Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
False Choices, or Media Traps
by Immanuel Wallerstein The United States is going through two sets of debates among presidential candidates, one set each for Democrats and Republicans.
These debates usually have journalists as conveners and questioners, and the journalists seek to force the candidates to commit themselves on supposedly difficult choices.
These "difficult" choices are regularly formulated in ways that they are media traps, sometime maliciously so.
The Last Days of Zimbabwe
by Aoife Kavanagh Some 40 golfers braved the midday heat to battle for the big prize on a parched nine-hole golf course that had seen better days. The winner of the weekend competition at the Hornung Sports Club in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, would walk away with 25 litres of unleaded petrol. “Last weekend, first prize was a box of vegetables,” a wiry veteran explained as he shaped up to tee off. “Veggies are welcome, but the petrol prize is something special, it’s like gold dust these days.”
In Zimbabwe, a white elite who once lived a charmed existence can barely manage to fill their fuel tanks. And years of economic and political mismanagement threaten the lives of the majority black population. Four out of every five black Zimbabweans live below the poverty line. Every wage earner is feeding almost 20 people from a monthly salary. Just over a decade ago the life expectancy of the average Zimbabwean woman was 66. Today it is 33. The central bank’s foreign exchange reserves have been destroyed; supermarket shelves are bare.
At 37 years of age, Deborah Glover says she had lived a middle-class life and never knew poverty. That all changed when she had a car accident, and as a single mother with three kids she could no longer afford to make ends meet.
"I'd never lived in poverty before that time," she told an audience of 300 at the recent Connecticut Association for Community Action's (CAFCA) annual conference, Ending Child Poverty: Investing in Our Future. "I had ignored poverty all together."
When she was advised to go to a shelter to get the help she needed, she responded, "What the hell is a shelter?"
The Endless Greed of Private Equity
by Ignacio Ramonet While critics of the economic horrors of globalisation argue, a new and even more brutal form of capitalism is in action. The new vultures are private equity companies: predatory investment funds with vast amounts of capital at their disposal and an enormous appetite for more.
Their names -- among them the Carlyle Group, KKR, the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital, Apollo Management, Cerberus Partners, Starwood Capital, Texas Pacific Group, Wendel, Euraze -- are still not widely known. And while still a secret they are getting their hands on the global economy.
Between 2002 and 2006, the capital raised by these funds from banks, insurance companies, pension funds, and the assets of the super-rich rose from $135bn to $515bn. Their financial power is phenomenal, more than $1,600bn, and they cannot be stopped.
In our times, we have witnessed the forces of darkness and destruction take over the Oval Office. Recently, I’ve had a few moments in which it seemed not only valid, but most illuminating, to understand this takeover in the spiritual terms of “the opportunism of evil.” What greater target could evil choose in the entire world than to occupy the highest place of power in the most powerful nation on earth.
THE CONCEPT OF EVIL, RECAPITULATED
I’ve said many times that the most important deepening of my understanding in my two-plus years of this anti-Bushite mission has concerned the phenomenon of evil. It was toward the end of the summer of 2004 that I began thinking of the Bushite forces in terms of evil and I continued to grapple with the subject into the summer of 2005. My explorations culminated in my writing the essay, “The Concept of Evil: Why It is Intellectually Valid and Politically and Spiritually Important.”
Feeding Eighteen Thousand Families Each Month in One Neighborhood in New Orleans - The Right to Return Eighteen Months after Katrina
By Bill Quigley
Each morning, Debra South Jones drives 120 miles into New Orleans to cook and serve over 300 hot free meals each day to people in New Orleans East, where she lived until Katrina took her home.
Ms. Jones and several volunteers also distribute groceries to 18,000 families a month through their group, Just the Right Attitude. Who comes for food? "Most of the people are working on their own houses because they can't afford contractors," Ms. Jones said. "They are living in their gutted-out houses with no electricity."
7. Electing Not (Opinion/Opinion)
Author : Charles Sullivan
Of Boycotts and Elections
by Charles Sullivan One hopes that at some point the American people will come to the realization that most elected officials these days do not serve the public interest, but their own economic self interests and those of their financial backers.
The few who would serve the public interest are filtered out by the insurmountable fortress of capital that is the bulwark of electoral politics, especially at the federal level.
Genuine public servants have roughly the same chance of winning a seat in Congress or the Whitehouse, as one has of winning the lottery. For the totally uninitiated, or those on narcotics: the odds are astronomical.
SATURDAY MARCH 17: VICTORIA JOINS THE
GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION AGAINST WARS OF OCCUPATION!
by Victoria Peace Coalition
This message contains:
1. Details for the March 17th demonstration
2. Information on the many ways that you can be involved during the march
3. Endorsements
4. Background info on war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan
RAIN OR SHINE - JOIN THE DEMONSTRATION IN VICTORIA!
Date: March 17
Time: 12 noon
Location: Centenial Square
VICTORIA, B.C. – The Sierra Club’s Energy Film Fest takes place this weekend and the line-up for Sunday’s mysterious “Shorts Binge” has just been announced. If you need a rapid dose of info on a variety of energy-related topics, this is the screening for you.
in the 2008 Presidential Race
by Chris Floyd People often say to me, "Gosh, Chris, you sure give our politicians a lot of guff. Seems like you find something wrong with everybody out there, no matter what their political stripe. Is there anybody at all that you could support for president?" That's what people say to me.
Well, thanks to the good offices of Scott Horton at Harper's, I'm happy to say that I have now found a presidential candidate to whom I can give my wholehearted, full-throated support: a man of the people, a son of the soil, a straight-talker with business moxie, military experience and a wide knowledge of foreign parts. I am proud to stand here today (why yes, I do write this blog standing up – and I hope you read it in the same way) and second Horton's nomination for the only man who can lead our great nation back to, er, greatness.
Ordinarily, the elevation of a gaggle of corporate bagmen, spine-free time-servers and craven accomplices of tyranny and aggression to the control of Congress would not be a cause for rejoicing. With a few notable exceptions, the Democratic Party has displayed nothing but cowardice and cluelessness over the past five years, betraying the interests of the American people at every single gut-check point in the long march to the self-proclaimed "Unitary Executive" dictatorship of George W. Bush. Whenever it really counted – Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts for the rich, the class-warfare nuclear bomb of the Bankruptcy Bill, the appointment of sleazy, third-rate officials such as torture-enabler and Constitution-gutter Alberto Gonzales to high office, and of course, the eager goose-stepping into the war crime of Iraq (which was, let us remember, approved by a Democratic-controlled Senate) – the Democrats folded, would not even go down fighting.
Is there any greater example of this than the vote, just a few weeks ago, on the "Military Commissions Act," the republic-killing measure that gave the president virtually unlimited, unchecked, unappealable powers over the life and liberty of every citizen? The Democratic "leadership" – now suddenly basking in media lionization – would not even mount a filibuster to defend the Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta). Many Democrats actually voted in favor of ending the American Republic. (Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee was one of these – and now he has reaped his reward: defeat. That's how it goes, Harold; you can make a deal with the devil, but he'll always cheat you in the end. You sold out the nation for nothing – and now Bob Corker, yet another feckless, faceless, money-grubbing tycoon will pollute the Senate chamber.) The MCA debacle was the last full measure of fear and servility from a group whose collective record is one long tissue of shame.
And yet, and yet…this is indeed a time – a brief, brief time – for celebration. For the fact remains that the Republican Congress is – as Matt Taibbi has detailed so forcefully – the worst in American history: corrupt, incompetent, dysfunctional, lazy, and ignorant almost beyond measuring. As often mentioned here, they are the very picture of the Roman Senate described by Tiberius, after they'd voted him yet another grovelling set of honors and powers: "Men fit to be slaves." The damage they have done to the nation, and the world, as the bootlicking handmaidens of George W. Bush and his militarist mafia is incalculable, and will go on producing foul repercussions for years, perhaps generations.
Empire and Burlesque: Permanent Bases Rise While Public Gawks at Geeks
by Chris Floyd Thirty years ago, I was in Nashville for a Bob Dylan concert. It was during Dylan's "Vegas" tour: full entourage of back-up singers, horn players, "big band" arrangements, glitzy Elvis-style suits for the star, all of it slickly packaged by Hollywood impresario Jerry Weintraub, who handled Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond, among others. It was, to put it mildly, a real hoot.
Especially intriguing was the persona that Dylan had adopted for the tour: a chatty Vegas lounge singer, full of patter and stories for the crowd between numbers. (The very next year I saw him in much more ascetic guise, in a black leather jacket with a stripped-down band doing nothing but Christian songs to a half-empty house during a snowstorm in Knoxville. Now there's a man who really knows something about "change.")
But on that Nashville night, Dylan – loquacious, and probably libated – was doing a lot of his old tunes, including the surreal send-up of conventional wisdom, "Ballad of a Thin Man."
While the American election campaign thrashes toward the finish line with the usual spasms of witless diversion and hyper-mendacity – an echo chamber of utter bullshit roaring in a media bubble murderously detached from reality – in the actual world of flesh and blood, the destruction of Iraq engineered by George W. Bush is entering a new phase that could make the previous three years of all-devouring hell look like a sojourn in paradise.
Baghdad is under siege, as Patrick Cockburn reports in the Independent; the city has been encircled by Sunni militias who have cut almost all the roads leading into the capital. Inside the city, "the scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict," says Cockburn. And it will inevitably, inexorably grow worse, as Shiite militias consolidate their hold within Baghdad while trying to break the blockade from outside. Already, "food shortages are becoming severe" in some parts of the city, he reports, while almost a thousand Iraqis are being slaughtered each week, mostly in Baghdad. Meanwhile, at least 1.5 million internal refugees have fled the ethnic cleansing by both Sunni and Shiite militias, joining the hundreds of thousands who have fled the country altogether. Again, these numbers dwarf those in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars – while the total dead from Bush's war, a very credible estimate of at least 650,000, is approaching the level of the Rwandan genocide.
It has been cast as a ferocious battle against a mighty opponent: a fanatical "apocalyptic cult" storming the holy city of Najaf with hundreds of warriors led by a self-proclaimed Islamic Messiah, their fren z y quelled only at the last moment by a massive intervention of American firepower. But as with so much else in the blood-soaked annals of the Bush Administration's disastrous Babylonian Conquest, it appears this neat story masks a far grimmer, grubbier truth: a mass slaughter of civilians, caught in the toxic fog of hair-trigger tension, sectarian hatred and violent political ambition unleashed by the U.S. invasion.
The January 28 clash in Najaf was, the New York Times proclaimed, the greatest one-day battle in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Some 200-400 "cultists" were killed by Iraqi troops and the American air and ground forces that came to their rescue when the apocalyptics – whose ranks included Baathists and al Qaeda terrorists – nearly overran the Iraqi government troops, according to the NYT and other Western media.
The "bizarre" and "extraordinary" attack by the obscure but massively armed "Soldiers of Heaven" Shiite splinter group was an attempt to kill the leading clerics in the sacred city, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of millions of Iraqi Shiites, we were told. This massacre would supposedly usher in the reign of the Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah-figure which many Shiites believe is coming to redeem – and judge – the world. For hours on end, the outgunned and ill-trained Iraqi government soldiers held off the swarming zealots until American planes began bombing raids on the cult's entrenched positions in the groves outside Najaf and U.S. troops marched in to bolster the flagging locals.
It was indeed a rousing tale of carnage, courage and fearsome zeal, fit for one of Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodbaths. Yet in the days following the attack, it has became increasingly apparent that the story being presented in the Western media – based largely on accounts from Iraqi government officials and the Pentagon – has about as much historical accuracy as Gibson's ersatz epics.
The outlines of Bush's "New Way Forward" or "Great Leap Forward" or "Long Walk Off a Short Pier" in Iraq is now fairly clear. It has three general thrusts: a large increase in troop numbers; a direct assault on the forces of Motqada al-Sadr; and, if possible, an expansion of the war beyond Iraq's borders through a military strike on Iran.
The troop increase is now certain (if indeed it had ever been in doubt). In the past few days, with the nation distracted by the Christmas holidays (and by the ever-phony and genuinely idiotic "Christmas Wars" eating up media airtime), the Bush Faction has carried out a quiet coup – or perhaps a counterrevolutionary purge – in the military ranks. Top generals who openly opposed increasing the U.S. occupation force in Iraq have either announced their retirements or else have been compelled to crawl and eat their words in public recantations. (This moral cowardice is even more remarkable when you consider how weak, stupid – and deeply unpopular – is the "commander-in-chief" who has somehow overawed these stalwart soldiers. One can only imagine that some sort of blackmail must be involved.)
The generals were the last possible obstacle to the war's precipitous escalation; the national Democrats have already signaled their willingness to countenance a "surge" (the Orwellian propaganda term that has been adopted wholesale by the corporate media to describe the vast expansion of the war). Even those Democrats who have appeared to speak out against it have, almost invariably, couched their objections in weasel-wording terms devoid of any actual oppositional content. "I won't support a surge unless it's part of an overall plan to bring our troops home sooner," is the standard formulation, although the "boldest" among them will sometimes tack on a specific date: "bring our troops home by 2008" or some such. But of course, any escalation of the war will be presented precisely as a strategy to bring the conflict to a speedier end; thus most Democrats will latch onto that spin and – grudgingly or enthusiastically – go along. In any case, it's certain that the Congressional Democrats will not put up a concerted, united effort against an escalation.
And so in the coming weeks, we will see anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 more troops sent to Iraq – despite the overwhelming public sentiment against such a policy: only 11 percent of Americans support the idea of escalation, as a new CNN poll reports. This is an astounding level of public opposition to any government policy; I can't recall anything like it in almost 40 years of observing American politics and studying American history. The fact that the Bush Regime is willing to undertake an action that 89 percent of the American people oppose – and what's more, an action that is guaranteed to cost the lives of many Americans and many billions from the public treasury – is a glaring indication of how completely anti-democratic the Bush Faction is, and how utterly dysfunctional the U.S. political system has become.
By now, you’ve all read the latest crackpot teapot story. So without further ado, I’ve written to one of the hacks who recycled this crap - Justin Penrose, ‘crime reporter’ of the UK ‘Sunday Mirror’.
Dear Justin Penrose,
I have just read your story about the alleged ‘Killer Teapot’.
I put it to you that this story is blatant propaganda and irresponsible, scaremongering journalism, since Scotland Yard is currently saying nothing of the kind. I checked if you didn’t.
As everybody knows, this story, which is doing the rounds, was sourced from an ‘Exclusive’ planted in ABC news.
To be clear, let’s read it together, Justin. Quote:
“British officials say police have cracked the murder-by-poison case of former spy Alexander Litvinenko, including the discovery of a “hot” teapot at London’s Millennium Hotel with an off-the-charts reading for Polonium-210, the radioactive material used in the killing.
A senior official tells ABC News the “hot” teapot remained in use at the hotel for several weeks after Litvinenko’s death before being tested in the second week of December. The official said investigators were embarrassed at the oversight.“
Executions Not Leading to Reconciliation
by Ali al-Fadhily
The executions of former regime officials are creating greater division, rather than reconciliation, among Iraqis.
Special courts formed by the American occupation authorities in Iraq are issuing death sentences -- like that carried out on former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, on 30 December 2006 -- on what many Iraqis are interpreting as a political basis.
"Executing Saddam cost Iraqis a lot of hatred and more division between the sects, " Walid Al-Ubaidi, post-graduate law student at Baghdad University told IPS.
"Now they [U.S.-backed Iraqi Government] are executing the Ex-Minister of Defense, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, who was very well known for being a professional general who led the Iraqi army against Iran," Al-Ubaidi said, stressing that, "This man represents a symbol for the Iraqi army that defended Iraq."
BAGHDAD, Jan. 5 (IPS) - The footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein
has generated controversy in Iraq that is refusing to die down.
Footage of Saddam's last moments, taken by an onlooker with a mobile
phone, shows the former dictator appearing calm and composed while
dealing with taunts from witnesses below him. The audio reveals several
men praising the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr,
founder of the Shia Dawa Party, who was killed by Saddam in 1980.
"Peace be upon Muhammad and his followers," shouted someone near the
person who filmed the events. "Curse his enemies and make victorious his
son Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada." These chants are commonly used by
members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.
There has been a huge international backlash to the footage. In India
millions of Muslims demonstrated against the execution being carried out
during the sacred festival of Eid.
Across Iraq, Shias seem mostly pleased. "Of course things will be better
now that Saddam is dead," Saed Abdul-Hussain, a cleric from the Shia
dominated city Najaf told IPS in Baghdad. "It is like hitting the snake
on the head and I hope his followers will hand over their weapons and
accept the fact that they lost."
But few believe that Saddam was inspiring the armed resistance.
"Who is Saddam and why would he affect anything after his death," a
55-year-old teacher from Fallujah told IPS. "The idea of his leading the
resistance from jail is too ridiculous for a sane man to believe. We
know that Mujahideen (holy warriors) are the only ones who will kick the
occupation out of the country."veral years.)
Refugees Bring In Some Brittle Strength
Inter Press Service Dahr Jamail DAMASCUS, Apr 17 (IPS) - Syria's decision to accept Iraqi refugees streaming into the country has brought the government of President Bashar Assad more power within Syria and the region, but at significant cost.
The ministry of interior in Syria estimates the total number of Iraqi refugees to be around 1.5 million. The Syrian government has maintained an "open door" policy towards Iraqi refugees, unlike neighbouring Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait who have been far less welcoming.
This appears to have earned Assad renewed political power within his country. That position, topping his strong stance against U.S. policy in Iraq, has won him support in the wider Arab world as well.
Media Complicit In ‘Shopocalypse’ As Consumers Go Wild
by Danny Schechter You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme - the famous William Tell Overture - as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news “correspondents” stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for “midnight madness” sales.
It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a “shopopocalyse.” His crusade against out of control consumption is pictured in the new film 'What Would Jesus Buy?' opening at some theaters in LA and San Francisco.
This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting/encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and on newscasts.
Here's the way to look at the Election Day outcome: If the U.S. were a parliamentary democracy, Bush would be history. Our self-proclaimed "war president" has lost a vote of confidence, not by the members of his party, but by the people of the United States.
Of course, we don't live in a parliamentary democracy, so we’re still stuck with the same megalomaniacal leader, even though the control of the Congress appears to be passing to the opposition party. (As of this writing, the new House will be firmly in the hands of the Democrats by a bigger margin than the current House is in the hands of Republicans, and the Senate appears headed towards Democratic control also, albeit by the narrowest of margins: 1 Lieberman.)
What was Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) thinking when he told Senate colleagues it was a "sad day" when that body started taking its marching orders from an outsider (the president and the director of national security), in passing a new version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that gives the president a free hand to spy on communications of Americans without a judicial review?
Is he implying that this is the first time the Senate has done this?
Isn't that exactly what the Senate (and the House) did when they passed the so-called USA PATRIOT Act in October, 2001? Isn't that what they did in overturning the Posse Comitatus Act and in altering the Insurrection Act last fall? Isn't it what they did in approving the Military Commissions Act last year, which retroactively okayed the use of torture on captives?
by dd jango
Recently, many very smart people became very scared about the start-up
of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. They're afraid that the
collider's activities will cause the creation of a black hole and,
well, bye-bye Earth. The machine has been on-line for a short while
now; no black hole yet. Maybe later.
I am certainly not either a quantum physicist or an astronomer. But I
think it goes like this: as a star dies, it collapses in on itself,
creating a mass with such enormous gravity as to suck in everything
near it, including light. Scary, I agree. Instead of worrying about the
LHC's potential for such an event, however, we would do well to turn
our concern to an existing vortex - American presidential and other
national-level politics.
Lilly's Legal Battle Over Zyprexa Documents Continues
by Evelyn Pringle
On January 3, 2007, a hearing was held before Judge Jack Weinstein in a US District Court in New York, on a motion by Eli Lilly to extend an injunction to conceal company documents that show Lilly hid the lethal side effects of Zyprexa for a decade and engaged in an illegal off-label marketing scheme to promote the drug for unapproved uses.
Zyprexa is only FDA approved to treat adults with conditions related to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and yet its Eli Lilly's number one best selling drug with sales of over $4 billion last year.
Kill for empire,
die for greed
kill for oil,
die for Bush
kill for democracy,
die for the Fatherland
kill for the Fortune 500,
die for the Homeland
kill for Cheney,
die for Halliburton
kill for the Republicans,
die for the Democrats
kill for American Idol,
die for NASCAR
kill for food,
die for Monsanto
kill for the children,
die for the cluster bomblet
kill for Jesus,
die for Pat Robertson
kill for BigPharma,
die for the drug
kill, kill, kill, kill
an Army of one and a
catafalque for millions
from the Halls of Montezuma
to the shores of the river Styx
“we who are about to die salute you”
we who are about to die curse you
we who are about to die pity you
and your imperial war machine
kill, kill, kill, kill
and the world kills with you
die and you die alone
in the name of Bush
in the name of God
in the name of Wall Street
in the name of Exxon-Mobil
“we who are about to die salute you”
we who are about to die excluded from your world
canon fodder for the idle rich and
the gated community
we who are about to die shit on you
as you have shit on us
in the name of the father, the son and the corrupt
we send the carrion-eating Valkyrie to feast on
the eyeballs of your children for one hundred generations
kill for empire
die for ego
ad majorem Dei gloriam
the greater glory of the Fatherland also
arma tuentur pacem
the gun kills
therefore it makes the peace
kill for empire
kill for peace
Annuit Coeptis.
Eliot’s Mess: The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
by Greg Palast While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.
Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.
This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.
Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Oil Spill
by Greg Palast [Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury.
Pope Versus President
by Heather Wokusch The Vatican’s recent snub of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is only the latest salvo in the battle between Pope Benedict XVI and President George W. Bush.
This tug of war has profound implications for both U.S. foreign policy and the critical Catholic vote in 2008’s presidential race.
EVIL SPIRITS: BUSH IN LATIN AMERICA
by Jack Random
Spirit Guides of the Mayan community in Guatemala vowed to cleanse their sacred lands of evil spirits in the wake of the American president’s footsteps.
Said spokesperson Juan Tiney: “That a person like him, with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk [on] our sacred lands, is an offense [to] the Mayan people and their culture.” [1]
Ecuador today faces great opportunities for a basic social transformation and also grave threats from imperial networks.
In the recent period, popular social mobilization of urban and rural popular classes (workers, peasants, Indians, public employees, urban barrio militants, teachers and street venders) have succeeded in overthrowing neo-liberal presidents, discrediting a corrupt and reactionary congress, and rejecting the traditional oligarchical electoral parties.
A vast independent mass movement has become the axis of a new power configuration demanding the complete and total nationalization of the petroleum industry, a profound comprehensive agrarian reform, the re-allocation of government revenues from foreign and domestic debt payments to the financing of extensive health, education and employment programs.
Separatism and Empire Building in the 21st Century
by James Petras
Throughout modern imperial history, ‘Divide and Conquer’ has been the essential ingredient in allowing relatively small and resource-poor European countries to conquer nations vastly larger in size and populations and richer in natural resources. It is said that for every British officer in India , there were fifty Sikhs, Gurkhas, Muslims and Hindus in the British Colonial Army.
The European conquest of Africa and Asia was directed by white officers, fought by black, brown and yellow soldiers so that white capital could exploit colored workers and peasants. Regional, ethnic, religious, clan, tribal, community, village and other differences were politicized and exploited allowing imperial armies to conquer warring peoples.
In recent decades, the US empire builders have become the grand masters of ‘divide and conquer’ strategies throughout the world. By the 1970’s, the CIA made a turn from promoting the dubious virtues of capitalism and democracy, to linking up with, financing and directing, religious, ethnic and regional elites against national regimes, independent or hostile to US world empire building.
America today is not the only empire, but it is one that has consistently formulated itself around the ideologies of corporate business, the military, big government, and religious self-righteousness, mass marketing itself and mass exploiting others with military back-up when needed to make itself the biggest and most powerful ever known.
Superficially, the empire has used the media interface of corporate business, the well known media companies themselves such as Time-Warner, to keep the general public ill-advised and readily entertained with pulp writing, pulp broadcasting, and computer activities and internet surfing.
The government and military combine to provide “reliable
information” from “reliable sources” who wish to remain “anonymous” and
thus create a mystique of underhanded cleverness and consequently
apparent correctness of information.
33. Economic Apartheid Kills (Opinion/Opinion)
Author : Joel S. Hirschhorn
by Joel S.
Hirschhorn
To be successful in overturning our
elitist plutocratic system we should add economic apartheid to our semantic
arsenal. Better than economic
inequality, economic injustice and class warfare, because apartheid is loaded
with richly deserved negative emotions. Sadly, in
South Africa
,
economic apartheid has taken over from racial
apartheid.
How ironic that the Bush
administration successfully talked up the global threat from terrorism while it
pursued domestic and foreign policies promoting economic apartheid, a far
greater and more pervasive threat to national and global stability.
The human race on planet Earth, taken as an aggregate mass
abstraction, may be getting richer. But a new report from the World Institute for Development Economics
Research of the
United
Nations
University shows that wealth creation
is remarkably - one might say criminally - unequal. Follow this hierarchy at the top of the
wealth pyramid: The richest 1 percent of adults alone owned 40 percent of global
assets in the year 2000; the richest 2 percent owned more than half of global
household wealth; and the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85% of the
world total. That leaves very
little for the remaining 90 percent of the global population. Could it be any worse? Yes, the rich are still getting richer,
more millionaires are becoming billionaires.
As to the world's lower class: the bottom half of the world
adult population owned barely 1 percent of global wealth, defined as net worth:
the value of physical and financial assets less debts. Over a billion poor
people subsist on less than one dollar a day. Every day, according to UNICEF, 30,000
children die due to poverty – that's over 10 million children killed by poverty
every year! Global economic
apartheid is killing people.
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration’s favoured model across the region.
Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf of the US. The reverberations would likely consume the region.
Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West’s failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. Were we more engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive in opposing Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq, the sectarian fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of course, that, without the West’s benevolent guidance, Arab societies are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.
But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have
been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine,
Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash
of political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about
whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference.
Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from --
increasingly a choice between the US or Iran -- seems to determine
where they stand in this confrontation.
Eat, Fight, Fuck, Pray
An Interview with Joe Bageant
by Joshua Frank
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War just published by Random House Crown. He recently spoke with DV co-editor Joshua Frank about his new book, religion, rednecks and what it’s like to serve beer to an underage horse.
Joshua Frank: So Joe, what the hell is going on with the redneck strain of the working class anyway? Why do they seem more apt to embrace evangelism rather than a labor union? Is it, as psychologists would say, learned helplessness, or worse, idiocy?
Joe Bageant: Well, Josh, that’s a pretty broad brush you’re painting with there. In fact, it’s too broad to be answered, but that will not stop me from responding with my usual shrillness and tin drum noise punctuated by flatulence. Let me start by saying the term redneck does not apply especially to southerners. I have found indigenous redneck culture and communities in Maine, Oregon Kansas, New York, Massachusetts, and California … in virtually every state and in large numbers. Among loggers, cowboys, poles, Germans, and even Latino rednecks.
Bukovksy: EU is Soviet Union Reborn
by Kurt Nimmo It takes a victim of sovietism to recognize a likewise process in Europe. “Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union,” writes Paul Belien for the Brussels Journal. “In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr. Bukovsky called the EU a ‘monster’ that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state.”
“In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified and still are even now, for 30 years,” Bukovksy declared in a speech delivered at a Polish restaurant opposite the European Parliament. “These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our ‘common European home.’”
Help 
The United States is going through two sets of debates among presidential candidates, one set each for Democrats and Republicans. 
Some 40 golfers braved the midday heat to battle for the big prize on a parched nine-hole golf course that had seen better days. The winner of the weekend competition at the Hornung Sports Club in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, would walk away with 25 litres of unleaded petrol. “Last weekend, first prize was a box of vegetables,” a wiry veteran explained as he shaped up to tee off. “Veggies are welcome, but the petrol prize is something special, it’s like gold dust these days.”
At 37 years of age, Deborah Glover says she had lived a middle-class life and never knew poverty. That all changed when she had a car accident, and as a single mother with three kids she could no longer afford to make ends meet.
In our times, we have witnessed the forces of darkness and destruction take over the Oval Office. Recently, I’ve had a few moments in which it seemed not only valid, but most illuminating, to understand this takeover in the spiritual terms of “the opportunism of evil.” What greater target could evil choose in the entire world than to occupy the highest place of power in the most powerful nation on earth.
Each morning, Debra South Jones drives 120 miles into New Orleans to cook and serve over 300 hot free meals each day to people in New Orleans East, where she lived until Katrina took her home. 
One hopes that at some point the American people will come to the realization that most elected officials these days do not serve the public interest, but their own economic self interests and those of their financial backers. 
This message contains:
VICTORIA, B.C. – The Sierra Club’s Energy Film Fest takes place this weekend and the line-up for Sunday’s mysterious “Shorts Binge” has just been announced. If you need a rapid dose of info on a variety of energy-related topics, this is the screening for you.
People often say to me, "Gosh, Chris, you sure give our politicians a lot of guff. Seems like you find something wrong with everybody out there, no matter what their political stripe. Is there anybody at all that you could support for president?" That's what people say to me.
a few notable exceptions, the Democratic Party has displayed nothing but cowardice and cluelessness over the past five years, betraying the interests of the American people at every single gut-check point in the long march to the self-proclaimed "Unitary Executive" dictatorship of George W. Bush. Whenever it really counted – Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts for the rich, the class-warfare nuclear bomb of the Bankruptcy Bill, the appointment of sleazy, third-rate officials such as torture-enabler and Constitution-gutter Alberto Gonzales to high office, and of course, the eager goose-stepping into the war crime of Iraq (which was, let us remember, approved by a Democratic-controlled Senate) – the Democrats folded, would not even go down fighting. 
While the American election campaign thrashes toward the finish line with the usual spasms of witless diversion and hyper-mendacity – an echo chamber of utter bullshit roaring in a media bubble murderously detached from reality – in the actual world of flesh and blood, the destruction of Iraq engineered by George W. Bush is entering a new phase that could make the previous three years of all-devouring hell look like a sojourn in paradise. 
It has been cast as a ferocious battle against a mighty opponent: a fanatical "apocalyptic cult" storming the holy city of Najaf with hundreds of warriors led by a self-proclaimed Islamic Messiah, their fren z y quelled only at the last moment by a massive intervention of American firepower. But as with so much else in the blood-soaked annals of the Bush Administration's disastrous Babylonian Conquest, it appears this neat story masks a far grimmer, grubbier truth: a mass slaughter of civilians, caught in the toxic fog of hair-trigger tension, sectarian hatred and violent political ambition unleashed by the U.S. invasion. 
rs; a direct assault on the forces of Motqada al-Sadr; and, if possible, an expansion of the war beyond Iraq's borders through a military strike on Iran.
By now, you’ve all read the latest crackpot teapot story. So without further ado, I’ve written to one of the hacks who recycled this crap - Justin Penrose, ‘crime reporter’ of the UK ‘Sunday Mirror’. 
The executions of former regime officials are creating greater division, rather than reconciliation, among Iraqis.
Footage of Saddam's last moments, taken by an onlooker with a mobile
phone, shows the former dictator appearing calm and composed while
dealing with taunts from witnesses below him. The audio reveals several
men praising the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr,
founder of the Shia Dawa Party, who was killed by Saddam in 1980.
DAMASCUS, Apr 17 (IPS) - Syria's decision to accept Iraqi refugees streaming into the country has brought the government of President Bashar Assad more power within Syria and the region, but at significant cost.
You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme - the famous William Tell Overture - as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news “correspondents” stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for “midnight madness” sales. 
What was Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) thinking when he told Senate colleagues it was a "sad day" when that body started taking its marching orders from an outsider (the president and the director of national security), in passing a new version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that gives the president a free hand to spy on communications of Americans without a judicial review? 
On January 3, 2007, a hearing was held before Judge Jack Weinstein in a US District Court in New York, on a motion by Eli Lilly to extend an injunction to conceal company documents that show Lilly hid the lethal side effects of Zyprexa for a decade and engaged in an illegal off-label marketing scheme to promote the drug for unapproved uses.
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.
[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. 
The Vatican’s recent snub of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is only the latest salvo in the battle between Pope Benedict XVI and President George W. Bush. 
Spirit Guides of the Mayan community in Guatemala vowed to cleanse their sacred lands of evil spirits in the wake of the American president’s footsteps. 
Ecuador today faces great opportunities for a basic social transformation and also grave threats from imperial networks.
To be successful in overturning our
elitist plutocratic system we should add economic apartheid to our semantic
arsenal. Better than economic
inequality, economic injustice and class warfare, because apartheid is loaded
with richly deserved negative emotions. Sadly, in
South Africa
,
economic apartheid has taken over from racial
apartheid. 
The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration’s favoured model across the region. 
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War just published by Random House Crown. He recently spoke with DV co-editor Joshua Frank about his new book, religion, rednecks and what it’s like to serve beer to an underage horse.
It takes a victim of sovietism to recognize a likewise process in Europe. “Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union,” 
