United States
articles
Move the Money, Starve the Empire
June 26 may have been the last day of the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit, but it might very well be the emergence of a more powerful antiwar movement in this country. We can’t address the economic crisis blighting neighborhoods throughout the United States without moving money away from war. That’s the only part of the national budget not being cut. Organizers at the USSF united two disparate sectors. One is comprised of grassroots base-building organizations with multicultural (...) read
Giving Up On Victory, Not War
> The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What’s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn’t actually work? Washington’s refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics. Read (...) read
WikiLeaks: Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn
It’s a big win for Internet-based, indie media that WikiLeaks.org posted its "Afghan War Diary," based on 90,000 leaked US military records detailing a failing war in which US and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War and was much faster in reaching the public. Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, it’s easier than ever for a whistleblower to anonymously leak (...) read
The Great Myth: Counterinsurgency
As success in Afghanistan becomes more uncertain, Conn Hallinan argues that the problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of counterinsurgency. Read more read
Latin America: Climate Change Swing States
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern traveled with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela to Chile, Peru, and Ecuador last week, to discuss climate change with his government counterparts and civil society. Deepening bilateral and multilateral cooperation to increase economic growth, cutting greenhouse gasses, and helping climate-vulnerable populations were on the official program. But the political objective of the trip was to push the (...) read
The Tea Party and the new right-wing Christian feminism
> Ruth ROSEN
Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture. Read (...) read
On the Road to a Jobless Recovery
Unemployment in the United States currently hovers at 10 percent, and more than 17 percent if involuntary part-time and discouraged job-seekers are included. And according to most forecasts, it is likely to remain above pre-crisis levels for at least three years. In good times, the economy might generate 400,000 new jobs each month. Today, the United States needs about 15 million jobs to make up for recession losses, population growth and labor force drop-outs. Despite record numbers of (...) read
A Hole in the World
The BP disaster reveals the risks in imagining that we have complete command over nature. Read more read
Why Future Prosperity Depends on More Socializing
Access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate and left us lonely, explains Bill McKibben. Read more read
Taking Back Homes from the Banks: Exercising the Human Right to Housing
> Bill Quigley
May has seen an upsurge in local organizations exercising their human rights to housing. Most people recognize that international human rights guarantee all humans a right to housing. With the millions of homeless living in our communities and the millions of empty foreclosed houses all across our communities, groups have decided to put them together. Organizations across the US are engaging in "housing liberation" and "housing defense" to exercise their human rights to housing. Read (...) read
As Canada’s Democracy Trembles, a New Global Architecture Emerges
TORONTO, 28 Jun (IPS) - Nearly 600 people were arrested as global leaders and elites met behind a fortified perimetre during the G8 and G20 Summits in Huntsville and Toronto this weekend. Read more read
Giant salmon will be first GM animal available for eating
A salmon that grows at twice the normal rate is set to be the first genetically modified (GM) animal available for human consumption. Usually Atlantic salmon do not grow during the winter and take three years to fully mature. But by implanting genetic material from an eel-like species called ocean pout that grows all year round, US scientists have managed to make the fish grow to full size in 18 months. They hope that the sterile GM salmon can offer an efficient and safe way to breed (...) read
Turkey, America, and Empire’s Twilight
A new world order is emerging from the wreckage of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Turkey will be a major player in it. Read more read
Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage
The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes in recent decades as women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth. These unequal gains have been accompanied by gender role reversals in both the spousal characteristics and the economic benefits of marriage. A larger share of men in 2007, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of demographic and economic (...) read
Crime, no punishment
The Bhopal mega-crime trial is over. The barbarity has ended in a light sentence, although the victims are countless. Eight officials of the erstwhile Union Carbide India Limited have been convicted and sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment. There is still no bar on trying the corporate perpetrators of the Bhopal tragedy, including Warren Anderson. Read more read
Bank Local: Indie Businesses Embrace Move Your Money
Across the U.S., independent business groups that have been urging people to "buy local" are now making "bank local" an increasingly prominent part of their message, bringing new grassroots visibility and organizational infrastructure to the Move Your Money movement. Read more read
The Oil Rush to Hell
Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake. Read (...) read
Eyeing the Difficult Path To a Sustainable Future
Environmentalist David Orr says the easy part of helping the United States live within its ecological limits may be passing laws, such as one that puts a price on carbon. The hard part, he maintains in an interview with Yale Environment 360, is changing a culture of consumption that causes extensive environmental damage — and unhappiness. Read more read
A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t)
The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders — with “minor and mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the (...) read
Obama’s “Remainees”. Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?
On his first day in office, President Barack Obama promised that he would close the Bush-era prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” and “no later than one year from the date of this order.” By now, it’s painfully obvious that the rejoicing, like the president’s can-do optimism, was wildly premature. To the dismay of many, that year milestone passed, barely noticed, months ago. As yet there is no sign that the notorious eight-year-old detention facility is close to a shut down. (...) read
Tax Day and America’s Wars. Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by (...) read
Why the Oil Spill May Be the Greatest Test of Obama’s Presidency
The river of Gulf oil welling up from BP’s hole in the bottom of the sea will be the great test of the Obama presidency—but not for the reasons people are starting to suggest. Can the president seize this moment to move boldly on the biggest question facing the world: our endless addiction to fossil fuel? read
"Why Do They Want to Do Us Harm?"
Helen Thomas, a veteran reporter, asked the question at a White House press conference on al-Qaeda and terrorism. US administration officials stonewalled. “In these times” asked several contributors with various profiles, including Noam Chomsky and Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak, to provide some answers. First part here; second part here, third part here. read
The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows About You
From Google Search to Google Earth, every move you make can be tracked by some feature of Google — and intelligence agencies are drooling over the data. Read more read
The New ‘Lost Generation’: Young Workers
A devastating new report, "The Kids Aren’t All Right," released by the Economic Policy Institute underscores the plight facing young workers in the US—and how little is being done to address the long-term damage this recession has inflicted on a generation of workers. Read more read
The New Anti-Nuclear Movement
There is a lot of news about nuclearism these days. But to cut through the verbiage of treaties and agreements and summits, and move people from fear to action, we need to focus on three concepts. The United States is the biggest problem when it comes to nuclear weapons. We need a new treaty to replace the NPT. And no nukes means no nuclear power. Read more read
The ’Obama doctrine’: kill, don’t detain
The ambitious desire to close Guantánamo hailed the coming of a new era, a feeling implicitly recognised by the Nobel peace prize that President Obama received. Unfortunately, what we witnessed was a false dawn. The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of their dismay as they prepare for Obama to do the one thing they never expected – to send the detainees back to the military commissions – a decision that will lose Obama all support he once had within (...) read
Afghanistan as a Drug War
Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide more than 90% of the world’s opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, it’s not surprising that drug-trade news and war news intersect from time to time. More surprising is how seldom poppy growing and the drug trade are portrayed as anything but ancillary to our Afghan War. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy has been focused on the drug trade — and the American role in fostering it — in Southeast, Central, and (...) read
Globalization Marches On
> Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power
Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India. There is yet another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth’s most powerful states. Read (...) read
US: With 2.4 Million Jobs Lost to China, New Trade Agreement Battle Begins
Concern about massive jobs losses due to unfair Chinese trade practices is reshaping the American political battle lines over trade, with labor winning new and sometimes unlikely supporters in its fight for stronger policies to protect American workers. Read more read
We Cannot ’Techno-Fix’ Our Way to a Sustainable Future
This week, California will host the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies. The conference follows hearings last week in the US House of Representatives and a report from the UK Committee on Science and Technology, as well as a recent report from the Government Accounting Office, all following on the heels of earlier reports from the Royal Society. In short, there is a lot of high level interest in the topic. Given the failure of Copenhagen, the sellout of (...) read
The Year of the Drone: study shows one third of victims are civilians
New America Foundation study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to February 2010 have killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, of whom around 550 to 850 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent. Data here and analysis (...) read
The Wrong Kind of Green
Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up (...) read
The Cleveland Model
Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum in one of the cities most dramatically impacted by the nation’s decaying economy. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL)—a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly "green" operation—opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000. It’s the first of ten major enterprises in the (...) read
Obama Boosts Nukes
Despite his pledge to seek nuclear disarmament, Obama is investing big in the nuclear complex. On February 1, the Obama administration delivered a budget request calling for a full 10 percent increase in nuclear weapons spending next year, to be followed by further increases in subsequent years. Perhaps this increase in spending on the nuclear complex does not contradict Obama’s public statements, for example in Prague in April 2009, that he would "seek" nuclear disarmament. In contrast to (...) read
America’s System Failure
As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails the US. It goes to the root of our political system. Only real democracy can save this country. Read more read
Tribute to Howard Zinn
On Democracy Now!, a tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called The People Speak. Democracy Now! remembers Howard Zinn in his own words, and we speak with those who knew him best: Noam Chomsky, (...) read
Is the Obama Administration Covering Up Three Murders at Guantanamo?
An explosive new article reveals that three Gitmo prisoners whose deaths were labeled suicides were murdered. Obama’s Department of Justice has refused to investigate. Read more read
One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show
One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies. Read more read
No logo revisited: Obama in the steps of corporate brands
Ten years after the publication of "No Logo", Klein looks at how Obama created a brand that won him the Presidency. Will his failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? Text extracted from a 10th anniversary edition of No Logo to be published by Fourth Estate on 21 January. Read more read
The Revolution Will Be Mapped
GIS mapping technology is helping underprivileged communities get better services — from education and transportation to health care and law enforcement — by showing exactly what discrimination looks like. Read more read
Are Progressives Depressed or Too Privileged to Produce Social Change? Or Are We Just Failing to Organize Effectively?
A few weeks ago Bruce Levine wrote a provocative article titled "Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression." Levine suggested that many progressives and much of the general population may be so broken by the system that they’ve given up hope and become passive. He uses the metaphor of an abusive relationship, in which lack of hope and the sense that nothing matters make people passive instead of angry. Longtime labor organizer and (...) read
The Year of the Assassin
> An American World of War: What to Watch for in 2010
According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. We don’t name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin. We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war” came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very symbols of our economic, military, and — had Flight 93 not gone down in a field in Pennsylvania — political power. Although our (...) read
US: Journey into the Heart of Whiteness
By the middle of this century, white Americans will no longer be in the majority. Yet even as the country grows more diverse, nearly all-white enclaves are on the rise. Richard Benjamin, a senior fellow at Demos, a think tank, spotted this trend several years ago and began venturing into these suburban and rural "Whitopias" to find out what makes them tick. His resulting book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbably Journey to the Heart of America, is a lively and perceptive foray into (...) read
Kissinger’s fantasy is Obama’s reality
The road to stability runs through Kashmir. With its latest surge, America has taken a terrible diversion. Meeting George Bush at the White House to discuss Afghanistan, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid once marvelled at how a "US president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning – all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public". The masters of (...) read
Welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0
What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ (...) read
War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel
The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned—not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama. The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times. The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the (...) read
US: The Tide Is Turning on Healthcare Reform
Social movements are messy, so it is often difficult to know, in the midst of the battle, which side is winning. But in the past month, momentum on healthcare reform has unmistakably shifted as liberals and progressives have taken to the streets, the Internet, the airwaves and the halls of Congress to push for a bold public option, strong regulations on insurance abuses and a progressive tax plan to finance reform. Read more about these (...) read
The Movement Against the Banks
A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place. "The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits," rally organizers—including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Change to (...) read
USA: Mapping DREAM Act Online Youth Movements
Immigrant high school and university students in the United States have used the internet effectively in building activist networks to support the passing of a law called the DREAM act. «I have been living in the U.S. for most of my life and now that i have graduated high school i can’t continue my life like i wanted to. If this act is passed i can go to school and study for a great career. I hope congress can make this happen, so thousands of people in my same situation can fufill their (...) read
Guantanamo plans don’t match rhetoric
> Phyllis Bennis interviewed by Louise Dunne
The president delivered his speech at the US National Archives - a highly symbolic location where the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are kept. He attacked Bush-era anti-terror tactics, saying they were rooted in fear and ideology. Mr Obama took on critics on the right who believe "anything goes" in the fight against terrorism, as well as allies on the left who, he said, put total transparency above national security. Reshaping standards Earlier this week, the US Senate rejected (...) read
Chomsky on the Obama/Geithner Rescue Plan
> Video
There’s been an outcry in America about the financial rescue plan unveiled by the Obama administration under the leadership of Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. The Obama administration plans to buy up $2 trillion in toxic financial assets. The plan is being denounced by economists in the mainstream press, as well as commentators in the alternative media. Pepe Escobar also provides excellent commentary of Geithner’s PPPIP (Public-Private Partnership Investment Programme), which he refers (...) read
Obama, America and the Rise of the Non-White World
> SACSIS – the South African Civil Society Information Service
It would be a squint-eyed view to read in Obama’s victory just a historic moment for African-Americans in the United States of America (USA). It should be granted that Obama’s entry through the front door of the White House rather than the back door, once reserved for black cleaners only, does mark a turning point in black history. African-Americans have come a long way since the days of slavery, the civil rights movement and many other sacrifices they have had to make to claim their (...) read
Early Voting Sees Reports of Voter Intimidation, Machine Malfunctions
Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of (...) read
Missile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War
> by F. William Engdahl
The signing on August 14 of an agreement between the governments of the United States and Poland to deploy on Polish soil US ‘interceptor missiles’ is the most dangerous move towards nuclear war the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis. Far from a defensive move to protect European NATO states from a Russian nuclear attack, as military strategists have pointed out, the US missiles in Poland pose a total existential threat to the future existence of the Russian nation. The Russian (...) read
The Difference Between Black Brazil and Black U.S.
> by Italo Ramos
African Americans sometimes embarrass themselves, often without know it, by assuming that others from the Diaspora see the world in the same way as themselves. Blacks from other nations are also frequently puzzled and confused by U.S. Black behavior, and even the concept of Blackness that prevails in the United States. Afro-Brazilian journalist Italo Ramos shares his notebook of impressions on the ways being Black - and the assumptions of whites - are different in the two countries. One (...) read
Developing countries face hard times as US recession looms
> by Martin Khor
It is a terrible time for the global economy. The latest sign of this is the deep plunge in the Asian and European stock markets on Monday, 21 January in response to the string of bad news last week in the United States, leading to the conclusion that the US has now slipped into recession. Read more read
Is the CIA trying to undermine the White House?
The US intelligence report saying that Iran had halted a nuclear weapons programme in 2003 is an important document. It does not prohibit the US military attack on Iran, but it may serve to deny the Bush administration enough public support in the US, or the diplomatic support from any other country, to go ahead with it, argues Phyllis Bennis in this video interview. View read
Human rights in Syria : Pelosi’s silence
US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Damascus this week caused quite a stir. Before she even landed in Syria, the White House was calling her decision a « really bad idea ». Pelosi’s spokesman was quick to defend the visit by saying that the speaker intended to use her trip « to discuss a wide range of security issues affecting the United States and the Middle East ». No one doubts that security is essential in the region. But Pelosi appears to have committed the same mistake as other (...) read
The politics of naming : genocide, civil war, insurgency
> Essay first published by the London Review of Books on 8 March 2007
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and (...) read
ExxonMobil’s tobacco-like disinformation campaign on global warming science
> Oil company spent nearly $16 million to fund skeptic groups and create confusion about global warming
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air: how ExxonMobil uses big tobacco’s tactics to manufacture uncertainty on climate change, offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled (...) read
Somalia : the new frontier in the "war on terror"
Somalia has become the new frontier in the war on terror, joining the unpopular club of Afghanistan and Iraq, a situation that is worrying the rest of Africa. The only difference is that President George W. Bush sent U.S. troops to get rid of the Taliban in Kabul and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, after Sep. 11. Bush is using the same soldiers to hunt down what he calls « terrorists ». In Somalia, Bush’s dirty work is being handled by Ethiopia. Ethiopian troops, backing Somalia’s weak (...) read
Middle East crises : inextricable from each other
> Bitterlemons international, December 14, 2006, Edition 46, Volume 4
The double standard that has resulted from the US compromising international legality because of its relations with Israel is a major cause of the regional hostility toward America. To understand the different conflicts in the Middle East, it is important to understand their growing interrelation. This interrelation is growing to an extent that it is becoming nearly impossible to understand one conflict in isolation. Similarly, solving one requires dealing with the others. More and more (...) read
Americans Want a New Direction, but will Democrats Lead?
> Focus on the Global South
http://www.focusweb.org/americans-wa (...)
The recent US election was a redemptive election. At a time that many throughout the world had written off the American electorate as lifeless putty in the hands of Karl Rove, it woke up to deliver the Republican Party its worse blow in the last quarter of a century. Not only independents and centrists voted to repudiate Republican candidates, but a third of evangelicals-Bush’s fundamentalist Christian base-voted for Democrats.
One of those pleasantly surprised was this writer, who in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential elections, predicted that the Republicans would rule for the next quarter century owing to the formidable grassroots machinery that they had forged-a "juggernaut" that was anchored by a fundamentalist base in the so-called "red states."
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Katrina one year later: civil movements demand right of return
http://www.habitants.org/noticias/in (...)
2005 Katrina demolished the United States Golf Coast with catastrophic results, previously known only to residents of the poorest countries like Bangladesh, but with an unprecedented mass media impact: this time the first world was the victim.
After the emotion and the initial phase of confusion, everything seemed to be under control, so much that the Bush Administration declared that America was able to handle the catastrophe on its own, refusing the assistance of countries that, like Cuba, were ready to send urgently needed assistance. More than 110 billion dollars were immediately allocated for the reconstruction. The government, marking August 29th a National Day of Remembrance of Hurricane Katrina, today affirmed that in excess of 70% of the resources were either utilized or available.
This is not the truth. We are familiar with the dramatic images of those days, with survivors desperately clinging to their roofs in Louisiana and Missouri, the inferno of the Superdome transformed into a welcome center, and the army set to patrol to keep order and defend private property.
We know even less about what happened during the last 12 months: the solidarity initiatives, the marches, the protests, the lawsuits, the network proposals, the citizens’ organizations, the labor unions relegated to the local news.
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Whatever is the IMF to do about the US?
STIGLITZ Joseph
> The US’ staggering trade deficit and continued borrowing threaten to undermine the relevance of the IMF
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit (...)
The IMF’s meeting this spring was lauded as a breakthrough, with officials given a new mandate for "surveillance" of the trade imbalances that contribute significantly to global instability. The new mission is crucially important, both for the health of the global economy and the IMF’s own legitimacy. But is the fund up to the job? There is obviously something peculiar about a global financial system in which the richest country in the world, the US, borrows more than US$2 billion a day from poorer countries — even as it lectures them on principles of good governance and fiscal responsibility. So the stakes for the IMF, which is charged with ensuring global financial stability, are high: If other countries eventually lose confidence in an increasingly indebted US, the potential disturbances in the world’s financial markets would be massive. read
USA: The Pharmaceutical Industry Stalks the Corridors of Power
> CorpWatch, Feb 2001
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php (...)
Whilst now out of date in view of current developments, this article gives insights into the power the pharmaceutical industry yields within the White House, and consequently at a global scale also. Furthermore, it brings to attention the reality over the industry’s claims that it needs to protect itself financially to fund new R&D (Research and Development), by highlighting the US government’s role in R&D. read
Alien Tort Claims Act: Developments on bill to supress ATCA
> OhmyNews, October 26, 2005
http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljust (...)
The following article (first appeared here) gives an update on the current developments to supress the Alien Tort Claims Act in the US through a new bill.
See also
- A collection of articles on the issues at Global Policy Forum
- The results of Unocal’s landmark settlement for Burmese villagers, made possible by ATCA
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