism could mistake Crisis Group for a muscular but essentially peace-loving NGO, as though it were the armed wing of Amnesty International.
(via Instapaper)
Blair's blood money →
ashleighlgray:
The advisory committee on business appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets an estimated £2m a year for “advising” investment bank JPMorgan and undisclosed sums from other financial services companies. He makes...
“[New Colombian president] Santos comes to power on a wave of public support,...”
– Al-Jazeera, who didn’t mention that turnout was about 45%.
The Honduran Business Elite One Year After the... →
Though this may seem like a return to the country’s violent past, Dr. Juan Almendares, the former rector of the country’s biggest university, says there is an important difference between the repression following the 2009 coup and the war against the Honduran people fought throughout the 1980s. “It’s important to understand that in the eighties the direct confrontation was more the political...
New President-Elect, Same Old Story →
Former Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos was elected president with the votes of just 30 percent of all voters on the electoral rolls, while turnout stood at a mere 45 percent in this country caught up in a civil war since 1964.
It’d be interesting to see a demographic breakdown of those that voted.
(via Instapaper)
Torturers Lurking Behind Uniforms →
IPS article on the widespread use of torture in Latin America, focusing mostly on Venezuela and Colombia. Utterly horrific.
(via Instapaper)
Mistah McChrystal — he dead →
Pepe Escobar spells out why the West are in Afghanistan:
So what’s “the mission” in AfPak? For the Obama team it’s rather to use Afghanistan as a pawn to expand the already abysmal fissure between the US and Iran, and to throw Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia at each other’s throats.
But for the industrial-military complex it goes way beyond....
All's fair in cuts and war | Terry Jones →
Did you notice there was one department that didn’t figure in the budget cuts?
Yes, it was the Ministry of Defence. Which is pretty surprising, since the UK spends more on its military than Russia. In fact, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last year it was the world’s third biggest spender on military matters. We can be proud that our country, in 2009, a...
The asylum seekers who survive on £10 a week →
“People think we should give asylum only to those who have a genuine need, not to those who have a so-called bogus claim,” she says. “But what people don’t understand is that the system is not fair. People don’t flee their country unless they have a very good reason for doing so, and it is difficult to prove what happened to you unless you have scars from torture up your arms. The fact that you...
COLOMBIA: Future Holds More of the Same →
Columnist William Ospina wrote that the elections represent merely a replacement of one caste — wealthy rural landowners, like Uribe’s family — by another — prominent urban families, like Santos’s.
What will undoubtedly be kept alive by Santos, according to Ospina, is Uribe’s “democratic security policy,” under which “the theft of land, forced displacement, espionage, killings with state...
July 2010
94 posts
Reinventing Demons →
At an April 7 press conference, President Barack Obama’s special advisor for the Summit of Americas Jeffrey Davidow announced the administration’s new plan to provide U.S.-funded “public safety” programs to other governments throughout the Western Hemisphere. U.S. public safety programs are necessary now, Davidow said, because “Latin America [and] the Caribbean are witnessing an increase in...
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...
Venezuela: Creating a new, radical media →
They are not your normal TV stations. ViVe was created at the national level to transmit the views of popular organisations, the communities, rural cooperatives, fisherpeople, women and workers.
We created what was necessary to consolidate the revolution. We recognised that the cultural battle was important in the communication media. Telesur, for instance, is a window into the...
“We Are In an Economic War,” Says Venezuelan... →
Former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, explained the US strategy and role at the time on Fox News, “[Chavez’s] ability to appeal to the Venezuelan people, only works so long as the populous of Venezuela sees some ability for a better standard of living. If at some point the economy really gets bad, Chavez’s popularity within the country will certainly decrease and it’s the one...
Seth Freedman never met a massacre he didn’t like →
@jamiesw on top form.
(via Instapaper)
“The way to lie about another war”, by John Pilger →
He focuses on the sinking of a South Korean warship some months ago, and compares compares it to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which was used as justification for attacks on North Vietnam by the Americans.
But I also liked this bit:
In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state benefits caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers’ money in a second-home scam. A prison...
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.
Report reveals systematic brutality against child... →
The [Physical Control in Care] manual and other data from Freedom of Information requests confirmed [the Children’s Rights Alliance for England]’s contention that there has been an “institutional culture of systematically using unlawful force on children with the intention of causing pain”.
The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger →
Chris Hedges:
The sacredness of the other is anathema for the Christian right, which cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of other ways of being and believing. If other belief systems, including atheism, have moral validity, the infallibility of the movement’s doctrine, which constitutes its chief appeal, is shattered. There can be no alternative ways to think or to be. All alternatives must be...
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...
Anger Rises Over U.S. Tax Dollars for Settlements... →
“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.)
Welcome to Britain PLC →
Following hard on the footsteps of the announcement earlier in the month that the government is to place prominent business figures on the boards of government departments comes Mr Cameron declaring yesterday that “I want to refashion British foreign policy, the Foreign Office, to make us much more focused on the commercial aspects.”
Now, that’s not new. Every Prime...
Must read: PM launches drive for Britain PLC →
Oh boy.
Tomlinson family alleges cover-up as G20 riot cop... →
Disgusting.
The prosecution insisted that it could not be proved “beyond reasonable doubt” that PC A’s attack on Mr Tomlinson made him a suspect of manslaughter, assault or misconduct in public office.
Yeah, whatever.
HRW: “Israel: Withdraw Legislation Punishing Human... →
Four bills and amendments are pending that would seriously restrict the rights of Israelis to criticize the policies and actions of their government, Human Rights Watch said. One would shut down groups that communicate information that could be used in charges filed in other countries against members of the Israeli government or army for violations of international law. A second would penalize...
UK justice proposal would lead to impunity for war... →
Amnesty International has urged the UK parliament to reject a government proposal that would hamper arrest warrants being issued for suspected war criminals and torturers visiting the country, warning that it could lead to the UK being seen as a safe haven for international criminals.
…
“The current procedure allows victims of crimes under international law to act quickly against...
BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While... →
Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.
Known to some as “the inmate state,” Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration...
No to oligarchy →
The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last fifteen years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest-paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million...
Israel gets brutal with media →
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel issued a statement recently condemning what it sees as a change in Israel Defence Forces (IDF) policy in their treatment of journalists covering the growing number of West Bank protests against Israel’s separation barrier, illegal settlements and land expropriation.
“We would appreciate it were the authorities to remind the various...
Peru to deport British environmental activist... →
Kristina Aiello:
On July 1 the Peruvian government notified Father Paul Mc Auley, an environmental activist in the Loreto Department of the northern Peruvian Amazon, that the Ministry of the Interior was rescinding his residency, which he has held since 2006, in a country he has called home for the past 20 years. The order to expel the British priest comes on the heels of his efforts to ensure...