(Noam Chomsky, Alternet, August 15, 2013)
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American power is diminishing, as it has been in fact since its peak in 1945, but it’s still incomparable. And it’s dangerous. Obama’s remarkable global terror campaign and the limited, pathetic reaction to it in the West is one shocking example. And it is a campaign of international terrorism – by far the most extreme in the world. Those who harbor any doubts on that should read the report issued by Stanford University and New York University [4] . . .  I’d like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy”, RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked” by accident. . . . for roughly 70% of the population – the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale – they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They’re effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it’s plutocracy. . . . » Continue reading “Chomsky: The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy”

(Bruce Melton, Truthout, 21 February 2013)
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Dry periods, which we normally refer to as drought times today, would be superimposed on top of the megadrought extremeness. . . . The results of the new research are critically deserving of an alarmist tone. That we could slip into profound continuous drought so soon is certainly a surprise to most of us, to say the least. The typical consensus opinion of unrestrained climate pollution impacts by the year 2100 only tells us that permanent drought will come to many parts of the world and, basically, that dry areas could become drier. The news that we could be experiencing permanent drought on the scale of megadrought proportions – beginning in only eight years – should be considered a global threat of the highest order. . . . The new models have more grid squares (higher resolution) in that they can “see” a smaller piece of the earth compared to the old models. The old models took forever to run on supercomputers, and so do the new ones, but we can see smaller areas and smaller scale climate processes are better represented now. The new models also include volcanoes, changes in the sun’s strength and more complex interactions between clouds and pollutants like nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxides (both manmade and natural), and their results agree better with observations of our past climate. . . . The results of the new scenarios and most current modeling (as compared to the old scenarios and models) are that warming is greater, drying in dry areas is greater and increasing wetness in wet areas increases further.

(Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, February 15, 2013 )
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Professor Cornel West argued that President Barack Obama is, like Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him, a “war criminal” uniquely responsible for the deaths of “over 200 children.” . . . West’s words were in response to a question about the administration’s seeming preference for killing terrorism suspects from the air rather than risking American lives to take them prisoner and hold them for an indefinite amount of time in military custody. A legal whitepaper obtained by NBC News recently exposed the Obama administration’s once-secret justification for the program, which authorizes a deadly airstrike if intelligence officials believe it may take out any “senior operational leaders” of al Qaeda or “associated forces,” even if that includes an American citizen. . . . “I think, my dear brother, the chickens are coming home to roost,” West told Smiley. “We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.” . . . Troublingly enough, West is right on the number: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that up to 216 children have died in three countries the U.S. is not formally at war with — Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — as a result of suspected U.S. drone strikes starting in 2002 and dramatically escalating during Obama’s first term. Out of an estimated 451 total drone strikes during that period, over 300 were ordered by Obama against Pakistanis alone. The Bureau estimates that up to 4,643 people in all have been killed by drone strikes in those three countries. . . . Similarly, a United Nations committee said this month that “hundreds” of children have been killed by U.S. drone strikes since 2008, many which are personally approved by Obama, according to The New York Times. . . . “I think we have to be very honest, let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they’re war criminals,” West said. “They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they’re suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us. You and I, brother Tavis, if we kill an innocent person we go to jail, and we’re going to be in there forever.” . . . “I am not somebody who believes that the president has the authority to do whatever he wants, or whatever she wants, whenever they want, just under the guise of counter terrorism,” he said. “There have to be checks and balances on it.”

The video below was made by a friend of mine over the 90 days that it took her to row, yes ROW, across the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Barbados, 6,500 Kilometers!

Maybe the end of the world didn’t arrive, but it’s been an interesting year nonetheless.

(Countercurrents.org, 14 September, 2012)
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Hunger is the number one reason behind riot. There are other reasons also. These include poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement. Trampled down humanity fights back. It’s, plain and simple. But, if there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge , and it makes sense. . . . In a 2011 paper , researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest. . . . The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this: [CLICK the above link for the graph.] . . . Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. . . . CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. . . . For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if a person can’t eat — or worse, a person’s family can’t eat — the person fights. . . . » Continue reading “One Year Away From Global Food Riots”

(Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, September 26, 2012 )
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“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example,” Nader told reporter Patrick Gavin. “He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account.” . . . President Obama’s own attorneys recognize that key portions of the U.S. drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and other countries are legally questionable, according to a report in The Wall St. Journal on Wednesday. That’s especially the case in Pakistan, which has stopped giving direct approval to U.S. drone strikes, but the bombs continue to fall anyway. . . . Casualty figures collected from media reports by the nonprofit New America Foundation show that between 1,877 and 3,177 people have been killed by drone strikes from 2004-2012, most of them being civilians. The vast majority of deaths reportedly happened during 2010, President Obama’s second year on the job. A study published this week by researchers at Stanford and New York Universities also claimed that only about 2 percent of the people killed in U.S. drone strikes were actual militants, saying at least 176 of those slain were children. . . . Nader added that Obama’s intellect and experience helped legitimize Bush’s “lawless war-mongering and militarism,” making him a “more effective evil” than Romney. However, he warned that the former Massachusetts governor is not to be trifled with either, calling him the greater of the two evils and warning that he’s “basically a corporation running for president masquerading as a human being.”

(MORRIS BERMAN, Counterpunch, September 20, 2012)
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An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular. . . . The “arc” of capitalism, according to this school, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in. . . . The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. . . . the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. » Continue reading “Is The “Arc” of Capitalism Coming To Its End””

(CounterPunch, VIJAY PRASHAD, September 17, 2012)
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A mid-September sunny day in New York City draws those with the day off to go to the parks and laze along the avenues, walking by the workers on call, cleaning up after tourists, holding together a city that always seems held together by the sweat of its massive workforce and a dose of city pride. Beneath the massive Washington Arch, a woman in a wheelchair, beside other men and women in wheelchairs and other prosthetic devices, holds a sign that says, “Occupy Wheelchairs.” The Occupy Wall Street Disability Caucus is holding an assembly to proclaim its presence at Occupy, Year 2. . . . Behind their wheelchairs, on the Arch, is a sculpture of Wisdom (made by Stirling Calder, the father of Alexander Calder), whose hand holds a book with Ovid’s quip, Exitus Acta Probat, which can be loosely translated as “all’s well that ends well.” It is a good hopeful slogan for the Occupy festival in anticipation of S17 (September 17), the day OWS returns to the canyons of Wall Street to shut down Money. . . . A man tells his three-year-old child, “let’s go occupy the playground.” It is the spirit of the moment. . . . The Occupy Catholics have a homemade sign: “We aren’t protesting. We’re advertising Love.” . . . A man in a police uniform holds a sign, “To understand us watch Inside Job. A film about Corporate Greed, not 9-11.” . . . » Continue reading “Occupy’s Not Dead, It Was on Vacation . . . Year 2 Begins”

(George Lakey, Nation Of Change, 3 Aug 2012)
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I see no signs of a revolutionary situation in Norway.  Students of revolution keep an eye on the perceived legitimacy of a nation’s leadership, and Norwegians are enormously confident that their little ship in a big global sea is being steered well.  . . . The United Kingdom is a different story.  The legitimacy of the nation’s leadership is definitely in trouble.  The mass media shout the stories of the irresponsibility of the 1 percent and the politicians they corrupt.  The government is a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and is enthusiastic about enforcing austerity, running down the National Health Service and education system, forcing English university students to pay more for what used to be free education and opening new coal mines.  Homelessness is already up by an estimated twenty-five percent. . . . One way that government’s hold on to their legitimacy is to have an opposition party that holds out hope that, if it is elected, things will dramatically improve.  That used to work in the U.K., as in the U.S. . . . While students of revolution need to pay attention to trends in legitimacy, another key question is this: Can the present leadership solve the biggest problems facing society? . . . Arguably the biggest problem is climate change.  While the British 1 percent is allowing some sensible policies, like electrifying the railways and increasing wind farms, there is no sign that it has the will really to take the necessary steps.  When you add together declining legitimacy, the inability to address climate change and the absence of a hopeful alternative within the institutional framework, you have conditions for the opening of a revolutionary situation over the next 10 years in the U.K. . . .       . . . How about the U.S.? » Continue reading “Is Revolution On The Way?”