 | |
World Focus: Money Manager Capitalism: Oil Imperialism and Monetary Policy
Sunday, March 22 @ 16:49:53 UTC |  By ROB URIE
March 22, 2015 - counterpunch.org
In important ways the world is an eternal mystery and in significant ways it isn’t. On the side of mystery are pre and post cognitive understanding, being of and in the world and all of the irreducible relations these entail. On the other side is narrative form, the way that the world is understandable in a communicable sense. A central strategy in the politics of domination is to convince us that the latter is the prior— that public policies are existential mysteries that need to be left to official interpreters lest they be misinterpreted. This has been alternatively explained as those who control the present control the past, with the past being history as shared narrative.
U.S. foreign policy in its official dimension is often an unfathomable mystery, a series of unrelated events that policy officials manage on a case by case basis. Within the taxonomy of modern academia this is the realm of political science. In another dimension lies pure economics; deduced theories about how ‘the world’ works where the economists’ hammer sees everywhere and always isolated and detached nails. And in yet one other dimension is the intersection of economics and politics, political economy of past decades. If economic interests can be found to substantially drive political actions, e.g. U.S. foreign policy, political scientists join economists in controlling the present through improbable parsing of the past.
| | (Read More... | 35753 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 0) |
|
War and Terror: The Human Price of Neocon Havoc
Friday, July 18 @ 07:48:38 UTC |
Exclusive: Neocons are the “masters of chaos” as they destabilize disfavored governments around the world. But real people pay the price as we’ve seen with Israel’s slaughter of four boys on a Gaza beach and an apparent shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over war-torn Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
July 18, 2014 - consortiumnews.com
Whether the tragedy is four boys getting blown apart while playing on a beach in Gaza or nearly 300 killed from a suspected missile strike on a Malaysian Airliner over Ukraine or the thousands upon thousands of other innocent victims slaughtered in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other recent war zones, the underlying lesson is that the havoc encouraged by America’s neocons results in horrendous loss of human life.
While clearly other players share in this blame, including the soldiers on the ground and the politicians lacking the courage to compromise, the principal culprits in the bloodshed of the past dozen years have been the neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies who can’t seem to stop stirring up trouble in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”
| | (Read More... | 13500 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
World Focus: Gasbag Hillary Blasts China on "Human Rights"
Wednesday, May 11 @ 17:14:04 UTC | By Mike Whitney
May 11, 2011 - smirkingchimp.coms
Is there anything more irritating than listening to US officials blabber about "human rights"?
I mean, really, doesn't it drive you crazy? Here's Hillary Clinton blasting China for their "deplorable" human rights record, and meanwhile Bradley Manning sits naked and freezing in a 6' by 8' cinderblock cell in some far-flung American gulag waiting to get fingernails yanked out. Does she think we're blind?
And that's just for starters. What about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and the myriad other dungeons, concentration camps and black sites the US has scattered across the planet. Seriously, the United States is the biggest human rights abuser in the world today, and they're giving other people lectures?
| | (Read More... | 6039 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 5) |
|
World Focus:
Friday, November 05 @ 07:03:23 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
November 05, 2010
Democracy in the Middle East continues to be a hugely popular topic of discussion. Its virtues are tirelessly praised by rulers and oppositions alike, by intellectuals and ordinary people, by political prisoners and their prison guards. Yet, in actuality, it also remains an illusion, if not a front to ensure the demise of any real possibility of public participation in decision-making.
Bahrain was the latest Arab country to hold free and fair elections. It managed a reasonable voter turnout of 67 percent. The opposition also did very well, winning 45 percent of the seats. In terms of fairness and transparency, the Bahraini elections could serve as an excellent example of how ‘things are changing’ in the Middle East. More, they might provide Western leaders, such as US President Barack Obama an opportunity to commend the contribution of American guidance to ‘progress’ in the region.
In actual fact, nothing is changing – except for the insistence by some that it is. Arab governments have made two important discoveries in the last decade.
| | (Read More... | 7169 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 0) |
|
War and Terror: WP: North Korean, Iranian nuclear capability threatens US imperialism
Sunday, April 04 @ 02:20:27 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
April 01, 2010 - gowans.wordpress.com
Washington Post columnist Walter Picus has put his finger on what’s wrong with north Korea and Iran developing nuclear weapons, or having the capability to do so.
The problem is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent, which means that if either country possesses a credible nuclear arsenal and the means of delivering warheads, their conquest by US forces isn’t in the cards. And that is something Picus seems to regard as regrettable.
In his March 30 column Picus points to General Kevin P. Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command.
Chilton reminded US legislators that, “Throughout the 65-year history of nuclear weapons, no nuclear power has been conquered or even put at risk of conquest, nor has the world witnessed the globe-consuming conflicts of earlier history.” [1]
| | (Read More... | 9118 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
Inside U.S.A.: Profs Document Hijacking of U.S. Foreign Policy
Wednesday, March 22 @ 22:19:18 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
It comes as no surprise two "of America's top scholars," having released an article criticizing the hijacking of American foreign policy by AIPAC, the neocons, and the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are unable to get a hearing in the corporate media. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School "say that [AIPAC] is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication," reports United Press International. "They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and 'has a stranglehold' on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate."
| | (Read More... | 9220 bytes more | Inside U.S.A. | Score: 0) |
|
US denies invading Iraq
Monday, March 20 @ 23:10:54 UTC | by qrswave
It might as well. It denies coordinating with Israelis before the latter stormed a prison in Jericho yesterday, killing three Palestinians and seizing six.
U.S. officials adamantly denied any coordination with Israel -- which attacked 20 minutes after the monitors left -- and urged all sides to maintain calm. "Such accusations are baseless and ignore the facts, quite frankly," State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli said. Not just a liar, but an AUDACIOUS one...
| | (Read More... | 4906 bytes more | Score: 0) |
|
Inside U.S.A.: Life or death class war: The ideological background of the United States neocons
Tuesday, January 31 @ 01:05:59 UTC | Life or death class war: The ideological background of neocons in the current Bush administration
By: Jutta Schmitt
From the Bolivarian Studies Circle "El Momoy" we report that we have been holding our study and discussion sessions throughout 2005, but for reasons beyond our control it wasn't possible for us to elaborate the summaries in the form of our usual protocols, which are available for all on the Internet, beginning with last Sunday's session of January 22.
January 22's session was focused on the subject of mental programming and manipulation of world population by the global elite and its mass media, as a result of the most recent news: the sudden reappearing of the “messages” of Osama Bin Laden, a figure that has been converted into a myth in the best Orwellian style, whose character "Emmanuel Goldstein" in the distopia "1984" shows surprising similarities with Bin Laden, who always serves the interests of the Bush Administration in their effort of imposing and consolidating a totalitarian social order, in other words, absolute control and subordination ... what they call "full spectrum dominance."
| | (Read More... | 15617 bytes more | Inside U.S.A. | Score: 0) |
|
World Focus: The IMF & US Political Economy
Monday, July 25 @ 04:44:31 UTC | Contributed by serendipity
Permanently established in December of 1945, but not operational until March 1947, the International Monetary Fund was originally chartered to make loans of foreign monies to nations with temporary payments deficits (which would be determined by their gold reserves). The organization was also made to serve as the regulator of public international management. Subsequently, if member countries wanted to change exchange rates approval from the organization was necessary.
Like Broughton says in The Silent Revolution, the Fund was to be "as an independent, objective, and essentially automatic force, subject to broad political constraints and the limits of predetermined financial resources" (p. 1). Currently, due to trends in the world's political and economic spheres, the IMF is a bit different in nature than it was intended to be. According to The American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language, the term "political economy" refers to the interrelationship between political and economic processes.
| | (Read More... | 15434 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 3) |
|
War and Terror: Curing Those People of Their Hatred
Thursday, March 31 @ 12:44:52 UTC | Condi's Pitch for a "Different Kind" of Middle East
By Gary Leupp, counterpunch.org
"We are going to build a different kind of Middle East, a different kind of broader Middle East that is going to be stable and democratic and where our children will one day not have to be worried about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those planes into those buildings on Sept. 11."
Condoleezza Rice, to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, March 17, 2005
Straight from the horse's mouth (although some find in it echoes of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, Chapter 65), this pithy remark expresses the State Department's attitude towards a large chunk of the planet. It cries out for translation and dissection. "We" of course means the United States, "coalitions of the willing" with shifting compositions, and most of all the GIs who comprised Rice's Afghan audience. "Broader Middle East" (also known as "Greater Middle East") is not a term often used by geographers but is applied idiosyncratically by the administration to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Southwest Asia and parts of Central Asia. Geographers do not consider Afghanistan a Middle East nation; the fact that Bush and Rice do is significant for reasons that will become apparent.
| | (Read More... | 13750 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 4) |
|
USA - Economic World War approximating genocidal dimensions
Wednesday, October 06 @ 07:27:42 UTC | By Franz J. T. Lee
The article, published in VHeadline.com: "Venezuela, Iran and Indonesia will follow once Russia moves to the Euro ... it would destroy the US$ as a reserve currency" is most timely, and very clearly portrays immediate future developments on a world scale.
Let us briefly illustrate the background "Economic World War" that determines these Orwellian coming events:
As we know, ever since the 1970s, the Bretton Woods system has collapsed and resulted in the disintegration of fixed exchange rates, and severe upheavals in international currency markets. The current slide of the US$ against the Euro marks a critical phase of the very existence of the world capitalist system, with far-reaching economic, political, social and military consequences that we are experiencing already on a world scale that could lead to a total destructive global war between the great powers.
| | (Read More... | 6783 bytes more | Score: 3) |
|
World Focus: Old Dog, Same Tricks? The CIA Then and Now
Thursday, September 16 @ 11:40:36 UTC | by Mark Engler and Jeremy Varon
Fifty years ago, in June 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency committed one of the cardinal sins of US foreign policy. That month, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, was deposed in a coup planned and coordinated by CIA operatives. Arbenz, a moderate, had proposed that uncultivated plots held by large landholders like the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) be distributed among poor farmers. Documents declassified in 1997 show that in response to this proposed reform the CIA, acting with the approval of President Eisenhower, led a propaganda campaign against Arbenz, sowed disloyalty in the Guatemalan military, and armed a rebel insurgency.
| | (Read More... | 17968 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 5) |
|
World Focus: Who, and what, is behind America's recurrent drive to war?
Wednesday, February 25 @ 17:00:12 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
February 18, 2004
When Sam Smith led the mob of angry white men that strung up a black man accused of a heinous crime, he faced a torrent of criticism.
When it turned out the victim was innocent, he faced more.
Smith didn't care. The victim was a ne'er-do-well. And he had taken over the victim's farm, and was running it at a profit for the first time ever.
| | (Read More... | 8291 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 5) |
|
World Focus: Nothing Changes
Tuesday, December 16 @ 18:32:07 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
December 15, 2003
US president George W. Bush may be embarrassed that France, Germany
and Russia are being asked to forgive Iraq's debt at the same time the
US is blocking the trio's companies from bidding on handsome reconstruction
contracts in Iraq, but you can hardly blame him for following a hoary presidential
tradition.
The US has been here before. In the immediate aftermath of W.W.II.
| | (Read More... | 13051 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Invasion of Iraq: The Iraqi Monkey Trap
Monday, October 20 @ 23:13:23 UTC | By William Raspberry
ctober 20, 2003, www.washingtonpost.com
There is a legend, the Rev. Earl Neil told the congregation of Trinity Episcopal Church here one recent Sunday, that certain African tribesmen have a clever way of trapping monkeys.
They begin by making a paw-sized hole in a coconut, then filling the coconut with rice or some similarly attractive food. A monkey will come along, stick in his paw and grab a fistful of rice -- and then find that he can't get his paw out.
"It screams for help, but it is trapped by its own greed," Neil explained. "As you and I can see, all the monkey would have to do is turn loose of the rice. His open hand could easily be withdrawn. The problem is that the monkey places greater value on the rice than on his own freedom."
| | (Read More... | 4627 bytes more | Invasion of Iraq | Score: 0) |
|
| |
| Facebook & Twitter | 
 | |
| Big Story of Today | | There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet. | |
|
