May 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Euro Zone prey to Wolfpack Behavior →
“We now see … wolfpack behaviours, and if we will not stop these packs, even if it is self-inflicted weakness, they will tear the weaker countries apart”
Read article at Reuters
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The Global Weimar Phase →
Stern warnings from English political scientist and activist Nafeez Ahmed:
We’re not back in the 1930s, but structurally - systemically - we’re in a far worse condition. The problem is that the three main parties on offer today lack a fully-formed understanding of the real structural issues behind the concurrent crisis of world capitalism. They fail to realise that they’re in...
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the trillion-dollar fraud →
Via: Salon.Com
BY JOHN R. TALBOTT
SATURDAY, MAY 1, 2010 Why is the Fed so opposed to being audited, and what does it have to hide?
….I believe the reason Paulson didn’t pursue his original toxic-asset purchasing plan is because such a purchase would have created a market price for these assets, and then all of the banks would have had to mark their poor-quality assets to this low market...
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Were US Special Forces Involved in the Arrest of... →
The team that was responsible for tracking down the Times Square Bomber was a group of secret Army intelligence planes. It was referenced in the press then removed from the story by CBS. Read about it in The Nation.
Via: The Nation
by Jeremy Scahill
May 4, 2010
A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence...
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Read: Times Square, Bombs and Big Crowds →
Via: The NY Times Opinion Page
Focus on the Threat
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of several books on computer security, including “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”
Clear thinking from one of the foremost security experts.
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Who Got Our $1,000,000,000,000? →
Asks Congressman Alan Grayson in the Huffington Post. Time to Audit the Fed
“Following Foucault, we can thus trace three stages in the development of...”
– From:
The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control Steven Shaviro
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Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN... →
This story resurfaced in my RSS feeds today, I remember it passing like indigestion through the media in December, it was soon forgotten, momentary discomfort followed by lots of meaning less diarrhea. This seem like the perfect time to resurrect the story and maybe even prosecute some criminals. The politicos and the press are looking for economic scandal, but maybe this one is just too hot to...
“No leftist polemicist could come up with as damning a description of...”
– E. J. Dionne, “How Wall Street Creates Socialists”
What I love about Tourre’s email quote, and which Dionne fails to mention, is the (typically neoliberal) idea that people should govern and manage themselves the way financial corporations do: “the real purpose of my job is to… ultimately provide...
April 2010
18 posts
WatchOpen Source Ecology
Building tools for replicable, open source, post-scarcity resilient communities
Trading Away The Lives of People Living with HIV &...
doctorswithoutborders:
On April 28th, India and the EU will enter closed-door negotiations for a free trade agreement.
At stake is access to affordable medicines for millions in India and others beyond India’s borders. The country is the source of 80 percent of the AIDS medicines used in all MSF projects, and is effectively the pharmacy of the developing world.
But the signing of a free...
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Corrupt Practices Accelerating the Decline of... →
Via: Guernica
By David Sirota: We have people posturing as journalists on TV who get paid as business spokespeople, financial reporters who retire to work for Goldman Sachs—media parasites.
“The Jerusalem Center for Social and Economical Rights (JCCER) reported that the...”
– Israel: You Pay Us To Take Your Home And Then Take Your Land (via clingtomymouth) (via exiledsoul)
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The second stage of the global capitalist crisis →
The second stage of the global capitalist crisis
By Nick Beams
12 April 2010
[article synthesized by Jodi Dean @ I cite]
Financialisation grew rapidly in the advanced capitalist economies. In other words, profits accrued increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production. In the US, the share of finance in total corporate profits...
“I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some...”
– Matt Taibbi (via azspot) (via dalasverdugo)
Jay Parkinson + MD + MPH = a doctor in NYC: What... →
Eliot Spitzer, when he was New York’s Attorney General, set up a website to expose the prices of the most popular medications sold in New York pharmacies.
The pharmacies “complied.” When I started my first practice in Williamsburg, I visited about 50 pharmacies and asked for their price list…
Robert Reich: Break Up The Banks →
A fight is brewing in Washington – or, at the least, it ought to be brewing – over whether to put limits on the size of financial entities in order that none becomes “too big to fail” in a future financial crisis.
Some background: The big banks that got federal bailouts, as well as their…
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the...”
– Desmond Tutu (via fuckyeahradicalquotes) (via fyeahsocialism)
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What the Mafia can teach us about corporate fraud
William K. Black - Professor of Economics and Law
Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007 and author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.
From Slate’s The Big Money
The Bust-Out What the Mafia can teach us about corporate fraud.
By Mark Gimein
Posted Sunday, March 21, 2010
Excerpts:
On a rainy day in New York last week, a man named William...
“War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no...”
– Thomas Paine (via fuckyeahradicalquotes) (via fyeahsocialism)
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Economics for a New Century →
By Ann Lee
Lee is an economics professor at NYU
and a former investment banker and bond trader.
Posted: March 30, 2010 to Huffington Post
With personal and national debt reaching record levels and unemployment at its most severe since the Great Depression, now may be the opportunity to abandon growth economics and come up with economic models for shrinking economies. Why not consider doing...
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Stop Trying to Save the Planet →
By Erle Ellis
From Wired Magazine
May 6, 2009 This is a short and fascinating piece written by a scientist who contents:
We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces
and we have been in this era for a long long time, it is not new.
The author posted a follow up article to answer the many...
March 2010
38 posts
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever...”
– Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal (via unburyingthelead)
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Israel allows clothes, shoes into blockaded Gaza... →
March 29th 2010 haaretz.com
By Reuters
Israel will allow a shipment of clothes and shoes to be delivered to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for the first time in its almost three-year-old tight blockade of the enclave, Palestinian officials said on Monday.
They said the first 10 truckloads would be arriving via the Israeli-controlled Gaza border point on Thursday....
James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent... →
deanwhitbread:
“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA…
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Conversation between Arundhati Roy and David...
David: [Chomsky] is often introduced as someone who speaks truth to power. I asked him about that once. He said he doesn't do that. He's not interested in that.
Arundhati: Power knows truth
David: He wants to provide information to people who are powerless, not to those who are oppressing them.
Arundhati: Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn't know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it's doing, We don't have to tell it what it's doing. We have to tell other people what Enron's doing. The contractors know how much they're stealing. The bureaucrats know how much they're getting as bribes.
Power knows the truth, there isn't any doubt about that. It is really about telling the story. . . in a way that ordinary people can understand. Snatching our futures back from the experts and the academics and the economists, and the people who really want to kidnap or capture things and carry them away to their lairs and protect them from the unauthorized gaze or the curiosity or understanding of passers-by. That's how they build their professional stakes by saying "I am an expert on something that you can't possibly understand. My expertise is vital to your life, so let me make the decisions."
extract from "The Chequebook & the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian" 2004
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Nathan Schneider interviews Judith Butler, March... →
Judith Butler, the premier gender theorist is interviewed in Guernica Magazine, she covers the Obama Administration, the wars in middle east, the abortion debate and many other issues.
Excerpt:
Judith Butler: A president is part of a team, and he chooses those with whom he will act in concert. Summers and Geithner were choices, and they were ones that clearly put technocratic free market...
An Absence of Class in the G.O.P. →
claytoncubitt:
“The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or...
“Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide. If you don’t see...”
– Charlie Stross (via azspot)
Robert Reich: The Final Health Care Vote and What... →
It’s not nearly as momentous as the passage of Medicare in 1965 and won’t fundamentally alter how Americans think about social safety nets. But the likely passage of Obama’s health care reform bill is the biggest thing Congress has done in decades, and has enormous political significance for the…
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How Moody's sold its ratings - and sold out... →
By Kevin G. Hall McClatchy Newspapers
October 18, 2009
As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody’s Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Read more
Moody’s...
“The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a...”
– Chris Floyd (via azspot)
“Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967 does not give it license to oppress...”
– Greg Barrett (via azspot)
2 tags
"Rethinking Dissent" →
From Jodi Dean @iCite
Perhaps the most pathetic attribute of the Left today is its vigorous defense of the Right’s most special treasure, liberal democracy. Even as the ‘coalition of the willing’ (a name whose multilateral pretense failed to disguise US militarism) wages aggressive, preemptive war in Iraq in the name of liberty, democracy, and human rights, so does the Left invoke precisely the...
Lenten Thoughts
nybooks:
Garry Wills
Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation of Christ
I say the rosary every day according to the church season, choosing one of the four sets of gospel “mysteries” (joyful, luminous, sorrowful, glorious) to reflect on
the life of Jesus. Since it is now Lent, I am saying the sorrowful mysteries, those that deal with the Passion and Death of Jesus. This year, two of the...
Walkable neighborhoods a buffer to foreclosures →
plainpaul:
A forward thinking article from Worldchanging.com:
Looking at data from more than 40,000 mortgages throughout Chicago, San Francisco and Jacksonville, Fla., the researchers behind the Location Efficiency and Mortgage Default report found that the rate of mortgage foreclosure actually decreased in neighborhoods that were more compact, walkable and connected to public transportation...
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On Becoming a Dissident →
Chris Hedges has written a very dark piece entitled Calling All Rebels, Here he quotes Vaclav Havel :
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex...
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The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is... →
Foreign Policy, March 13, 2010
Posted By Mark Perry (bio)
On January 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief JCS Chairman Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by...
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Biden, Netanyahu, and papering over the Grand... →
Foreign Policy March 11, 2010
Posted By Daniel Levy (bio)
Excerpts:
Today’s Israeli press is full of stories of future settlement expansion in East Jerusalem - 7000 units according to Yedioth, 50,000 if the (probably exaggerated) Ha’aretz numbers are to be believed. Israel does not view East Jerusalem as occupied or any different from Tel Aviv, and it does not view West Bank...
“The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy - one that...”
– Lester R Brown (via azspot) (via newleft)
3 tags
Chris Hedges Interviewed in Pulse →
Chris Hedges discusses war, death, morality and governments in PULSE - BERLIN
Do you believe in progress when it comes to historical processes surrounding conflict?
No. Progress doesn’t exist. Time is not linear; time is cyclical. Societies mature, degenerate, and die. That’s history. The whole concept of linear progress is a myth. It doesn’t exist. And it’s what is used to anesthetize a...