John sent this link:
Aisling Byrne: A Torrent of Disinformation: The NeoCon Propaganda Machine Pushing “Regime Change” in Syria (CounterPunch)
Heiko Khoo: Life and death in DPRK (China.org.cn)
Peter Weiss: Attacking the Idea of Justice: Gitmo: Ten Years Too Many (CounterPunch)
There goes another once respected organization:
Hillary Clinton aide at the helm of Amnesty International USA (Voltairenet)
Serene Assir: Haytham al-Manna: The Politics Behind the Pact with Ghalioun (al-Akhbar)
Wilhelm Langthaler: Syrien, die Türkei und die arabische Revolte / Syria, Turkey and the Arab revolt (Anti-Imperialist Camp)
Stephen Kinzer: Iran’s First Great Satan Was England (New York Times)
John Grant: The New Big Show: Iran and Historical Forgetting (CounterPunch)
Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzales, Stephen Cohen: Election Fraud Galvanizes Russian Opposition, Communist Party 20 Years After Soviet Union’s Collapse (Democracy Now)
Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzales, Bruce Cumings: North Korea’s New Leader Kim Jong-un Inherits Father’s Nuclear Legacy & Country’s Uncertain Future (Democracy Now)
Jesse L. Jackson: The Miserable Choices in Iowa: Making Reagan Look Like a Liberal (CounterPunch)
Jonathan Cook: Israel’s New House Rules: Deepening Authoritarianism (al-Akhbar)
Samir Amin: Audacity, more audacity (Pambazuka News)
Samir Amin is proposing a way out of the current situation of capitalism in crisis. Nations should socialise the ownership of monopolies, de-financialise the management of the economy and de-globalise international relations.
Naomi Klein: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Nation)
Boris Kagarlitzky: Politics is Now Being Played Out in Public. A Very Peaceful Russian Revolt (CounterPunch)
Ibrahim al-Amin: A Revolution Against Resistance? (al-Akhbar)
Jay Solomon, Nour Malas: Syria Would Cut Iran Military Tie, Opposition Head Says (Wall Street Journal)
Walden Bello: An Unbalanced Relationship. The New German Colossus (CounterPunch)
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh: Keynesian vs. Marxian Explanations: Understanding Unemployment (CounterPunch)
Yang Rui, Colin Mackerras, Einar Tangen: A watchful US in Pacific (CCTV)
Derek Bolton: Australia Remilitarizes (FPIF)
Michael Kaufman: Lesser Evilism, 2012. A Vote for Obama Now is More Evil Than It Was in 2008 (CounterPunch)
Robert Pallitto: The Return of Waterboarding? (FPIF)
Barry Sautman, Yan Hairong: Gilded Outside, Shoddy Within: The Human Rights Watch report on Chinese copper mining in Zambia (Japan Focus)
Lee Sustar, Boris Kagarlitsky: The Struggle Emerges in Russia (CounterPunch)
John told me about these articles, both on the front page of the Guardian, and both Galloway and Bolton say the withdrawal from Iraq is a huge defeat for the United states:
George Galloway: Last Post in Iraq: this is the death knell of the American empire (Guardian)
John Bolton: Be warned, America’s withdrawal from Iraq heralds a world of instability (Guardian)
לא לטייח חקירת הרג המפגין / In Israel, the life of a Palestinian is cheap (Ha’aretz)
Aeyal Gross: דין לערבים, ודין שונה ליהודים / Jewish rock-throwers are more equal (Ha’aretz)
Ruth and Herb sent this link (for those who can get YouTube):
Helen Farnum, Georg Friedrich Händel: Hallelujah Corporations (revised) (YouTube)
And if you can get YouTube, this debate on China and Africa is worth watching:
Beware of the dragon: Africa should not look to China (YouTube)
This debate took place at Cadogan Hall in London on 28th November 2011.
Speakers for the motion: George Ayittey, Ana Maria Gomes
Speakers against the motion: Deborah Brautigam, Stephen Chan
Chair: Lindsey Hilsum
We all know that the Chinese are the neo-colonialists of Africa. They’ve plundered the continent of its natural resources, tossing aside any concern for human rights and doing deals with some of the world’s most unsavoury regimes. The relentless pursuit of growth is China’s only spur.
But is this picture really fair? In Angola, for example, China’s low-interest loans have been tied to a scheme that has ensured that roads, schools and other infrastructure has been built. China has an impressive track record of lifting its own millions out of poverty and can do the same for Africa. And is the West’s record in Africa as glowing as we like to think? After decades of pouring aid into Africa, how much have we actually achieved in terms of reducing poverty, corruption and war? So which way should Africa look for salvation — to the West, to China, or perhaps to its own people? Come to the debate and decide for yourself.
Richard Spencer: Syria: Turkey raises prospect of buffer zone for first time (Telegraph)
The Syrian crisis has put new energy into old allegiances in what had been shifting diplomatic territory in the region. Syria and Russia are old allies, but Syria, already close to Iran, had been moving closer to Turkey too until earlier this year.
But Turkey, a key Nato member, moved squarely against first Libya and then a second state in the vanguard of anti-Western rhetoric in the region, Syria.
It remains unclear what effect this will have in military terms – most western countries are desperate to avoid further intervention in the region. But Turkey and its western allies imposed a buffer zone for the Kurds in northern Iraq in the early nineties, as part of a series of defensive measures and embargoes that ultimately led to the 2003 invasion.
Clinton to meet Syrian opposition in Switzerland (Daily Star)
Franklin C. Spinney: Why the US & Israel May Agree to Bombing Iran (CounterPunch)
Patrick Seale: Will Israel Bomb Iran? (agence global)
Paul Vallely: War on Iran has begun. And it is madness (Independent)
Diana Johnstone: As the “Humanitarian Warriors” Gloat… Here’s the Key Question in the Libyan War (CounterPunch)
A young French film-maker, Julien Teil, has filmed a remarkable interview in which the secretary general of the Libyan League for Human Rights, Slimane Bouchuiguir, candidly admits that he had “no proof” of the allegations he made before the U.N. Human Rights Commission which led to immediate expulsion of the official Libyan representative and from there to U.N. Resolutions authorizing what turned into the NATO war of regime change. Indeed, no proof has ever been produced of the “bombing of Libyan civilians” denounced by Al Jazeera, the television channel financed by the Emir of Qatar, who has emerged with a large share of Libyan oil business from the “liberation war” in which Qatar participated.
Amos Schocken: חיסולה ההכרחי של הדמוקרטיה / The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy (Ha’aretz) / Die israelische Apartheid (Frankfurter Rundschau)
Amira Hass: כשפשיסט איננה מלה גסה / In Israel, ‘fascist’ is not a rude word (Ha’aretz)
Or Kashti: סקר: מחצית מבני הנוער הודו שלא ילמדו בכיתה עם ערבי / Poll: Half of Israeli teens don’t want Arab students in their class (Ha’aretz)
Tom Segev: תוכנית קניה / Zionism, Uganda and the Jews (Ha’aretz)
Alexander Cockburn: Obama Rebirthed as TR (CounterPunch)
Alberto C. Ruiz: The AFL-CIO’s Covert Ops in Venezuela (CounterPunch)
Michael T. Klare: Playing With Fire: Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China (Nation)
John Yi: An Anti-China Axis? (Diplomat)
Zhu Yuan: Small ray of hope for future (China Daily)
Amal Hanano: Framing Syria (Jadaliyya)
Céline Lussato: La DGSE va-t-elle former les déserteurs syriens ? (Nouvel Observateur)
excerpts translated into English: Will French Intelligence Agents Be Training Syrian Deserters? (MRzine)
Anthony Shadid: Sectarian Strife in City Bodes Ill for All of Syria (New York Times)
Wilhelm Langthaler: A farce difficult to boycott: Why Tahrir II is also
a criticism to the elections (Anti-Imperialist Camp)
Amy Goodman: Seymour Hersh: Propaganda Used Ahead of Iraq War Is Now Being Reused over Iran’s Nuke Program (Democracy Now)
In his latest article for The New Yorker blog, titled “Iran and the IAEA,” Hersh argues the recent report is a “political document,” not a scientific study. “They [JSOC] found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization,” Hersh says. “In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities to build the bomb. This is simply a fact. … They’re certainly far away from a bomb. Israel has been saying for 20 years they’re … six months away from making a bomb.”
Occupy Tokyo: Mass demonstrations go unreported by Japanese media (Signs of the Times)
Naomi Wolf: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy (Guardian)
Sarah Ben Hamadi: Ennahdha-Qatar-United States: Dangerous Liaisons (MRzine)
Arundthati Roy: We are all Occupiers (Guardian)
Tom Ackerman, Slavoj Žižek: Capitalism with Asian values (Aljazeera)
In his distinct and colourful manner, [Žižek] analyses the Arab Spring, the eurozone crisis, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the rise of China. Concerned about the future of the existing western democratic capitalism Zizek believes that the current “system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy, and now the field is open.”
Nathan Brown: Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (UCDavis Bicycle Barricade)
Seymour M. Hersh: Iran and the IAEA (New Yorker)
Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.” (…)Greg Thielmann, a former State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the A.C.A. assessment, told me, “There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb.” He added, “Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.”
Hugh Roberts: Who said Gaddafi had to go? (London Review of Books)
Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of a kind with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan drama is rather an addition to the list of Western or Western-backed wars against hostile, ‘defiant’, insufficiently ‘compliant’, or ‘rogue’ regimes: Afghanistan I (v. the Communist regime, 1979-92), Iraq I (1990-91), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (over Kosovo, 1999), Afghanistan II (v. the Taliban regime, 2001) and Iraq II (2003), to which we might, with qualifications, add the military interventions in Panama (1989-90), Sierra Leone (2000) and the Ivory Coast (2011). An older series of events we might bear in mind includes the Bay of Pigs (1961), the intervention by Western mercenaries in the Congo (1964), the British-assisted palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. (…)
Libya was part of the wider ‘Arab awakening’ in two respects. The unrest began on 15 February, three days after the fall of Mubarak: so there was a contagion effect. And clearly many of the Libyans who took to the streets over the next few days were animated by some of the same sentiments as their counterparts elsewhere. But the Libyan uprising diverged from the Tunisian and Egyptian templates in two ways: the rapidity with which it took on a violent aspect – the destruction of state buildings and xenophobic attacks on Egyptians, Serbs, Koreans and, above all, black Africans; and the extent to which, brandishing the old Libyan flag of the 1951-69 era, the protesters identified their cause with the monarchy Gaddafi & Co overthrew. This divergence owed a lot to external influences. But it also owed much to the character of Gaddafi’s state and regime.
Rory Stewart: Because we weren’t there? (London Review of Books)
Martin Chulov: Free Syria Army gathers on Lebanese border (Guardian)
Michael Doliner: Why the U.S. Can’t Do Anything Right: China’s Game (CounterPunch)
Umakant Delhi: Sri Lanka: The Siege Within Continues… (HardNewsMedia)
With more than two decade long Civil War over, annihilation of LTTE, a farce called democracy in the form of Constitutional Dictatorship and amidst growing militarisation the siege within continues in Sri Lanka
Conn Hallinan: Playing With Fire in Korea (CounterPunch)
Gideon Levy: A new Israel in the making / המדינה שבקרוב תהיה כאן (Ha’aretz)
Jonathan Lis: Israeli ministers back bills to limit funding for human rights groups / השרים אישרו את הצעות החוק המיועדות להגביל מקורות מימון לארגוני זכויות אדם (Ha’aretz)
Bills set for preliminary vote in Knesset would cap foreign governments’ contributions to ‘political’ NGOs; EU, U.S. say legislation could harm Israel’s standing as a democratic country.
Jonathan Lis, Ophir Bar-Zohar: Netanyahu is working to limit free speech in Israel, Labor leader says / לבני: הקואליציה סותמת פיות; דנון: השמאל הקיצוני הוא נגע שיש להסירו (Ha’aretz)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has set upon itself to limit free speech and declare war on Israel’s judicial system, Labor leader MK Shelly Yachimovich said on Sunday, adding that a wave of recent Likud bills was pushing Israel away from the democratic world.
Rob Evans, Paul Lewis: Undercover policeman admits spying on Danish activists (Guardian)
The controversy over the [British] undercover policeman Mark Kennedy has deepened after he admitted spying on and disrupting the work of activists in another European country.
Kennedy has admitted that he infiltrated a Danish community centre that had housed progressive causes for more than a century, obtaining intelligence that helped police to storm it and close it down in violent raids. (…)
Details of his deployment in Germany, Iceland, and Ireland have previously been revealed, leading to criticism that British police were interfering in the democratic affairs of other countries.
Kennedy said he went to 22 countries in total during his seven years under cover, pretending to be an environmental activist. The list also includes Spain, Poland, France, and Belgium.
Amy Goodman, Michael Hudson: G20 Opens as Greek PM Pushes for Referendum on Bailout and Austerity Measures (Democracy Now)
Obama is here to represent the interests of the American banks. And the Europeans are very angry that a few weeks ago Tim Geithner, the bank lobbyist, came over and insisted that Europe not forgive Greece’s bank loans, not let Greece write down the loans, and indeed that it not even claim that Greece should do what Argentina is and write down the loans as a premise, because Mr. Geithner explained to the Europeans that the largest insurers of the Greek debt are American money market funds and hedge funds. And he said American hedge funds and banks would lose money and actually would crash the U.S. economy, if Europe made a concession to Greece to bring debts down to the ability to pay. So, instead of a debt write-down or a haircut, the banks said, “OK, we will agree with what the Americans are insisting on, and we will ask for a voluntary write-down by the banks on the Greek debt they hold.” Obviously, European banks who are not part of the credit default swaps have disagreed with this. So the Americans are putting immense pressure on Europe, saying, “We will wreck your economy, if you don’t wreck Greece’s economy.” (…)
Yesterday, the headline in the Frankfurter Zeitung was “Democracy is Crap,” and—or “Democracy is Junk.” And the reason that was the headline was the financial sector was saying democracy is incompatible with collecting debts, and when they can’t pay, with foreclosing on the public domain and privatizing a country. You can’t have democracy, and you can’t have debts grow beyond the ability to pay and impose austerity, like the IMF used to do in the third world countries. So, what’s at stake is whether Europe—Greece and other countries—are going to be democratic or whether they’re going to be run by a financial oligarchy, run by the E.U. bureaucracy, basically the European Central Bank, that’s neoliberal, anti-labor, anti-government, and totally in the pockets of the most predatory banks.
Amy Goodman: Italian Financial Crisis Prompts Berlusconi’s Exit (Democracy Now)
Dean Baker: Bankers Crush Greek Democracy (CounterPunch)
Tomasz Konicz: Krise und Wahn (Telepolis)
Je weiter sich die kapitalistische Systemkrise in die Gesellschaft und das Massenbewusstsein hineinfrisst, desto irrationaler gestaltet sich die öffentliche Rezeption des Krisengeschehens (…)
Albert Einstein definierte Wahnsinn als das Bestreben, “immer wieder das Gleiche zu tun und andere Ergebnisse zu erwarten”. Die europäische Krisenpolitik erfüllt alle Voraussetzungen, um gemäß dieser Einsteinischen Definition als wahnsinnig bezeichnet zu werden.
Paul Krugman: Crats, Maybe, But Not Much Techno (New York Times)
Atrios complains, rightly, about the description of the policies being followed in Europe as technocratic. (…) But it’s more than that: these alleged technocrats have in fact systematically ignored both textbook macroeconomics and the lessons of history in favor of fantasies.
George Monbiot: The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen (Guardian)
Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That’s why we’re nearly bankrupt
Mike Whitney: Europe’s Crash Landing (CounterPunch)
Italy and the other countries are in dire straits because they do not control their own currency and, thus, cannot control their own fate. They are entirely at the mercy of the ECB. Is it any wonder why restructuring is never seriously considered (because it would cost the banks and bondholders money) or why there’s been no attempt to create a stimulus program that will lift the struggling states in the south out of their slump and back into the black? The ECB refuses to use the tools that are available to it because its overall policy objectives are already being achieved. Internal devaluation and belt-tightening are the path to privatization, fewer social services, and cheaper labor, exactly what the bankers want.
Peter Lee: This Stupid Democracy Thing: Communist China and the Western Commentariat Finally Get on the Same Page (CounterPunch)
Mike King: Death and Police Opportunism at Occupy Oakland (CounterPunch)
Julian Borger: Iran nuclear report: IAEA claims Tehran working on advanced warhead (Guardian)
The UN’s nuclear watchdog will publish new details on Wednesday on alleged Iranian work on an advanced design for a nuclear warhead developed with the help of a former Soviet scientist, according to nuclear experts. (…)
Iranian officials have already denounced the report as “counterfeit” and there are doubts, even in Washington and London, whether the IAEA evidence will be enough to convince Russia and China to abandon their opposition to further economic sanctions, let alone countenance air strikes. (…)
Earlier this year the US supplied Israel with 55 bunker-busting bombs, and last week the Israeli air force conducted drills at a Nato base in Sardinia for long-range attacks.
Ian Williams: Déjà vu all over again (Guardian)
The US is smearing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not finding evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons. Sound familiar?
When it comes to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?
Gareth Porter: FBI Trickery in Terrorism Cases: Debunking the Iran “Terror Plot” (CounterPunch)
Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.” This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.
Ismail Salami: IAEA report thrives on laptop of lies (PressTV)
Gareth Porter: Iran’s “Soviet Nuclear Scientist” Never Worked on Weapons (CounterPunch)
The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.
But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives. (…)
The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko’s nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the “former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist” story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.
Nick Meo: Libya dispatch: as lawlessness spreads, are the rebel ‘good guys’ turning bad? (Telegraph)
Stories of gunmen taking expensive cars at checkpoints, giving receipts saying they will be returned after the revolution, are nervously swapped over cups of tea.
More alarming than the looting have been the armed clashes between militias. There have been three big fights in the capital alone in the past week; shoot-outs at a hospital, Martyr’s Square, and the military airport, which have left several dead and dozens wounded.
Then there are the detentions. With the fighting over, the revolutionaries have not been idle. They have kept busy rounding up hundreds of suspected Gaddafi supporters in a wide-scale witch-hunt, often on the basis of little more than rumour and accusation.
Franklin Lamb: Terror and Revenge Engulf NATO’s Libya (CounterPunch)
Peter Baofu: China’s need for a new foreign policy (East Asia Forum)
As China fast approaches superpower status, its current policy of non-interference in world affairs will soon become obsolete.
Freedom from Torture submission to the Committee against Torture for its examination of Sri Lanka in November 2011 (PDF; Freedom from Torture)
Michael Neumann: Resolutions and “Solutions”: After Palestine’s Statehood Bid (CounterPunch)
Jonathan Cook: A Response to Michael Neumann: There’s Nothing Idealistic About the One-State Solution (CounterPunch)
Reuters: חילוקי דעות במועצת הביטחון האם להכיר במדינה פלסטינית / UN Security Council panel fails to reach consensus on Palestinian bid, says draft report (Haaretz)
Ben Lorber: Freedom Waves Campaigners Abused and Imprisoned (CounterPunch)
Amy Goodman: Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Flotilla (Democracy Now)
Jamie Jackson: England to wear poppies on armbands as Fifa and FA reach compromise (Guardian)
Adam Gabbatt: Thousands attend protests in Oakland (Guardian)
Dennis Bernstein: What the Cops Really Did in Oakland (CounterPunch)
Steve Stallone: Scenes From Oakland’s General Strike (CounterPunch)
Nikolas Kozloff: From Radical Past to Radical Present: Oakland’s General Strike (CounterPunch)
Vijay Prashad: Reform, My Ass: Mind the Gap (CounterPunch)
Between the sentiment at the Occupy encampments and the liberal wing of the Democratic establishment lies a moat unbridgeable even by the tallest trees. Between Occupy and the Republicans lies a universe.
What seems reasonable to the Democratic leadership in Washington and to their far-flung minions in the districts is a tepid negotiation with finance capital. The corridors of the White House might as well be renamed Wall Street: apart from the Banks’ errand-boy Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, there is the Chief of Staff, Bill Daley (previously on J. P. Morgan Chase’s Executive Committee where he was in charge of Corporate Responsibility) and there is newly hired Senior Campaign Advisor Broderick Johnson (recently lobbyist for Bank of America, Fannie Mae, J. P. Morgan Chase, and Keystone XL). These are the scum of Wall Street and Washington, emblems of the pay-to-play system and of Financial Power. To them, the Occupy movement is an irritant, and a potential liability come election time. (…)
The debate around demands bewilders. As Ruth Jennison and Jordana Rosenberg put it at Lenin’s Tomb, “What, after all, is a demand? That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education? If any of our hesitation to demand comes from a fear of losing, let’s look around us and see how strong we are. For the first time in a lifetime.” After the remarkable General Strike in Oakland, that strength is now before us. It is true that struggles like these do not follow a text-book, and that it is in the fight that we learn how to fight, as Rosa Luxemburg put it a century ago. And it is also the true that in the heat of these struggles, slogans emerge that germinate programs and agendas. It is time for us to agglomerate these and throw them in the face of Order.
David Harvey: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis (Verso)
The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law. (…)
Americans believe in equality. Polling data show they believe (no matter what their general political allegiances might be) that the top twenty percent of the population might be justified in claiming thirty percent of the total wealth. That the top twenty percent now control 85 percent of the wealth is unacceptable. That most of that is controlled by the top one percent is totally unacceptable. What the Occupy Wall Street movement proposes is that we, the people of the United States, commit to a reversal of that level of inequality, not only of wealth and income, but even more importantly of the political power that such a disparity confers. The people of the United States are rightly proud of the their democracy, but it has always been endangered by capital’s corruptive power. Now that it is dominated by that power, the time is surely nigh, as Jefferson long ago suggested would be necessary, to make another American revolution: one based on social justice, equality and a caring and thoughtful approach to the relation to nature.
Sean Antrim: The October Revolution (Mainlander / rabble.ca)
Paul Weinberg: The Face of Imperialism: An interview with Michael Parenti (rabble.ca)
Paul Craig Roberts: A Farce and a Sham: On Western Democracy (CounterPunch)
Aijaz Ahmad: Libya recolonised (Frontline)
No credible evidence has ever emerged to support Obama’s claim that a massacre (of up to 100,000) was imminent in Benghazi, and no massacres ensued in the rebellious cities and towns that Qaddafi’s troops did occupy in the earlier stages of the fighting. On the contrary, there is incontrovertible evidence of massacres at the hands of NATO’s mercenaries. Neighbouring countries, such as Niger, Mali and Chad, have reported the eviction of some three lakh* black African residents from Libya as NATO’s local allies and clients rolled on towards Tripoli under the devastating shield of NATO’s own 40,000-plus bombings over large parts of Libya. Together with these mass evictions of workers and refugees from neighbouring countries – whom the Qaddafi regime had welcomed to make up for labour shortages in an expanding economy – there are also credible reports of lynchings and massacres of black Libyans themselves. The scale of these depredations is yet undetermined but it is already clear that upwards of 50,000 have died as a result of the war unleashed by NATO with the collusion of the Security Council, and half a million or more have been rendered homeless, mostly at the hands of NATO-armed “rebels” who have now been appointed as the new government of the country. Neither the Security Council nor NATO commanders nor, indeed, President Obama – the first black President in the history of the U.S. and himself the son of a Kenyan father – has seen it fit to take up the “responsibility to protect” these hapless people, most of them black Africans, even though several heads of African states have protested, including the very pro-U.S. President of Nigeria.
* one lakh (lākh लाख) = 100,000
Vijay Prashad: Ruthless theatre (Frontline)
With the fall of Tripoli and the execution of Qaddafi at a small cost to the NATO states themselves, new armed adventures have commenced across Africa: more drone attacks in Somalia, U.S. special forces in Uganda, and a green light to the Kenyan armed forces to enter Somalia. The A.U. remains prone. It is likely that given a reasonable interval, the U.S. will ask the new Libyan authorities for access to land to build a base and bring the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to the continent (it is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany, since no African country has welcomed it). These developments are buoyed on the back of the Libyan model of intervention – minimal, but deadly NATO and U.S. armed attacks, with proxy forces given licence to act as they wish.
Franklin Lamb: Libya’s Liberation Front Organizing in the Sahel (CounterPunch)
John Cherian: Next, Syria (Frontline)
Jack Shenker: Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah accuses army of hijacking revolution (Guardian)
Call-Out for Solidarity with Egypt: Defend the Revolution (MRzine)
Eric Walberg: Topple Their Debts: Egypt and the IMF (CounterPunch)
Mark Weisbrot: Obama prepara guerra com Irã (Folha de São Paulo / CEPR) / Obama Administration Escalates Confrontation With Iran: Why? (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
Ewen MacAskill, Harriet Sherwood: Is the US heading for war with Iran? (Guardian)
Nick Hopkins: UK military steps up plans for Iran attack amid fresh nuclear fears (Guardian)
Robert Fantina: A Tale of Three Countries: The US, UNESCO and Palestine (CounterPunch)
It is telling that, despite the warning in advance of the vote that the U.S., which provides 22% of Unesco funding, would withdraw all funding, 107 member nations voted to accept Palestine (14 opposed and 52 abstained). Despite clear international consensus, the U.S. and 13 other nations, including, of course, Israel, attempt to buck the trend.
Medea Benjamin, Robert Naiman: Challenging the Blockade: Jailed for Sailing to Gaza (CounterPunch)
Binoy Kampmark: The Next Phase: Extraditing Assange (CounterPunch)
Δελτίο Τύπου ΚΟΕ: Ο λαός είπε βροντερό «ΟΧΙ» στη νέα κατοχή (Κομμουνιστική Οργάνωση Ελλάδας)
Wilhelm Langthaler: Papandreou setzt alles auf eine Karte (Antiimperialistische Koordination)
Global Revolution (LiveStream)
First Official Release from Occupy Wall Street (OccupyWallStreet.org)
Michael Greenberg: In Zuccotti Park (New York Review of Books)
William Loren Katz: Challenging Fat Cat Capitalism: A Visit to Zuccotti Park (CounterPunch)
Christopher Ketcham: The Reign of the One Percenters: Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City (Orion)
New York, the [Fiscal Policy Institute] informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent. Meanwhile, the number of homeless in the city rose to an all-time high last year—higher even than during the Great Depression—with a record 113,000 men, women, and children, many of them comprising whole families, retreating night after night to municipal shelters. (…)
The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings. Almost 11 percent of the population, about 900,000 people, live in what the federal government describes as “deep poverty,” which for a four-person family means an income of $10,500 (the average One Percenter household in New York makes about that same amount every day).
Glenn Greenwald: Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land (TomDispatch)
It is now clearly understood that, rather than apply the law equally to all, Wall Street tycoons have engaged in egregious criminality — acts which destroyed the economic security of millions of people around the world — without experiencing the slightest legal repercussions. Giant financial institutions were caught red-handed engaging in massive, systematic fraud to foreclose on people’s homes and the reaction of the political class, led by the Obama administration, was to shield them from meaningful consequences. Rather than submit on an equal basis to the rules, through an oligarchical, democracy-subverting control of the political process, they now control the process of writing those rules and how they are applied.
Micah Zenko: Syria No-Fly Zone: Realistic Objectives (Council on Foreign Relations)
According to United Nations estimates, well over 3,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in mid-March. Notably, none of the nonviolent protestors were killed or injured by airpower.
The escalating demands for an international no-fly zone (NFZ) over Syria is puzzling, since, as I pointed out in an earlier piece, it would do nothing to protect civilians who are dying in cities by soldiers on the ground, tanks, short-range artillery, and snipers.
However, recent statements from anti-regime groups have provided further insight into what they believe a NFZ could achieve in Syria. (…)
In summary, according to anti-regime activists, a NFZ over Syria would protect the armed opposition groups; provide international legitimacy for an armed uprising; encourage defections from regime security forces; and fulfill the international community’s responsibility, since Libyan anti-regime were extended a NFZ.
Ernest Khoury: Foreign Intervention: Debating the Taboo of the Syrian Opposition (al-Akhbar)
Franklin Lamb: Failing the Burden of Proof: Amnesty International’s Flawed Syrian Hospitals “Investigation” (CounterPunch)
Mark Weisbrot: Extremist and Dangerous Rhetoric: The Iranian Escalation (CounterPunch)
Amira Hass: Palestinians must say no to negotiations with Israel / על הרשות להימנע ממו”מ (Haaretz)
Barak Ravid: Israel to expedite settlement construction in response to Palestinian UNESCO membership / בתגובה לקבלת הרשות לאונסק”ו: ישראל תבנה 2,000 יחידות דיור בהתנחלויות (Haaretz)
Clive Hambige: Gaza, the World’s Largest Prison: From One Prison to Another (CounterPunch)
Natasha Mozgovaya: Israel is a strategic asset for U.S. national interests, according to new report / בכיר לשעבר בפנטגון: “אין פתרון קסם לבעיית הגרעין האיראני” (Haaretz)
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