Our most popular post today was posted exactly one year ago about another event federal investigators might have been the source of the world Trade Center Disaster. We reprint the brief item in full. . .
Image of the day: Remembering the other 9/11
You know, the CIA/Nixon-backed 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile and resulted in 60,000 deaths. Via PRAWN, the Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network.
Posted in Deep Politics, History, Latin America, Politics
The diplomatic battle over the fate of Julian Assange, wanted in Sweden for questioning of allegations of sexual misconduct, heated up a notch today when foreign ministers of 12 Latin American nations backed Ecuador’s grant to diplomatic asylum to the WikiLeaks founder.
From Deutsche Presse Agentur:
South American nations expressed unanimous support for Ecuador in its row with Britain over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday.
The foreign ministers of the continent’s twelve countries urged both sides to resolve the dispute through negotiation and condemned the potential use of force against Ecuador’s mission in London.
“We reiterate the right of states to grant political and diplomatic asylum,” the foreign ministers from the Union of South American Nations said in joint communique.
The bloc also rejected Britain’s claim that its own laws would allow it to violate international treaties.
It expressed “solidarity with and support for the government of Ecuador in the face of threats against its embassy in Britain,” where Assange has taken refuge since June to avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of alleged sexual offences.
British threats boost Correa at home
The explicit threat by Great Britain to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London has backfired in another way, giving a significant bump to the popularity of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.
From MercoPress:
Hundreds of Ecuadoreans marched on Monday in support of the government’s decision to grant asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a saga that could help President Rafael Correa if he seeks re-election.
Ecuador is outraged at Britain for threatening to enter its embassy in London where the Australian anti-secrecy campaigner — faced with extradition to Sweden for questioning over rape and sexual assault accusations — has taken refuge.
There is also a wider power game at play between Ecuador and the bloc of populist Latin American governments it belongs to, and the United States.
Correa supports Assange’s claim that he is at risk of being sent to the United States for punishment over Wikileaks’ 2010 release of a deluge of US diplomatic cables and secret army documents.
Correa is already very popular and appears to be drawing more support with his stance on Assange. He has portrayed the standoff with London as a principled struggle between a small nation against a “colonial power.”
The Obamans fire back at Correa
Meanwhile, Washington aimed some diplomatic shots at Ecuador today, as MercoPress reports in a second story:
The Obama administration on Monday accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of making “wild assertions” about US persecution to deflect attention from sex allegations he faces questioning for in Sweden.
The Obama administration on Monday accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of making “wild assertions” about US persecution to deflect attention from sex allegations he faces questioning for in Sweden.
>snip<
Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also berated Ecuador for granting Assange asylum from possible US persecution at its embassy in London. And, she said Ecuador’s attempt to have the Organization of American States take up the matter was a “sideshow.”
Assange “is making all sorts of wild assertions about us, when, in fact, his issue with the government of the United Kingdom has to do with whether he is going to face justice in Sweden for something that has nothing to do with Wikileaks” Nuland told reporters.
“He is clearly trying to deflect attention away from the real issue, which is whether he is going to face justice in Sweden,” she said. “That case has nothing to do with us, it’s a matter between the U.K., Sweden and now Ecuador has inserted itself.”
Here’s a London Telegraph video featuring Nuland, preceded by the remarks of Ecuadorian President Correa:
One has to wonder just what “us” Nuland is referring to. Is it the State Department? The White House? And what about the Justice Department, which is most certainly very interested in Assange?
So what are the legal issues?
Here’s a clip of attorney and Harper’s contributing writer Scott Horton and radio talk show host sam Seder parsing the fascinating legal history of diplomatic immunity and its application to the Assange case. It’s well worth a listen:
That said, the Swedish legal case is real, however questionable the motives of his accusers may be. He should answer questions, but not necessarily in Sweden, where he would be immediately incarcerated on arrival and where extradition to the U.S. would be considerably easier than in Britain. For an interesting discussion of the issue from a hard left perspective, see this post at Lenin’s Tomb.
Posted in Crime, Deep Politics, Europe, Governance, Latin America, Law, Secrecy, Video, WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke to supporters today from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London as the diplomatic battle over the decision of the government of President Rafael Correa to grant him asylum.
Assange took the opportunity to deliver a plea from alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, now facing an army court martial on charges he provided WikiLeaks with those diplomatic cables that infamous video of a 12 July 2007 U.S. helicopter gunship shooting down 14 Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists.
The BBC reports:
Julian Assange has urged the US to end its “witch-hunt” against Wikileaks, in his first public statement since entering Ecuador’s London embassy.
He also called for the release of Bradley Manning, who is awaiting trial in the US accused of leaking classified documents to the Wikileaks site.
Mr Assange spoke from a balcony at the embassy and thanked Ecuador’s president, who has granted him asylum.
He faces extradition to Sweden over sexual assault claims, which he denies.
Mr Assange said: “As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies.
“We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.
“Will it return to and re-affirm the revolutionary values it was founded on?
Legal battle“Or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?”
Before Assange spoke, his lawyer, suspended Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, spoke to reporters outside the embassy. From the London Telegraph:
The British government threat to invade the Ecuadorean embassy to arrest the WikiLeaks founder has provoked a furious response from that country.
From Emily Alpert of the Los Angeles Times:
As Britain and Ecuador remain locked in a diplomatic standoff over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the government in Quito made a public push to protect its London embassy.
Ecuador said Wednesday that Britain had threatened to storm its embassy to arrest Assange, who is being sought for questioning by Sweden on allegations of sexual assault. Ecuador has granted the activist political asylum, but Britain says it will not guarantee him safe passage out of the country. That leaves Assange marooned in the embassy, unable to leave despite winning asylum.
The British letter to Ecuador referenced a little-known law, saying, “You should be aware that there is a legal basis in the U.K. — the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act — which would allow us to take action to arrest Mr. Assange in the current premises of the embassy.”
The South American country has sought to marshal other nations across the Americas to insist that its embassy not be violated, calling a council meeting Friday of the Organization of American States.
At the meeting, Britain denied it had threatened Ecuador, saying Ecuador had aired a private note that had been misunderstood out of context.
“Allegations that the United Kingdom was threatening Ecuador and was about to storm the embassy are without foundation,” the British observer to the group told the council.
Britain renounces doctrine of international law
Diplomatic asylum has been a key principle of international law, and embassy’s have traditionally reserved the right to house dissidents to shield them from persecution.
Embassy grounds are, by international law, sovereign territory of the state represented by the ambassador.
In perhaps the most famous case of diplomatic asylum of the 20th Century, the United States embassy in Budapest sheltered Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty from 1956 to 1971, when he was finally allowed to leave the country.
But now Britain’s Foreign Secretary says his country no longer recognizes the principle.
From Robert Hutton of Bloomberg:
U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain doesn’t recognize the concept of “diplomatic asylum” and won’t allow Wikileaks founder Julian Assange safe passage out of the country after Ecuador granted him political asylum.
“We cannot give safe passage to someone in this situation,” Hague told reporters in London today. “The U.K. doesn’t accept the principle of diplomatic asylum.”
The foreign minister’s remarkable declaration has drawn criticism and a warning from a former British ambassador of potentially grave consequence for the U.K.’s own diplomats.
But the government’s move poses dangers
That’s the opinion of the country’s former ambassador to Russia.
From Rosa Prince of the London Telegraph:
The Foreign Office risks breaching international law if it carries out its threat to revoke the status of the Ecuadorean Embassy in order to arrest Julian Assange, a former ambassador to Moscow has warned.
Sir Tony Brenton, who served as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia between 2004 and 2008, said “arbitrarily” overturning the status of the building where Mr Assange has taken shelter to avoid extradition, would make life ‘impossible’ for British diplomats Continue reading
Posted in Crime, Deep Politics, Europe, Governance, GWOT, Latin America, Law, Mideast, Military, Politics, Secrecy, Video, Warfare, WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
The anti-tuition protests are continuing in Chile, triggering a major police action in Santiago Thursday followed by another occupation the following day.
The BBC reports on Thursday’s police action:
Police in Chile have detained 139 people – most of them teenage students – who were occupying three schools in the capital, Santiago.
There were violent clashes as police moved into the buildings.
The occupation is part of continuing protests against the government’s education policies.
Chilean students have held months of mass protests in the past year to demand free, high-quality public education for all.
The BBC’s Gideon Long in Santiago says the action seems to mark a hardening of the government’s stance towards the protest.
Student leader Camila Vallejo, who came into prominence in Chile during last year’s protests, criticised the action.
“It is a direct assault on public education and on the chance to advance towards ending inequality in Chile,” she said.
Here’s some raw video of Thursday’s police action from RT:
And a report from RT:
Chilean Police deployed tear gas and water cannons against student protestors as they stormed schools in Santiago where the activists had held a weeklong sit-in. Officers arrested 139, claiming the use of force was “necessary to maintain order.”
Police action occurred at the Dario Salas, Miguel de Cervantes and Confederacion Suiza schools at the behest of Santiago Mayor Pablo Zalaquett. Water cannons and tear gas were used to disperse students who resisted arrest and brawled with police.
Police officers forcibly entered Miguel de Cervantes with a water cannon and climbed over fences to capture the students.
After failing to negotiate an agreement with students, Zalaquett threatened to withdraw their scholarships, provoking the ire of other mayors who branded it an “abuse of power.”
In the wake of the evictions, Zalaquett said he would have preferred for there to have been no arrests, but added that the “students were given a chance to leave peacefully, but they didn’t take it.” The Chilean government rejects the sit-ins as a form of protest, he said, calling on the students’ parents to intervene.
But Thursday’s violence hasn’t deterred the students, as MercoPress reports:
Following over a hundred arrests made on Thursday and clashes with police, students in Santiago occupied on Friday the central building of the University of Chile, the country’s most important higher education facility, as the demands to the government over education reform ensue.
Some thirty university students entered the building this morning, located metres from the Chilean presidential palace, in the centre of Santiago.
In 2011, the building was taken over for the period of five months, while bloody protests and clashes took place on the Chilean capital city’s streets on numerous occasions throughout the year.
“Secondary school students and university students are in the same fight and we are not going to take a step back on this,” the president of the student’s federation from the University of Chile Gabriel Boric said on his Twitter account today.
Students reignited their claims two weeks ago in the hopes of changing the education system left by dictator Augusto Pinochet (in power from 1973-1990) demanding free university education and central government control over public schools.
Posted in Education, Governance, Latin America, Politics, Video
First, from RT, a video of Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino. announcing that his country is granting asylum.
Next, from the London Telegraph, University of Birmingham professor and international criminal law Robert Cryer predicts that Britain’s efforts to apprehend the WikiLeaks founder won’t stop with today’s announcement and predicts his arrest should he try to board an airplane:
And the story, from the BBC:
Ecuador has granted asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange two months after he took refuge in its London embassy while fighting extradition from the UK.
It cited fears that Mr Assange’s human rights might be violated.
Foreign minister Ricardo Patino accused the UK of making an “open threat” to enter its embassy to arrest Mr Assange.
Mr Assange took refuge at the embassy in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over assault and rape claims, which he denies.
The Australian national said being granted political asylum by Ecuador was a “significant victory” and thanked staff in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
We’ll have more later.
Posted in Crime, Europe, Governance, Latin America, Law, Politics, Video, WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
Yet another casualty of the craze to turn food into fuel is the German shepherd [to two-legged kind, and not the four-legged critters Germans call Alsatians].
One of the big political fights in the corporate driven agriculture craze [all those patented crops, some created by UC Berkeley millionaire serial entrepreneurial “bioengineers” like Jay Keasling and Chris Somerville, has been over whether or not governments should count the “indirect land use” costs of agrofuels.
Those range from the killings of Brazilian tribal peoples to grab their land for industrial scale sugar cane fields [used for ethanol, of course], destruction of biodiversity, to the loss of homes, villages, lifeways, and native landscapes freighted with particular meanings by those who inhabit them.
The corporados don’t want ILUs, as they’re known in the trade, to factor into discussions with civil servants and elected officials, much less public hearings where the victims of land grabs can be heard.
Renate Nimtz-Koester of Spiegel brings us an important story about an ILU we hadn’t even considered til we read her tale, which includes interviews with folks who give the issue a human face.
Here are the basics:
In the last five years, the number of full-time shepherds has declined by a fifth, to a total of 2,000. By keeping the grass dense and compacting the soil, their 2.5 million sheep still protect dikes along the coast and rivers. They also preserve cultural landscapes, like the Lüneburg Heath and the Swabian Jura, from scrub encroachment, and they maintain waysides, open spaces, hillsides and hard-to-reach elevated areas. “But many herds are already gone because the shepherds had to give up,” Gersonde says.
Stefan Völl, managing director of the Union of German Sheep Farming Associations, says the profession, one of the oldest in the world, is “on the verge of extinction.” The future of shepherds, he says, is being threatened by growing bureaucracy and falling prices for lamb meat and wool. But the biggest culprit is Germany’s energy revolution, which is seeing it abandon nuclear energy by 2022 while making a massive push to get a larger percentage of its power from renewable resources, such as natural gas produced from crops.
The biogas boom is transforming meadows, fields and even the most barren pieces of land — in other words, the places where sheep have always grazed — into vast stretches of corn. As a result, shepherds, who rarely own land, are having trouble finding pastures to lease. They also have to walk greater distances to find pastures, and their already modest average monthly income of €1,200 ($1,500) is declining even further. “If this continues, the caretakers of the nation’s landscapes won’t be around much longer.”
Attracted by the subsidies provided under Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), which seemingly makes it possible to rake in money in environmentally correct ways, investors are now offering to lease land from farmers at twice the rate they paid only a few years ago.
>snip<
The EEG subsidies even encourage biogas producers to drive shepherds out of their last refuges, Germany’s conservation areas. Producers are paid a higher-than-normal feed-in tariff — a fixed price for the electricity they feed into the grid — for what they harvest there to compensate for the fact it has a lower energy yield in biogas plants.
Posted in Agriculture, Corpocracy, Culture, Environment, Europe, Governance, History, Human behavior, Latin America, Resources, Science
A fascinating report from Agence France-Presse on one nation’s efforts to reduce the price of food by opening up urban land to community farming. Providing citizens with free seeds, tools, and other materials needed to organically grow food, Venezuela is following in the footsteps of Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union:
And for more on the Cuban program, see here.
Posted in Community, Cuba, Gardens, Governance, Latin America, Video
Posted in Culture, Economy, Governance, Latin America, Politics
An important documentary by Scott Noble. The Power Principle exposes the hidden agenda driving American foreign policy over the last seven decades and its gruesome consequences.
Historian Michael Parenti calls the film “A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.”
In an interview for Soldiers for the Cause, a veterans group supporting the Occupy movement, filmmaker Noble outlines the theses advanced in his documentary:
For more information see the film’s website.
And now, the documentary:
The Power Principle – I: Empire
The program notes:
An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l”; Globalization: Consequences.
1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.
The Power Principle – II: Propaganda
The program notes:
The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”.
Fear-based conditioning – The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.
The Power Principle – III: Apocalypse
The program notes:
Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men – Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men – Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?
Posted in Africa, Asia, Class, Corpocracy, Crime, Cuba, Culture, Deep Politics, Economy, Europe, Film, Geopolitics, Governance, GWOT, History, Holocausts, Intolerance, Labor, Latin America, Mideast, Military, MSM, Noteworthy, Politics, Secrecy, Socialism, Spooks, Video, Warfare, Wealth
The catastrophe continues cascading, compounded by criminality.
We’ve got warnings from the IMF and Latin America, a Wall Street bankster suspending some European operations, a Finnish threat to leave the eurozone, more financial woes and pay cuts ahead for Spain, German bonds falling below zero interest, bad news for Cyprus workers, bad numbers for Italy, Britain’s health service in trouble [Ireland's too], underfunded banks in The City, lots of Greek developments, Merkel’s soaring popularity, a senior center occupation in Berlin and, well, lots more.
Wall Street Journal: What, me worry?
We’ll begin with a look on the lighter [?] side in the form of a Wall Street Journal [soon be to renamed WSJ] videotorial featuring editorial board member Mary Kissel and assistant editorial page editor James Freeman, who seem to think it’s no big deal:
So bankers systematically lying for the sake of personal profit [those colossal bonuses] is a trivial matter?
Maybe to your boss, Rupert Murdoch, but not to the rest of us poor working [on looking for work] stiffs.
And some other folks do consider it a serious problem.
From the BBC:
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has confirmed that it has formally launched an investigation into the rigging of inter-bank lending rates.
The case could lead to criminal charges being brought against individuals.
Its involvement follows an investigation by US and UK regulators into the manipulation of Libor, which resulted in a record fine for Barclays.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, said he was “delighted” by the decision.
“As a government, we will make sure the SFO has all the resources it needs to conduct this investigation in full,” he said.
“I want the SFO to follow the evidence wherever it goes, to bring prosecutions if they can.”
Now recall that Barclay’s settled with the U.S. Department, and the deal enabled the banksters to avoid criminal prosecution.
Why is it that banksters are able to avoid hefty fines, while federal prosecutors are filling prisons with poor people who can’t afford the white shoe lawyers so beloved of the Wall Street crowd.
What’re those words engraved in stone over the entrance to the Supreme Court?
IMF cuts global growth numbers
Gee, looks like Me. Bankster’s reading the papers.
From the Associated Press:
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Friday that the fund will cut its forecast for global economic growth in a quarterly assessment to be released later this month.
She did not say which nations or regions were contributing to the lowered assessment for 2012, characterizing it as “tilted to the downside” compared with the International Monetary Fund’s 3.5 percent global growth projection given three months ago.
“In the IMF’s updated assessment of the world economy, to be released 10 days from now, the global growth outlook will be somewhat less than we anticipated just three months ago. And even that lower projection will depend on the right policy actions being taken,” she said in a speech Friday.
She declined to give more details.
More from the BBC:
She warned that the IMF’s forecast for global economic growth, which is due out later this month, would be lowered.
“What I can tell you is that it will be tilted to the downside and certainly lower than the forecast that was published three months ago,” she said.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda complained that Europe’s debt problems were hurting the Japanese economy because they were causing unjustified rises in the value of the yen.
“Market jitters on eurozone problems, especially one-sided yen rises that do not reflect Japan’s economic fundamentals, are inflicting severe damage on economic sentiment,” he said.
Credit ratings agency Moody’s also said on Friday that the short-term risks to the eurozone economy had reduced.
But it warned there would be a high cost to wealthier eurozone countries.
The London Telegraph has posted her full speech here.
Eurobank move prompts a Wall Street move
With interest on European Central Bank loans set to zero and the euro in near-freefall, one Wall Street giant is closing their European moment market funds to would-be speculators.
From Dawn Kopecki of Bloomberg:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bank, closed five of its European money-market funds to new investments after the European Central Bank lowered deposit rates to zero.
JPMorgan notified clients yesterday that it won’t accept new investors or money in five euro-denominated money-market and liquidity funds because the rate cut might generate negative returns for investors, the New York-based company said in a notice to shareholders.
The ECB yesterday reduced its benchmark rate to a record low of 0.75 percent and took its deposit rate to zero, with President Mario Draghi saying the cuts may have only a “muted” economic impact.
The deposit rate cut “will almost certainly move cash bids in short-dated instruments into negative territory, and so we have taken the step to restrict subscriptions and switches into the funds in order to protect existing shareholders from yield dilution,” the company said on its website.
Use our money for debtors states and we’re Finnished
Such was the warning from the eurozone’s northernmost state.
From the Agence France-Presse:
Finland would consider leaving the eurozone rather than paying the debts of other countries in the currency bloc, Finnish Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen has said.
“Finland is committed to being a member of the eurozone, and we think that the euro is useful for Finland,” Ms Urpilainen told financial daily Kauppalehti, adding though that “Finland will not hang itself to the euro at any cost and we are prepared for all scenarios”.
The finance minister stressed that Finland, one of only a few EU countries to still enjoy a triple-A credit rating, would not agree to an integration model in which countries were collectively responsible for member states’ debts and risks.
She also insisted that a proposed banking union would not work if it were based on joint liability.
“Collective responsibility for other countries’ debt, economics and risks; this is not what we should be prepared for,” Ms Urpilainen said.
Spain pain prolonged as bailout lags
While that eurozone summit promised to fund Spanish and Italian banks directly without sticking the governments for the bill, the money itself won’t show up for at least another six months, leaving Spain to suffer from prolonged agony as it struggles to keep a sagging economy alive.
From Agence France-Presse:
Struggling Spanish banks will not get much needed cash directly from Europe’s new bailout fund until next year, a senior European official said Friday.
A European Union summit last month agreed that the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) would recapitalise banks directly, rather than give funds to the government concerned and so weigh down the state accounts with new debt.
Spain, under pressure on financial markets as its borrowing costs reach dangerously high levels, had held out for the move to help stabilise the banking system without making Madrid’s sovereign debt burden even worse.
The EMS aid is conditional, however, on setting up a European bank regulatory and resolution system — also agreed at the summit — which the official said would “not occur before the first half of 2013″.
The EMS, in place officially from July 1, is not yet operational but should be within the next few months, added the official, who asked not to be named.
In the meantime, aid for Spanish banks would have to take the form of a loan by the temporary European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to the Spanish public Fund For Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB).
But delayed cash doesn’t equal delayed austerity
And for Spain, that also means costs of borrowing are soaring, leaving the government no choice but to impose even harsher conditions of austerity.
The news wasn’t reassuring to the markets, which reacted with predictable alarm.
From Angela Monaghan and Louise Armitstead of the London Telegraph:
The Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said that he will take additional steps in the coming days to reduce the country’s debt mountain.
Speaking at a conference outside Madrid on Saturday, he said that Spain’s 17 autonomous regions must also accelerate their efforts to cut Continue reading
That’s certainly a reasonable suspicion about the strange constitutional coup that two weeks ago overthrew President Fernando Lupo. And if that’s the case, the reason becomes abundantly clear in a story from Mexico City’s La Jornada via a translation at Aletho News:
A group of US generals reportedly visited Paraguay for a meeting with legislators on June 22 to discuss the possibility of building a military base in the Chaco region, which borders on Bolivia in western Paraguay. The meeting coincided with the Congress’s sudden impeachment the same day of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, who at times has opposed a US military presence in the country. In 2009 Lugo cancelled maneuvers that the US Southern Command was planning to hold in Paraguay in 2010 as part of its “New Horizons” program.
More bases in the Chaco are “necessary,” rightwing deputy José López Chávez, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Defense, said in a radio interview. Bolivia, governed by socialist president Evo Morales, “constitutes a threat for Paraguay, due to the arms race it’s developing,” according to López Chávez. Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over the sparsely populated Chaco from 1932 to 1935, the last major war over territory in South America.
The US has been pushing recently to set up military bases in the Southern Cone, including one in Chile and one in Argentina’s northeastern Chaco province, which is close to the Paraguayan Chaco, although it doesn’t share a border with Paraguay [see Update #1129]. Unidentified military sources say that the US has already built infrastructure for its own troops in Paraguayan army installations near the country’s borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil; for example, an installation in Mariscal Estigarribia, some 250 km from Bolivia, has a runway almost 3.8 km long, in a country with a very limited air force.
Now consider a 21 September 2009 SECRET/NOFORN diplomatic cable from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the American embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay referring to U.S. Special Forces training operation then underway in the country:
One year into office, President Lugo is confronted by the reality of governing with a fractured ruling coalition, an antagonistic Congress, and entrenched systemic corruption. Lugo has proven resilient, and thus far has weathered deliberate destabilization efforts that included a wave of small explosive devices and bomb threats in Asuncion. Nevertheless, rumors of coup-plotting persist along with a continual erosion of Lugo’s political capital. Given the current environment and the absence of written status protections for all DoD personnel in Paraguay, their presence poses a potential political risk. At any point, those who oppose Lugo or merely wish to weaken his ties to the United States may publicly raise the issue of U.S. forces in Paraguay and speculate about their role in a way that undercuts U.S. interests. In addition, there is a potential personal risk to U.S. forces on training missions in Paraguay without the benefit of status protections or equivalent.
Then consider this excerpt from another cable, a SECRET dispatch sent to Washington on 2 June 2008 by Deputy Chief of Mission Michael J. Fitzpatrick in Asuncion:
Sensitive reporting indicates that some members of Lugo’s inner circle have ties to representatives of Venezuelan President Chavez. These Lugo insiders claim that he supports Chavez’ plans for Latin America; Lugo has stated publicly and privately (to Embassy officials) that he will not align himself with Chavez. Lugo volunteered to OAS chief of electoral mission (and former Colombia Foreign Minister) Maria Emma Mejia early April 21 that while Chavez was the first president to congratulate him April 20, he does not know Chavez and was delighted that the U.S. Ambassador was in fact the first caller to congratulate him and to offer support for his government. One party in Lugo’s coalition, the P-MAS (Paraguayan Movement towards Socialism), receives Venezuelan financial support.
And here’s an excerpt from another cable, a SECRET/NOFORN 18 June 2007 dispatch from Ambassador Craig Kelly in Santiago, Chile:
Our growing economic relationship with the pragmatic leftist government in Uruguay puts the lie to the claim that greater trade and investment with the U.S. is tantamount to betrayal of local populations. This is critical because poor countries, like Uruguay, are vulnerable not so much to Chavez’s ideology but to his petrobolivars. We need to draw attention to and build on these success stories borne out of engagement with the U.S., as alternatives to Chavez’ vision of a region cut off from the U.S. Even Paraguay’s leftist priest-turned presidential candidate Fernando Lugo has stated he is closer to Bachelet or Lula than to Chavez.
Now let’s add another ingredient to the mix: Genetically modified soybeans peddled by American companies, as noted in an 18 June 2008 cable from Economics/Political Chief James Story at the U.S. Consulate in Sao Paulo: and titled U.S. SCIENTISTS VISIT BRAZIL FOR MOU ON BIOFUELS:
With peasant farmers threatening land invasions to demand land reform and end perceived environmental abuses, Paraguay’s soybean producers last month staged a two-day demonstration intended to call the government’s attention to rural turmoil. Hundreds of medium- and large-scale soy producers parked their tractors on Dec. 15 and 16 along the sides of the roads in 13 departments, creating a so-called “tractorazo”, underscoring the importance of peasant labor to agricultural production. The protest by soy producers comes after months of marches on Asuncisn and threats of land invasion by thousands of small and landless peasants, or campesinos, demanding agrarian reform and an end to the spraying of toxic agro-chemicals. Handling the tensions that fueled it marks a key test for President Fernando Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop who took office Aug.15.
Incidentally, the same cable also mention Amyris, the UC Berkeley-spawned and Bill Gates-enabled genetic engineering company that hopes to make a fortune off of using GM bugs to harvest fuel from plants.
A final bit of context
The so-called constitutional coup that led to Lugo’s ouster followed a bloody confrontation between peasants and police at the site of a massive agricultural plantation the peasants claimed had been illegally seized by a leading supporter of the opposition Colorado party.
So we’re getting the picture of a nominally leftist leader with uncomfortable relations with both an ambitious American military and the peasants’ demand for land reform and their deep dislike of American agribusiness and its monopoly on seeds.
Forgive us if we suspect some deep politics at work, favoring both the Pentagon and global corporations like Monsanto which provide the patented seeds to the latifundistas.
An illuminating and chilling interview by Sam Seder of Majority Report with Harvard Law grad Lori Wallach from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch on the rights-destroying secret provisions of Barack Obama’s TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership [previously].
The proposed agreement bans “Buy American” laws, fair trade laws, and a whole host of other regulations designed to protect the environment and save citizens from rapacious banksters, as well as creating a secret tribunal system privatizing enforcement of the treaty and elevating corporations to the status of sovereign citizens. Presiding over the tribunal will be private sector corporate attorneys.
In other words, the Trans-Pacific Partnership combines the worst of NAFTA with the new corporate rights bestowed by Citizens United, the ruling that transferred ultimate control of the American political system to corporate sponsors.
Here are some of the law’s secret provisions, from an Global Trade Watch news release [PDF] issued earlier this month:
Although the TPP has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:
- limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
- extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
- establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
- allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.
>snip<
The TPP offered an opportunity to develop a new model of trade agreement that could deliver the benefits of expanded trade without unduly undermining signatory nations’ domestic public interest policies or establishing special privileges for foreign corporations. President Barack Obama and countless members of Congress campaigned on fixing these investment rules to better protect the public interest. But Public Citizen’s analysis of this text shows that the U.S. positions do not reflect any of the changes that candidate Obama pledged when he recognized the threats posed by the NAFTA-style investment provisions in trade agreements.
Barack Obama is giving us lots of Change™ without any of the Hope™.
Anyone who still thinks Obama is a liberal suffers from a serious case of endocrectocraniality.
H/T to Moussequetaire.
UPDATE: Wallach writes about the TPP here.
Posted in Asia, Banksters, Corpocracy, Deep Politics, Environment, Finance, Hypocrisy, Latin America, Law, Resources, Video, Wealth
Like all good austerians, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera pushes privatization and increased costs for public schools.
The first hard Right president since the end of the nation’s military dictatorship, he’s already launched a partial privatization of the nation’s copper mines, and now he’s targeting higher education — the spark for yesterday’s rallies that drew 150,000 to the streets.
From I Love Chile:
Educational profiteering was a main topic during today’s protest, which also joined professors and workers from across the city.
“We’ve gathered here today to call for an end to educational profiteering, which is something that affects the private universities more than it does us [Department of Mathematics at the Universidad de Santiago en Chile],” student Aguillen Ortega said to I Love Chile. “However, just because it only affects private universities doesn’t mean it’s not a fight for all the Chilean students.”
>snip<
Members of Chile’s older generations also joined the ranks of protestors today. Parents and grandparents marched alongside the young people in a crowd of 150,000 people, according to figures reported by Confech.
“We’re protesting, accompanying. We have children that it cost us a lot to educate, and we now have grandchildren it’s costing us even more to educate,” said Rita, a grandmother and demonstrator at today’s event.
More from the EFE news agency:
Starting last year, Chilean students have mounted a series of protests against a highly stratified education system that funnels state subsidies to private institutions even as public schools in poor areas struggle.
Chile’s public schools and universities were neglected by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of the late Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who embraced doctrinaire free market policies.
Private schools mushroomed under the military regime and the trend continued after democracy was restored, even during the 1990-2010 tenure of the center-left Concertacion coalition. EFE.
And from Kevin Kunitake of the Santiago Times:
“The government is right to be worried because we are dealing with a minister who bows to business,” said Confech Spokesperson Gabriel Boric at the march’s closing ceremony. “We want to say that while this happens, we will not be quiet. We went from a military dictatorship to a market dictatorship.”
In Chile, the majority of education costs are borne by private citizens. Confech and other student organizations have called for the government to take a more active investment.
In addition to the movement’s broad call for education reforms, many protesters specifically spoke against profiteering in the educational system. At least seven universities are under investigation for taking money from the instruction and putting it into the pockets of its directors and executives.
This was the movement’s third major protest of the year, but first sanctioned route past La Moneda presidential palace. It was also the biggest of the three, according to the Confech estimate.
An overwhelming majority were students from both private and public universities and varying grade levels. Others included grandmothers, teachers and workers, all supporting the movement.
And note this detail from the Associated Press [emphasis added]:
Chile is beset by poor-quality public schools and expensive private universities benefiting from state funding, and many students face huge educational loan debts.
Gee, students actually taking to the streets. They do it in Canada and Chile; why not here?
Video roundup of the day’s events
Here’s a video of the action in Santiago, featuring a appearance by Camila Vallejo, the spearhead of the ongoing student revolt. And we love those street dogs who find water cannons and even better source of drinking water than toilet bowls:
Here’s another video of stills from the day’s action, set to Hip Hop:
More footage, this time of a parallel rally in Concepción:
Finally, from Reuters, more scenes from Santiago, including some rather remarkable teargas-spewing armored vehicles. Maybe Berkeley can buy a couple, to go along with that tank:
Posted in Academia, Class, Corpocracy, Debt, Education, Finance, Governance, Latin America, Politics, Video, Wealth
Though Julian Assange may be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, waiting for word on his bid for refuge in that land, he’s still at work, as witnessed by the latest of his interview webcast for RT.
It’s an important discussion about the rise of popular movements, primarily in Latin America and the Middle East, among Assange, MIT prof and provocateur Noam Chomsky, and Tariq Ali.
The Julian Assange Show: Noam Chomsky & Tariq Ali
The program notes:
A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.
Posted in Class, Corpocracy, Cuba, Culture, Deep Politics, Development, Economy, Governance, History, Labor, Latin America, Mideast, Military, Politics, Thinkers, Video, Warfare, Wealth
The prodigy is Julio Silpitucla of Ciudad de Merlo in Argentina, and his skill and elan are simply breathtaking.
The videos were recorded two years ago when he was 11.
One of our favorite melodies, “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” [Memories of the Alhambra] by Francisco Tárrega:
“Alfonsina y el Mar” by Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna:
“Asturias [Leyenda]” by Isaac Albéniz:
“Entre Dos Aguas” by Paco de Lucia:
And for something not so completely different, a remarkable rendition of Brazilian composer Zequinha de Abreu’s “Tico-Tico no Fubá” by The Duo Siqueira Lima, composed of Uruguayan Cecilia Siqueira and Brazilian Fernando de Lima, performed at the University of Florida three years ago.
Oh what the heck, one more from the duo. This time on two guitars.
“Chaccone in G Minor” by George Frideric Handel:
Posted in Latin America, Music, Video
Paraguay’s moderate leftist President Fernando Lugo has been ousted from office in a legislative coup, following a bloody fight between police and peasants occupying land they claimed was illegally seized by a member of the party behind the ouster.
The ouster followed a week after the killings at Curuguaty in eastern Paraguay and the Lugo-demanded resignations of his Interior Minister and national police chief.
His removal has prompted extensive protests from other Latin American leaders.
Ludo, a former Catholic bishop, was elected to the presidency four years ago on a platform calling for land reform, but he had done little to carry out his promise.
Here’s a 2010 report from The Real News Network on the politics of land and power in Paraguay, with an emphasis on the role played by U.S. agribusiness giants and their genetically modified proprietary crops [a transcript is here]:
Note that one of the major soy players is Monsanto, which is also the source of much of the personal wealth of Chris Somerville, who now heads the BP-funded Energy BioSciences Institute here in Berkeley, which hopes to turn out proprietary GM crops for planting in the “green parts” of the globe.
And guess which government was first to recognize the new regime?
From MercoPress:
Germany’s International Development Minister Dirk Niebel met with [newly installed President Federico] Franco on Saturday and became the first foreign official to express support for the new government.
”I’m not a constitutional expert on Paraguay, but as a politician I think the vote in Congress sent a clear political message,” Niebel told reporters in Asuncion.
Let’s see: Immediate German recognition of a right wing government headed by a guy named Franco responsible for overthrowing an elected left st government overthrown on behalf of wealthy entrenched interests. Seems to me we’ve heard of something similar that happened once before.
And of course survivors [including this one] from that German regime that was first to recognize the first Franco found Paraguay a safe haven in defeat, where they were pampered by another unelected president with a Germanic name. Gen. Alfredo Strössner.
Paraguay had long been a haven for Europeans of a peculiar bent, as Graeme Woof writes at The Smart Set, a Drexel University blog, describing a Parguayan town founded by an earlier variety of German racists:
New Germany would have been [Josef] Mengele’s kind of town. It was founded in the 1880s by Elisabeth Nietzsche (sister of Friedrich) and her husband, the noted anti-Semite Bernhard Förster. This couple had tried to whip their countrymen into a Jew-hating frenzy, but apparently not even 19th-century Germans were anti-Semitic enough for them. Disgusted, the couple packed off to Paraguay with a few other families and tried to establish a pure Aryan colony, a place to preserve the master race.
The colony failed utterly, ravaged within two years by parasites and the unfortunate realization that the Aryan volunteers’ European farming experience hadn’t prepared them to grow the local manioc and yerba mate any more than it had taught them to ranch llamas or stalk yaks. The anti-Semitic colonists came to hate the Försters, and began to wonder whether they had picked the wrong Jew-hating loons to follow into the jungle. Those who didn’t die of lockjaw or hunger left; a few stayed, and decades later, their children and grandchildren fought for the Third Reich. By now, anyone who had papers to return to Germany has already gone — unless, of course, they had reason to stay away.
Latin leaders react with outrage
Unsurprisingly, the legislative coup provoked strong reactions from other democratically elected leaders.
From Jill Langlois of GlobalPost:
Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay said Sunday they were pulling their ambassadors from Paraguay in the wake of President Fernando Lugo’s impeachment.
Brazil’s foreign ministry said the decision was made “due to the breakdown of democracy in Paraguay,” and promised to take up the impeachment with Mercosur and Unsur, according to CNN. The moves, made by three of Paraguay’s most important neighbors, follow the swift removal from office of Lugo on Friday, after less than 48 hours of debate.
>snip<
Paraguay’s new president, Federico Franco, said on Saturday he would ask his impeached predecessor to help calm regional tensions, according to Reuters. Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop, said he Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Corpocracy, Governance, History, Latin America, Politics, Video
The U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] has been ordered to pack up and leave by the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, reports Venezuelanalysis.
The move follows the adoption of a resolution by the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [ALBA], which cites the agency’s subversive role as revealed in those pesky diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.
Here’s part of the resolution, dated 21 June and translated for Venezuelanalysis by Rachael Boothroyd:
Given the open interference of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the internal politics of the ALBA countries, under the excuse of “planning and administering economic and humanitarian assistance for the whole world outside of the United States,” financing non-governmental organizations and actions and projects designed to destabilise the legitimate governments which do not share their common interests.
Knowing the evidence brought to light by the declassified documents of the North American State Department in which the financing of organisations and political parties in opposition to ALBA countries is made evident, in a clear and shameless interference in the internal political processes of each nation.
Given that this intervention of a foreign country in the internal politics of a country is contrary to the internal legislation of each nation.
On the understanding that in the majority of ALBA countries, USAID, through its different organisations and disguises, acts in an illegal manner with impunity, without possessing a legal framework to support this action, and illegally financing the media, political leaders and non-governmental organisations, amongst others.
On the understanding that through these financing programmes they are supporting NGOs which promote all kind of fundamentalism in order to conspire and limit the legal authority of our states, and in many cases, widely loot our natural resources on territory which they claim to control at their own free will.
USAID has a long, complex history of involvement in the world of deep politics, and has often been used as cover by the spooks of the CIA and other three-letter outfits.
As Venezuelanalysis reported two years ago:
A high-level USAID official confirmed two weeks ago that the CIA uses USAID’s name to issue contracts and funding to third parties in order to provide cover for clandestine operations. The official, a veteran of the U.S. government agency, stated that the CIA issues such contracts without USAID’s full knowledge.
Indeed, USAID is among the outfits listed by Wikipedia under the category “Central Intelligence Agency front organizations.”
Posted in Deep Politics, Latin America, Secrecy, Spooks
While we’ve been focusing mostly on Europe because of the extraordinary wave of economic disaster sweeping the continent, things are looking bleak elsewhere too, especially in the U.S.
Today’s wrapup focuses mainly on the U.S. but also takes a more general look. And what we discover ain’t pretty.
Federal Reserves tries Operation Twist
Picking a name that sounds like something out of a novel about confidence artists, the Federal reserve is throwing more money at the economy, though it’s doing it in a way that virtually ensures failure.
From Dominic Rushe of The Guardian:
The US Federal Reserve announced a $267bn plan to underpin the US’s fragile recovery Wednesday as chairman Ben Bernanke warned that unemployment was unlikely to improve before the end of the year.
The plan – an extension of a scheme known as Operation Twist – aims to drive down long-term interest rate and encourage borrowing. The announcement came as the latest statement from the Fed painted a gloomier picture of the US economy and said it was prepared to take more action if necessary.
The Fed said that the growth in employment “has slowed in recent months, and the unemployment rate remains elevated,” and that household spending “appears to be rising at a somewhat slower pace than earlier in the year.” The Fed also reiterated its concern that “strains in global financial markets continue to pose significant downside risks” to growth.
That news will be a blow to the Obama administration in the run-up to an election that looks set to be dominated by economic news in general and the unemployment rate in particular.
More from Ron Scherer of the Christian Science Monitor:
However, the Fed’s actions, termed Operation Twist because it involves the central bank selling short-term US treasuries and buying an equal amount of long-term bonds, disappointed those on Wall Street who had hoped to see more aggressive steps to stimulate the economy.
“I think there was a slight disappointment,” says Fred Dickson, chief investment strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Ore. “There was a little bit of anticipation [that] the Fed would hint at the timing of some kind of additional easing or economic stimulus.”
Wall Street was also somewhat disappointed, says Mr. Dickson, to hear the central bank’s forecast for the economy: modest weakening and little pickup in hiring. And, in an indication that the Fed expects the economy to be in slow motion no matter who is elected president in November, the Fed says it will keep short-term interest rates low through the end of 2014.
Here’s an idea: Rather than throwing money where only the rich can grab it, why not try something that really would serve as an economic stimulus: Fire up the government printing presses and give the money directly to the people along with a demand that they spend it?
Sounds a lot better than leaving it to the rich, who will most likely either sit on it or use it in Europe, where the dollar has the upper hand over the euro, ensuring plenty of bargains.
We propose doling out the dollars to the public with the proviso that they spend it in their own communities, ensuring that there’s some real economic activity rather that notional entries on corporate and bank ledgers.
Or give it to the long-term unemployed
These are folks who’ve exhausted their government benefits and need money simply to live.
And lord knows there are plenty of them to help
From Lucia Mutikani of Reuters:
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits was little changed last week, according to government data on Thursday that suggested the labor market was struggling to regain momentum.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 387,000, the Labor Department said. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 389,000 from the previously reported 386,000.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 380,000 last week. The four-week moving average for new claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends, increased 3,500 to 386,250 – the highest level since early December.
The claims data covered the survey week for June’s nonfarm payrolls and the report pointed to little or no improvement on the paltry 69,000 jobs added in May. Claims rose 15,000 between the May and June survey periods.
And here’s another place to use it
New York City, where the unemployment levels in the African American community are higher than unemployment figures for Greece and Spain.
From Patrick McGeehan of the New York Times:
More than half of all of African-Americans and other non-Hispanic blacks in the city who were old enough to work had no job at all this year, according to an analysis of employment data compiled by the federal Labor Department. And when black New Yorkers lose their jobs, they spend a full year, on average, trying to find new jobs — far longer than New Yorkers of other races.
Nationally, the employment outlook for blacks has begun to brighten: there were about one million more black Americans with jobs in May than there were a year earlier, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But that is not the case in New York City, where the decline in employment since the recession began here, in 2008, has been much steeper for blacks than for white or Hispanic residents, said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
One problem, said David R. Jones, the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, is that blacks were overrepresented in fields that suffered the most in the downturn, including government agencies, construction and manufacturing.
G20 warns U.S. may become Greece
Yep, things are looking so bad here at home that the G20 is talking about getting tough, warning that American debt levels are reaching Mediterranean proportions.
From Richard Blackden of the London Telegraph:
America has been given a rare warning from G20 countries not to botch its own deficit-cutting measures amid fears that the world’s biggest economy could fall off a “fiscal cliff” next year.
The warning came at the end of a fraught two-day summit in Mexico dominated by Europe’s debt crisis. While the world’s most powerful economies urged European governments to do more to end their crisis, the rebuke to The White House reflects increasing concern that America’s struggle with its own $15trillion of debt will be the next to hit the world economy.
Efforts by President Barack Obama and Congress to agree on a grand plan to cut the country’s deficit have so far failed.
A series of short-term compromises have left the US facing $1trillion in spending cuts at the start of next year. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has warned that the cuts, alongside the expiration of tax cuts first introduced by George W. Bush, leave the US facing a fiscal contraction that could plunge the country back into recession.
The G20 urged the US to “calibrate the pace of its fiscal consolidation by avoiding a sharp fiscal contraction in 2013 while insuring that its public finances are placed on a sustainable long-run path,” according to the communique.
Now we’d add that the root of the problem is a monetary system is which money is created by laundering it through private banks.
So long as money originates in debt, the cycle will continue, and since debt accrues exponentially, the whole system’s bound to break eventually.
Why not break it now, since the pain will only be incrementally greater when the whole sad edifice collapses, as it must, under its own weight?
Most Americans fear second recession
While we agree that most Americans are right in being afraid of worsening economic conditions, we disagree profoundly with the notion that we’re not already in an ongoing recession that amounts to a depression.
Just because some economic signals have been stronger than at the worst levels of the crash doesn’t mean there’s a recovery as far as most Americans are concerned.
The harsh reality is that Americans who have jobs work longer hours, often for less pay and reduced benefits when compared with say 2006 — and the worst of it is born by the newly hired, who very often have even lower pay and benefits than those who’ve been able to retain their jobs for the same companies.
Meanwhile, working people are unable to get loans while the corporations and the rich can borrow money art historically low interest rates.
What’s happened has been a vast redistribution of wealth.
With that premable, the story from Alicia M. Cohn of The Hill:
A massive majority of likely voters fear America could be slipping into a second economic downturn just four years after the Great Recession, according to a new poll for The Hill.
But people remain split over which of the presidential candidates — Barack Obama or Mitt Romney — are offering the better prescription for economic health.
Amid worrisome jobs numbers and the looming threat of a eurozone crisis, the survey found 75 percent of people were either very or somewhat worried the country is headed toward another recession.
Among those concerned, 46 percent said they were “very” worried Continue reading
And the subject is soybeans, presumably including strains developed by UC Berkeley’s Chris Somerville, who made millions selling genetically modified soy to Monsanto.
Somerville currently serves as head of the campus side of the Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI], funded with $500 million of BP money to develop GMO crops and microbes BP can use to produce transportation fuels.
The Brazilian case centers on one of Monsanto’s most insidious practices: Turning farmers into corporate serfs by banning the the practice at the heart of agriculture since its beginngings — saving seeds to plant next year’s crop — and imposing royalties on farmers whose crops by be contaminated by their own GMOs.
The story from Subodh Varma of the Times of India:
Five million Brazilian farmers have taken on US based biotech company Monsanto through a lawsuit demanding return of about 6.2 billion euros taken as royalties from them. The farmers are claiming that the powerful company has unfairly extracted these royalties from poor farmers because they were using seeds produced from crops grown from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, reports Merco Press.
In April this year, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, ruled in favor of the farmers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004 or a minimum of $2 billion. The ruling said that the business practices of seed multinational Monsanto violate the rules of the Brazilian Cultivars Act (No. 9.456/97).
Monsanto has appealed against the order and a federal court ruling on the case is now expected by 2014.
A telling quote defines the essence of the farmer lawsuit:
“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production,” Jane Berwanger, lawyer for the farmers told the media agencies.
Here’s a video report from RT
Featuring am interview with Shelly Roche of ByteStyle.TV:
Luisa Massarani, writing for Nature, describes the potential impacts:
Brazil is the second-largest producer of genetically-modified (GM) crops, after the United States. Last year, it farmed 30.3 million hectares of the crops, mostly soya beans, but also corn and cotton. It legalized the growing of GM crops in 2005, after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina. Because the crop is resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, farmers can spray they fields with the chemical to control weeds without risking damage to their crops.
Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nation’s soya-bean crop. The company also tests Brazilian soya beans that are sold as non-GM — if they turn out to be Roundup Ready, the company charges the farmers responsible for the crops some 3% of their sales.
>snip<
On 12 June, the judges of the Brazilian Supreme Court of Justice ruled against Monsanto, deciding unanimously that the ruling by the Justice Tribune of Rio Grande do Sul, once it is made, should apply nationwide. Monsanto has declined to comment on the case.
Some scientists fear that if the company is forced to repay royalties, it could trigger cuts in funding for biotech research.
If they prevail in the end, the farmers could have a major impact on Somerville’s BP project, which aims at creating massive industrial-scale plantations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for proprietary agrofuel crops.
Posted in Africa, Agriculture, Asia, Development, Environment, Global Corporate U., Latin America, Law, Resources, Science, Video
If you thought the economic news was grim, consider a newly published study just published in Nature, that most eminent of scientific journals.
Written by a team of 22 internationally respected academics, the study paints a grim picture of a planet in danger of massive biological changes as the direct result of human devastation of the natural environment.
What’s not mentioned is the role Berkeley is playing in creating the very natural holocaust the researchers decry.
From UC Berkeley science Writer Robert Saunders:
A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.
“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”
Here’s Barnosky in a brief clip posted by the university:
A critical tipping point
Note in particular this section of Sander’s report on the article [which we’re unable to access because Nature hides it behind a pay wall and we’re short the $32 dollars it would take to read it]:
The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity.
Currently, to support a population of 7 billion people, about 43 percent of Earth’s land surface has been converted to agricultural or urban use, with roads cutting through much of the remainder. The population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2045; at that rate, current trends suggest that half Earth’s land surface will be disturbed by 2025. To Barnosky, this is disturbingly close to a global tipping point.
“Can it really happen? Looking into the past tells us unequivocally that, yes, it can really happen. It has happened. The last glacial/interglacial transition 11,700 years ago was an example of that,” he said, noting that animal diversity still has not recovered from extinctions during that time. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 percent mark.”
Berkeley’s role in pushing the tipping point
If the planet reaches the tipping point, UC Berkeley may be one of the principal culprits should the university’s massive research efforts on turning plants into fuel ever reach a point of commercial success.
In addition to the $500 million BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute [the EBI, headed by a scientist who made a fortune selling genetically modified plants to Monsanto], the university is also home to the federally funded Joint BioEnergy Institute and has spawned several start-up companies devoted to the same end.
EBI head Chris Somerville insisted repeatedly to fellow faculty members that fuel crops developed by the project would only be farmed on “marginal” U.S. farmlands east of the Mississippi.
The scientist who then headed BP’s secret side of the EBI was more honest, declaring that BP’s interest is global, and focused on farming the “green parts” of the planet, the lands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Africa is already presently the target of massive land grabs by corporations from Asia and Europe, eager to corner cheap land for fuel crops, and massive dam projects to transform waterways and divert their flows to agrofuel plantations are already in the works — efforts that will radically expand the destruction of existing ecosystems.
And here’s what we wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet on 28 December 2007:
During meetings with industry and legislative officials in Washington in June, BP officials stressed that their company was a global business with a global reach.
The multinational is keen to develop crops suitable for growth in the tropics of Africa, South America and Asia—what BP chief scientist Steve Koonin called “the green parts” of the globe.
BP’s targets are the tropics of the Third World, not just east of the Mississippi in the U.S., the region emphasized by officials at UC Berkeley and its partners at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
And the first researchers dispatched by the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), as Berkeley’s BP-funded project is formally known, headed to India and Africa in search of potential fuel crops five months before the research agreement was formally signed in November.
The question of population
One area where we disagree with the studies authors is in placing primary blame on the earth’s growing population.
We would argue instead that population increase is greatest in those countries with the greatest income inequality, and that population growth becomes toxic only when coupled with political systems subservient to economies dominated by debt, corporate interests, and media systems which combine to create a noxious Continue reading
Posted in Africa, Agriculture, Asia, Corpocracy, Development, Environment, Governance, Human behavior, Latin America, Nature, Resources, Science, Video
