The Waning Influence Of The United States Constitution
Photo: Terry Miller
Adam Liptak describes the decline of the United States Constitution’s global popularity in the New York Times. (If the U.S. adopted Roger Copple’s Third Constitution might the American model become more popular?)
The Constitution has seen better days.
Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.
In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”
A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.
The study, to be published in June in The New York University…
The Industry of Hunger
Photo: Tawheed Manzoor (CC)
Vandana Shiva on Al Jazeera English explains how, as mega-chains venture into industrial farming, they have created an epidemic of hunger- and generated billions in profit.
New Delhi, India – In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods.
But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.
The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with…
The Pentagon’s Invisible Third-World Army
When enlistment is down, what’s the military to do? Outsource. Seventy thousand of the people in the Pentagon’s war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not U.S. soldiers, but “third-country nationals” — Filipinos launder our soldiers’ uniforms, Bosnians repair electrical grids, Indians serve up iced lattes. Many say they are being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law, the New Yorker reports:
In the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”. And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S.…
A Bomb At Bilderberg 2011
The most entertaining reporting from the Bilderberg conferences is usually filed by Charlie Skelton on his Guardian blog. In one of his latest entries he reveals that someone tried to bomb the current meeting in Switzerland. Well, maybe it was a bomb…
Just when you thought the annual four-day Bilderberg conference couldn’t get any more exciting, a policeman goes and finds a bomb. Or at least, he went and found a “tubular device” that at certain angles, if you squinted a bit, looked sort of like a bomb. By that well known bomb manufacturer – Pringles.
All of a sudden the shout went up, out came the handcuffs, and two men (that nobody recognized) were bustled into custody. We’re still trying to find out who they were or what they’re charged with. Ownership of a tubular device is still frowned on in Switzerland. That’s why Toblerone is shaped like that.
In light of this…
U.S. Brings Subversive Portable Internet To Enemy Territories
Photo: Zapyon (CC)
Looks like Uncle Sam still has some tech tricks up his sleeve, unveiled for the New York Times by James Glanz and John Markoff:
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link…
Do UFOs Now Prefer To Visit Asia?
We already knew that China will soon overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, but today comes news that we have fallen behind the East in a more important area, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Trackers at the Mutual UFO Network, one of the oldest unidentified-flying-object research organizations in this world, say that since the slump of the Western banking system in 2008, UFO sightings among Asia’s fast-growing economies have accelerated. Suspicious UFOs have shut down airports in China, buzzed resorts in Borneo and lit up the night sky in Myanmar.
“It’s not surprising, really,” says Debhanom Muangman, a 75-year-old Harvard-educated physician and one of Thailand’s leading UFO investigators. “Aliens have been coming to Asia for decades, but now they sense a change. This is where the progressive countries are, so they are coming here much more often now.”
Still, these aren’t American-style alien encounters. The aliens that Thai researchers say they…
Are We Entering A New Age Of Feudalism?
Everything old is new again. Current makes note of the growing belief that, in the era of postindustrial perma-recession, our sociopolitical structures increasingly resemble those that were found in feudalist societies — a concept called neofeudalism:
Among the issues claimed to be associated with the idea of neofeudalism in contemporary society are class stratification, globalization, mass immigration/illegal immigration, open borders policies, multinational corporations, and “neo-corporatism.”
Capital Is The Real Of Our Lives
Via Adbusters’s Kick It Over project, philosopher Slavoj Zizek sums up the reality that the financial meltdown laid bare:
Although we always recognized the urgency of the problems, when we were fighting AIDS, hunger, water shortages, global warming, and so on, there always seemed to be time to reflect, to postpone decisions (recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of world leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, was that they would meet again in two years to continue their talks…). But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of an unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the starving children…all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action.
Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose…
IMF Says China To Surpass United States In 2016
China will become the world’s number one economy — and therefore most powerful nation — by 2016. Brett Arends provides some analysis at Marketwatch:
The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.
For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.
And it’s a lot closer than you may think.
According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.
Put that in your calendar.
It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and…
China ‘To Pass United States In Science’ In Two Years
For years we were warned that American students trailed other nations’ in math and science — now the chickens have come home to roost. The BBC reports that in 2013 China will pass the United States as the global leader in scientific output. But can scientific progress really be measured? And, must it be viewed as a battle between nations? This issue may be as much about Western fears as anything else:
The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected.
That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy. The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan. The figures are based…
The World As A Theater Of The Absurd
It’s been a long time since I sat in a college literature class and learned about the theater of the absurd, the work of great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Camus, among others. Their writing was their way of reacting to a world that seemed out of control and maybe out of its mind.
Wikipedia tells us “It expressed the belief that, in a Godless universe, human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.”
Significantly, the word theater is used for places putting on plays and countries conducting wars. The battlefield is considered as much a “theater” as Broadway.
Without waxing philosophically and commenting on the many unknowns that so obsessed Donald Rumsfeld, our modern day philosopher king of the Pentagonian School, one has to abandon logic and rationality to…
We’re Screwed: Jobs For Highly Educated Westerners Going Offshore Fast
The Guardian’s Peter Wilby describes what his editors term “the awful truth” that developed countries must face: even jobs for graduates of our numerous colleges and universities are going to India, China and other fast developing countries:
Western Europeans and Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach “marketable” skills. That is the thinking behind Michael Gove’s policies and those of all his recent…
USDA Report Shows Rocketing Food Prices – Global Revolution?
source: www.fao.org
The back story to the revolutionary overthrow of longstanding dictatorships in the Middle East is that the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, et al couldn’t afford even basic foods and weren’t going to stand for the elites hoarding all their countries’ resources any longer.
The U.S Dept. of Agriculture’s Outlook Forum suggests that syrocketing food prices will continue, with possibly disastrous consequences around the world. Adam Gordon analyzes the situation for Forbes:
The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) annual “Outlook Forum” in Washington D.C., usually draws a polite trickle of insiders and commodities traders, but on February 24 the forum’s venue was overrun with 2,000 attendees.
At the event, USDA chief economist Joseph Glauber warned of record farm prices for corn, wheat, and soyabeans for 2011, and resulting US food inflation of at least 4% this year and next as prices work their way through the supply chain.
The world situation is more…
Texas Rep. Michael McCaul Declares, ‘There Is A War On Our Nation’s Doorstep’
Following the killing of a US ICE agent in Mexico yesterday, supporters for border security say this is a “game changer” and call for offensive against Mexican drug cartels. Fox News reports:
Advocates for stronger border security on Wednesday called for stepping up the U.S. offensive to stop murderous drug cartels terrorizing Mexico after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent was killed a day earlier.
“This tragic event is a game changer. The United States will not tolerate acts of violence against its citizens or law enforcement and I believe we must respond forcefully.
This should be a long overdue wake-up call for the Obama administration that there is a war on our nation’s doorstep,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.
McCaul’s comments came after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Holder announced they are establishing a joint task force to be led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help Mexico track down…
France Wants New System Of Global Currencies
Are the days of each nation having its own currency numbered? France is calling for a global financial system based around “international currencies,” RTE News reports:
France, as current head of the Group of 20 countries, will help the transition to a global financial system based on ’several international currencies’, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said today.
Lagarde, speaking ahead of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris on Friday and Saturday, said the world had to move on from the ‘non-monetary system’ it now has to one ‘based on several international currencies’.
Accordingly, France wants to see less need for countries, especially the emerging economies, to accumulate huge foreign reserves, she said.
At the same time, international capital flows should be better regulated and the role of the Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund should be reinforced by the inclusion of China’s yuan in the system.
China, whose booming economy now ranks…
‘Slackistan,’ Pakistan’s First Slacker Film
Yahoo News reports:
In a country scarred by Taliban attacks and hobbled by political bickering, film director Hammad Khan found himself riveted by a creature so out of touch with reality that it almost inspires jealousy: the Pakistani slacker.
He found such youth roaming the Pakistani capital’s tree-lined boulevards in tight jeans, sipping lattes at Western-themed coffee shops and partying underground — with plenty of liquor to boot. They had no story, really. So Khan had to tell it.
The result is “Slackistan,” Pakistan’s first slacker film.
The movie shows a side of this South Asian nation rarely seen in the West, where media typically tie it to terror and Islamist fundamentalism. But in Pakistan, censors unhappy with some of the slacker portrayals have demanded so many changes that the film may not get released here.
“Things have gone from bad to worse in Pakistan. You look at these kids and wonder, ‘Does anything affect them?’”…
UK Muslim Pupils Reportedly Being Taught Anti-Semitism, Sharia Law
Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
The Telegraph reports:
Muslim children are being taught how to chop off thieves’ hands and that Jews are plotting to take over the world at a network of Islamic schools, it has been disclosed.
Up to 5,000 pupils attending weekend schools across Britain are being exposed to textbooks claiming that some Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and that some offences could be punished with stoning. One book for six year-olds warns that those who do not believe in Islam will be condemned to “hellfire” in death.
Another text for 15 year-olds teaches that thieves who break Sharia law should have their hands cut off for a first offence and their feet amputated for a subsequent crime. Teenagers are presented with diagrams showing where the cuts should be made.
Tonight’s Panorama on BBC One will claim that the books were discovered at a network of 40 private schools teaching the Saudi…
McCain Calls Democracy In Middle East A “Virus”
“This virus is spreading throughout the Middle East. This is probably the most dangerous period of history…in the Middle East.” Speaking to FOX News, John McCain echoes the current sentiments of many politicians and pundits distressed by recent events in Egypt and Tunisia. Because the rules are, democracy only belongs in the countries where we choose to impose it. Via Think Progress:
Could A U.S. Government Crackdown Take America Off The Internet?
I’m sure this has been on the minds of many following the ongoing events in Egypt. An io9 article discusses the possibility:
With the threat of today’s protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America.
How the Egyptian government erased its citizens from the internet
No one is completely certain what happened to the Egyptian internet, but it appears that the shutdown started off early in the week with the country blocking Twitter and Facebook access for those within its borders. Then, shortly after Thursday midnight local time, the country simply disappeared from the internet. With a few exceptions like the stock exchange, Egyptian websites and services were unreachable; the network traffic over Egyptian borders dropped by an astonishing 90 percent. Cell phone networks were also down. Today…
