A market economy and capitalism are synonymous — or at least joined at the hip. That’s what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism — control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders — is only one way to drive a market.
The European Parliament is due to vote on its attitude to the Goldstone Report on March 10. Please URGENTLY email your MEPs – if possible by the end of today 8/3/10.
Sarah Meyer, 73, who published her work on Index Research much more, died yesterday, 4 March, 2010 from cancer.
There’s no doubt about it, three decades of unregulated ‘free market’ financialized capitalism in the UK has proved to be a total disaster, but not in the ‘classical marxist’ sense of a struggle between capital and labour being played out in the streets or in our (non-existent) factories let alone in our decrepid and corrupt political institutions. Instead, ‘neo-liberalism’ has failed not only on an economic level but more importantly it’s been a cultural and ideological failure, hence all the talk about regaining the ‘trust’ of the populace and lots of hot air about ‘consultations’ and ‘town hall meetings’ and of course, the inevitable patriotic jingoism about our ‘glorious’ imperial past.
Full page ads in the London Independent? Though the word ‘Russia’ is nowhere to be seen, instead it’s RT.com, what we used to know as Russia Today. But RT.com is a far cry from its crude beginnings four years ago as a mouthpiece for the Russian state. The question is, what kind of animal is it now?
Also filed in Creative-i on Russia, Creative-i on the Media
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Tagged Al Jazeera, Amy Goodman, Dahr Jamail, Danny Schecter, Dilip Hiro, noam chomsky, Norman Solomon, Novosti, rt.com, Russia today
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The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns the continued persecution of international human rights defenders in the West Bank by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and the deportation of international activists from the country. PCHR is concerned about such measures, as they aim to expel international witnesses of human rights violations perpetrated by IOF against Palestinian civilians during peaceful protests against the construction of the Annexation Wall and settlement activities in the West Bank.
In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results. These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.
The media give Clare Short short shrift at the Chilcot ‘inquiry’ transforming her into a “difficult” woman though nevertheless “entertaining”.
The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.
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Reams have been written about the appearance of Tony Blair at the so-called inquiry. Very few if any have even come close to identifying the real nature of the beast called Tony Blair.
A compilation of links, with descriptions to news and analysis on the crisis in Haiti.
People are coming from across Britain for the protest outside the Iraq inquiry when Blair gives evidence on 29 January.
Negotiations between the police and Stop the War broke down today when it became clear that the government is trying to hide our legitimate peaceful protest from Tony Blair when he gives evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Friday.
I’ve been scanning through the BBC News website almost every day to see what our ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ state-controlled news organization has to say on the subject. So first I searched through my BBC RSS feed from the 15 January to today, 25 January, using Haiti as the keyword. Only one out of twenty-six stories on Haiti refers to the issue of the US role. However, the article has precious little say about it.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court announced a disastrous rollback of campaign finance laws. Their 5-4 decision gives corporations free rein to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
I am staggered. There are 10,000 ‘NGO’s’ in Haiti, one for every 900 inhabitants and each one of them has no doubt at least one Westerner working within, yet aside from the Cuban health workers, it seems they could do nothing until the gringos arrived with their Blackhawks and nuclear-tipped aircraft carrier and of course, the 82nd Airborne, paying yet another ‘visit’ to this benighted and super-exploited land to ’secure’ the place for the locust storm of aid to come (too late for too many).
The Americans have landed, or as they used to say of the GIs in the UK during WWII, ‘they’re overfed, over sexed and over here’. So now, in spite of protestations that air-dropping supplies would cause a riot, on the eighth day of this catastrophe (one that the BBC still continues to call a “humanitarian catastrophe”) the US has decided to act.
This report includes progress made on transporting teams and supplies into Haiti, the latest summary assessment for Jacmel from the UN in PAP and details of our headquarters and operations in Santo Domingo.
18 January, 2010
It was obvious from the getgo that media ‘coverage’ of the earthquake in Haiti was heading in the same, predictable direction, namely down the same racist path that Western media coverage of things ‘darker than blue’ always travels.
“Relief efforts have also been hampered by supply bottlenecks, leading to security concerns over looting and [...]
The wailing of survivors pierced the air in pockets of this devastated city on Wednesday as people dug desperately through the rubble of collapsed buildings and piled bodies of the dead on roadsides under white sheets. Huge swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, lay in ruins, and thousands of people were feared dead in the rubble of government buildings, foreign aid offices and shantytowns. Limbs protruded from piles of disintegrated concrete, and muffled cries emanated from deep inside the wrecks of buildings, as this impoverished nation struggled to grasp the grim, still unknown toll from its worst earthquake in more than 200 years.
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