‘Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Resolution S.RES.65 sends the message to Iran that the US objective is regime change, not a negotiated settlement to nuclear question (13 March 2013)’.
‘The Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick is back chatting about a myriad of economic and stock market-related issues with Cambridge House Live’s anchor, Bridgitte Anderson. Taped at Cambridge House International’s Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. (24 Jan 2013)’.
‘New research finds the planet is warming rapidly. Climate scientists say that’s actually the opposite of what the planet would be doing on its own (8 March 2013’.
This new study seems pretty conclusive and indicates that the time is up . . . Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and HarvardUniversity published their findings in the journal Science. The National Science Foundation released this statement on 7 March: ‘With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around the world, [OSU and Harvard] scientists have reconstructed Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age. The analysis reveals that the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years. Results of the study, by researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Harvard University, are published this week in a paper in the journal Science. Lead paper author Shaun Marcott of OSU says that previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the last 2,000 years. Extending the reconstruction of global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts today’s climate into a larger context’.[1]
Shaun Marcott states unequivocally that “We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years. Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years”.[2] Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences adds that “The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution, as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history–but this change happened a lot more quickly”.[3] Climate change or global warming continue to be two hot talking points, in spite of the fact that public opinion has turned away from these issues now . . . global apathy with regards to the effects of man-made climate change seems to reign supreme and the search for more fossil fuels to burn continues unabated. As a result, it would appear that the future of humanity on planet earth is not very rose-coloured anymore . . .
[1] “Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years” The Natural Science Foundation (07 March 2013). http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127133&org=NSF&from=news.
[2] “Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years”.
[3] “Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years”.
‘Have you heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The lobbyist-penned trade deal that could give global corporations the right to sue America for getting in the way of their profits? It’s larger than NAFTA and Obama is a fan. This episode features well-known activists Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. (5 March 2013)’.
Viva Chavez!!!
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‘Hundreds of anguished Venezuelans poured onto the streets of downtown Caracas, crying and shouting slogans in support of deceased President Hugo Chavez, after learning of his death on Tuesday. (5 March 2013)’.
On the World Socialist Web Site, Bill Van Auken writes that “Venezuela’s [14-year] president, Hugo Chavez, a former military officer and left nationalist, died in a military hospital in Caracas Tuesday [, 5 March 2013] afternoon following a two-year battle with cancer. Chavez, who was 58, came to national prominence as the leader of an abortive military coup against the corrupt regime of Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the leader of Accion Democratica, a social democratic bourgeois party. Andrés Pérez was responsible for the bloody repression of the “Caracazo”—a popular uprising against IMF-dictated austerity measures in which up to 3,000 were killed. Freed after two years of imprisonment, Chavez founded his “Bolivarian” movement and ran for president in 1998, claiming that he represented “neither the left nor the right,” but was committed to a program of social and economic reform and an end to the corrupt two-party system that had traded power over previous decades between Accion Democratica and the Christian Democratic Copei party. After gaining power, he began espousing a left populist political platform, identifying himself as both a nationalist and “socialist.” Chavez earned the implacable hostility of Washington with his populist and nationalist politics. This included clashes with US-based energy conglomerates sparked by his assertion of greater national control over the exploitation of the country’s petroleum resources, his partial nationalizations, his economic backing for Cuba, and his pursuit of closer economic ties with US imperialism’s rival, China”.[1]
Van Auken continues critically that “sections of the pseudo-left in Europe, North America and Australia sought to cast Chavez as a revolutionary leader of the working class, promoting his vaguely defined ‘21st century socialism’ as a new way forward for the masses of Latin America and beyond. In reality, Chavez’s policies were founded on the use of Venezuela’s oil revenues, which account for over 90 percent of the country’s earnings and are based for the most part on exports to the US, to fund various social assistance programs for the poor. While these programs undoubtedly improved literacy levels, health care, housing and income levels for Venezuela’s impoverished majority, the commanding heights of the economy remained firmly in the hands of a financial elite. The private sector constitutes a larger share of the country’s economy today than when Chavez first took office in 1998. Finance capital remained, along with the military, a pillar of his government. There is no reason to doubt Chavez’s professed sympathy for the oppressed working masses of Venezuela and Latin America. However, the politics of his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, to be realized without the working class itself overthrowing capitalism or establishing its own organs of state power, had nothing to do with genuine socialism”.[2]
The World Socialist Web Site piece end thus: “Only hours before announcing Chavez’s death, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro—anointed by Chavez as his political successor—announced the expulsion from Venezuela of the US Air Force attaché, Col. David Delmonaco, and his deputy for attempting to recruit Venezuelan military officers for ‘destabilizing projects’. President Barack Obama issued a statement indicating Washington’s hopes to exploit Chavez’s death to establish more favorable conditions for US imperialism in Venezuela. ‘At this challenging time of President Hugo Chávez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government’, it read. Under the Venezuelan constitution, the death of the president is supposed to trigger a new presidential election within 30 days. Vice President Maduro is expected to emerge as the Chavista candidate, facing Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, whom Chavez defeated in a presidential election held last October [2012]. The future of Chavismo without Hugo Chavez is by no means certain. The former paratroop lieutenant colonel had ties to the military, a key pillar of his government, that Maduro, a former bus drivers’ union leader and the husband of Chavez’s attorney during his post-1992 imprisonment, lacks. The importance of these ties was underscored by the appearance on Venezuelan national television, directly following Maduro, of the chief of the country’s military, Admiral Diego Molero, who appealed for ‘unity, tranquility and understanding’ among Venezuelans and pledged the armed forces’ loyalty to the constitution”.[3]
[1] Bill Van Auken, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dead” World Socialist Web Site (06 March 2013). http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/06/hugo-m06.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co.
[2] Bill Van Auken, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dead”.
[3] Bill Van Auken, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dead”.
The pro-government daily Today’s Zaman reports that a ‘pro-Israeli, anti-Islamic extremist group, known for running anti-Muslim ads in the New York subway, has depicted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a terrorist in ads targeting the concept of jihad in Islam. The anti-jihad ads were designed by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) as a response to “MyJihad,” a public education campaign that seeks to share the proper meaning of jihad as believed and practiced by the majority of Muslims. MyJihad has been running various ads on buses and trains in cities across the US, in which it has tried to show the global values of Islam with such slogans as “My Jihad is not to judge people by their cover. What’s yours?” and “My Jihad is to build friendships across the aisle. What’s yours?” The AFDI, widely known for its controversial attacks on Islam, apparently designed its ads in the same way but with the opposite aim. One of the ads shows the angry face of Erdoğan next to a passage from a poem by Ziya Gökalp, a Turkish sociologist and writer, that Erdoğan famously recited in 1998. The poem reads, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers,” and next to this, the AFDI had added the sentence “That’s My Jihad. What’s yours?”’. [1]
As long ago as 2010, I wrote in the same newspaper that “[n]owadays the term jihad is much bandied about and used and/or abused at will by Muslims as well as non-Muslims the world over. The historian and Islam specialist Mark Sedgwick maintains that the concept of jihad was developed in the eighth century, when it basically functioned as a “mixture of the Army Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, appropriate for the circumstances of the time.” At the time of the Islamic conquests (seventh-eighth centuries), the world was divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb) and international relations between both spheres were primarily military in nature. But as the centuries progressed and relations between Muslims and the outside world achieved a quasi-peaceful status quo, punctuated by commercial exchanges and trade links, the idea of jihad changed as well. There is the well-known distinction between the greater jihad (al-jihad al-akbar) and the lesser jihad (al-jihad al-asghar), between a personal struggle in the way of Allah (crf. Surah 29:69) and an armed struggle to protect believers against oppression and violence perpetrated by unbelievers. In other words, jihad evolved from a code of war into a defensive mechanism, tantamount to a religious duty leading to religious rewards”.[ii] So much for the meaning of Jihad, either greater or lesser. Returning to Tayyip Erdoğan’s countanace in ads in the New York subway: in ‘1999, Erdoğan served four months in jail after being convicted of “Islamist sedition” for reading Gökalp’s poem at a political rally in Siirt when he was the mayor of İstanbul for the now-defunct Welfare Party (RP). His conviction came two years after an unarmed military intervention on Feb. 28, 1997, often dubbed a postmodern coup, which resulted in the fall of a coalition government led by RP leader Necmettin Erbakan . . . Apart from the attack on Erdoğan, the AFDI created similar ads, with the alleged words of Osama Bin Laden and Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad, and an alleged anti-Semitic sentence from a Hamas-owned TV channel. A lawyer from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently sent a letter to the AFDI claiming ownership of the MyJihad ads and stating that the AFDI is violating MyJihad.org’s common law trademark and trade dress, or design, rights’.[3]
[1] “Anti-Islam extremist group depicts Erdoğan as terrorist in public ads” Today’s Zaman (05 March 2013). http://www.todayszaman.com/news-308855-anti-islam-extremist-group-depicts-erdogan-as-terrorist-in-public-ads.html.
[2] C. Erimtan, “The war in Afghanistan: jihad, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda” Today’s Zaman (29 September 2010). http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&link=222918.
[3] “Anti-Islam extremist group depicts Erdoğan as terrorist in public ads”.
‘With Chris Hedges, Senior fellow at the Nation Institute, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize in 2002. His latest book is Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with illustrator Joe Sacco. In this Chris Hedges describes “sacrifice zones” in the U.S. which have been exposed to unlimited economic exploitation: fromer industrial centres like Camden, New Jersey which is one of the poorest and most violent cities in the country or the coal mines of West Virginia where nature and commmunities have been devastated. The liberal institutions such as the Democratic Party have betrayed the American people and sold their interests to corporate capital. The Clinton administration was responsible for the deregulation of financial markets, the hand over of public airwaves to private corporations and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – “the hardest attack on workers’ interests since 1948″. Further revolts like the Occupy movement are to be expected. The attack on civil rights under the Obama adminstration is even worse than under George W. Bush says Chris Hedges. With the escalation of drone attacks and the White House “kill list” American citizens can be killed without trial. The espionage act is used to silence whistleblowers as in the case of former CIA-employee Kiriakou who has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after exposing war crimes. Under the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) citizens can be detained without due process for an infinite time. As the law applies to journalists as well Hedges has sued the Obama adminstration – and was proven right by District Judge Katherine B. Forrest’.
‘It has been 10 years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, which marked a turning point in the West’s so-called war on terror. The pretext of the Iraq war was security and freedom, but the bombastic and openly pronounced objective was no less than remaking the greater Middle East region. For the US, Iraq became a quagmire and a humiliation – a strategic and moral failure that the country has spent the last four years trying to forget. But how much has America’s calculus of war really changed? And as Africa becomes the new frontline in the ‘war on terror’, have the Europeans learnt from America’s mistakes? Empire explores the merits, objectives, costs and morality of these wars with our guests: John Nagl, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who co-authored the US army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual; Jean Marie Guehenno, the director of the Center of International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, and former United Nations under secretary general for Peacekeeping Operations; Barbara Bodine, a professor at Princeton University and a former US Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen who also served with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq; and Christopher Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, and author of several books, including War is a Force That Gives us Meaning and Empire of Illusion’ .
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers his first major public address on investing in a strong foreign policy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA on February 20, 2013.
South of the Border, 2010 (O. Stone)
South of the Border is a 2009 documentary film directed by Oliver Stone. The documentary premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. Writer for the project Tariq Ali calls the documentary “a political road movie”. Stone stated that he hopes the film will help people better understand a leader who is wrongly ridiculed “as a strongman, as a buffoon, as a clown”. The film has Stone and his crew travel from the Caribbean down the spine of the Andes in an attempt to explain the “phenomenon” of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and account for the continent’s “pink tide” leftward tilt. A key feature is also Venezuela’s recent Bolivarian revolution and Latin America’s political progress in the 21st century. In addition to Chávez, Stone sought to flesh out several other Latin American presidents whose policies and personalities generally get limited, or according to Stone, biased media attention in the United States and Europe, notably: Evo Morales of Bolivia; Cristina Kirchner and former president Néstor Kirchner of Argentina; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; Raúl Castro of Cuba; Fernando Lugo of Paraguay; and Lula da Silva of Brazil.
Category:
Americana, Chavez, Current Affairs, Current History, Democracy, Latin America, Oil and Gas, Peak Oil, Political Commentary, Uncategorized
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