Disinformation » Globalization

Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost

JacobSloan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:12 +0000

It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:

The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.

Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.

Occupy Wukan? or A Chinese Spring

MoralDrift — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:45:43 +0000

The village of Wukan in Guangdong province has staged a massive protest over local officials seizing land without compensation for development projects. This type of issue has been sticky in China for quite some time, similar to eminent domain in the U.S. but without much recourse or a court to appeal to. Here is a video posted on YouTube, its in Mandarin but the images are worth it:

The Financial Times also has a decent article and video.

147 Companies ‘Own Everything’

majestic — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:22:41 +0000

Source: New Scientist

New Scientist reveals the capitalist network that runs the world:

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”…

[continues at New Scientist]

You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization”

ralph — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:49:32 +0000

The following is an excerpt of “Columbus and Western Civilization” written by Howard Zinn that appears in the Disinformation anthology You Are Still Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick.

Author’s Note: In the year 1992, the celebration of Columbus Day was different from previous ones in two ways. First, this was the quincentennial, 500 years after Columbus’ landing in this hemisphere. Second, it was a celebration challenged all over the country by people—many of them native Americans but also others—who had “discovered” a Columbus not worth celebrating, and who were rethinking the traditional glorification of “Western civilization.” I gave this talk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in October 1991. It was published the following year by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series with the title “Christopher Columbus & the Myth of Human Progress.”

George Orwell, who was a very wise man, wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.” In other words, those who dominate our society are in a position to write our histories. And if they can do that, they can decide our futures. That is why the telling of the Columbus story is important.

Let me make a confession. I knew very little about Columbus until about twelve years ago, when I began writing my book A People’s History of the United States. I had a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University—that is, I had the proper training of a historian, and what I knew about Columbus was pretty much what I had learned in elementary school.

But when I began to write my People’s History, I decided I must learn about Columbus. I had already concluded that I did not want to write just another overview of American history—I knew my point of view would be different. I was going to write about the United States from the point of view of those people who had been largely neglected in the history books: the indigenous Americans, the black slaves, the women, the working people, whether native or immigrant.

I wanted to tell the story of the nation’s industrial progress from the standpoint, not of Rockefeller and Carnegie and Vanderbilt, but of the people who worked in their mines, their oil fields, who lost their limbs or their lives building the railroads.

I wanted to tell the story of wars, not from the standpoint of generals and presidents, not from the standpoint of those military heroes whose statues you see all over this country, but through the eyes of the G.I.s, or through the eyes of “the enemy.” Yes, why not look at the Mexican War, that great military triumph of the United States, from the viewpoint of the Mexicans?

And so, how must I tell the story of Columbus? I concluded, I must see him through the eyes of the people who were here when he arrived, the people he called “Indians” because he thought he was in Asia.

Well, they left no memoirs, no histories. Their culture was an oral culture, not a written one. Besides, they had been wiped out in a few decades after Columbus’ arrival. So I was compelled to turn to the next best thing: the Spaniards who were on the scene at the time. First, Columbus himself. He had kept a journal.

His journal was revealing. He described the people who greeted him when he landed in the Bahamas—they were Arawak Indians, sometimes called Tainos—and told how they waded out into the sea to greet him and his men, who must have looked and sounded like people from another world, and brought them gifts of various kinds. He described them as peaceable, gentle, and said: “They do not bear arms, and do not know them for I showed them a sword—they took it by the edge and cut themselves.”

Throughout his journal, over the next months, Columbus spoke of the native Americans with what seemed like admiring awe: “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal…they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world…always laughing.”

And in a letter he wrote to one of his Spanish patrons, Columbus said: “They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves.” But then, in the midst of all this, in his journal, Columbus writes: “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Yes, this was how Columbus saw the Indians—not as hospitable hosts, but as “servants,” to “do whatever we want.”

And what did Columbus want? This is not hard to determine. In the first two weeks of journal entries, there is one word that recurs 75 times: GOLD.

In the standard accounts of Columbus what is emphasized again and again is his religious feeling, his desire to convert the natives to Christianity, his reverence for the Bible. Yes, he was concerned about God. But more about Gold. Just one additional letter. His was a limited alphabet. Yes, all over the island of Hispaniola, where he, his brothers, his men, spent most of their time, he erected crosses. But also, all over the island, they built gallows—340 of them by the year 1500. Crosses and gallows—that deadly historic juxtaposition.

In his quest for gold, Columbus, seeing bits of gold among the Indians, concluded there were huge amounts of it. He ordered the natives to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time. And if they did not meet their quota, their arms were hacked off. The others were to learn from this and deliver the gold.

Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian who was Columbus’ admiring biographer, acknowledged this. He wrote: “Whoever thought up this ghastly system, Columbus was responsible for it, as the only means of producing gold for export…. Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and of those who escaped, starvation and disease took toll, while thousands of the poor creatures in desperation took cassava poison to end their miseries.”

Morison continues: “So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by a modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one-third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508, an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive…. in 1548 Oviedo [Morison is referring to Fernandez de Oviedo, the official Spanish historian of the conquest] doubted whether 500 Indians remained.”

But Columbus could not obtain enough gold to send home to impress the King and Queen and his Spanish financiers, so he decided to send back to Spain another kind of loot: slaves. They rounded up about 1,200 natives, selected 500, and these were sent, jammed together, on the voyage across the Atlantic. Two hundred died on the way, of cold, of sickness.

In Columbus’ journal, an entry of September 1498 reads: “From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold…”

What the Spaniards did to the Indians is told in horrifying detail by Bartolomé de las Casas, whose writings give the most thorough account of the Spanish-Indian encounter. Las Casas was a Dominican priest who came to the New World a few years after Columbus, spent 40 years on Hispaniola and nearby islands, and became the leading advocate in Spain for the rights of the natives. Las Casas, in his book The Devastation of the Indies, writes of the Arawaks: “…of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity…yet into this sheepfold…there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening beasts…. Their reason for killing and destroying…is that the Christians have an ultimate aim which is to acquire gold…”

The cruelties multiplied. Las Casas saw soldiers stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies’ heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killing with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to the Spaniards—they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions—were beheaded or burned at the stake.

Las Casas’ testimony was corroborated by other eyewitnesses. A group of Dominican friars, addressing the Spanish monarchy in 1519, hoping for the Spanish government to intercede, told about unspeakable atrocities, children thrown to dogs to be devoured, newborn babies born to women prisoners flung into the jungle to die.

Forced labor in the mines and on the land led to much sickness and death. Many children died because their mothers, overworked and starved, had no milk for them. Las Casas, in Cuba, estimated that 7,000 children died in three months.

The greatest toll was taken by sickness, because the Europeans brought with them diseases against which the natives had no immunity: typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, smallpox.

As in any military conquest, women came in for especially brutal treatment. One Italian nobleman named Cuneo recorded an early sexual encounter. The “Admiral” he refers to is Columbus, who, as part of his agreement with the Spanish monarchy, insisted he be made an Admiral. Cuneo wrote:

…I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me and with whom…I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well…. Finally we came to an agreement.

There is other evidence which adds up to a picture of widespread rape of native women. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: “In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young and beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant.” Who presumes this? Morison, and so many others.

Morison saw the conquest as so many writers after him have done, as one of the great romantic adventures of world history. He seemed to get carried away by what appeared to him as a masculine conquest. He wrote:

Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.

The language of Cuneo (“we came to an agreement”), and of Morison (“gracefully yielded”) written almost 500 years apart, surely suggests how persistent through modern history has been the mythology that rationalizes sexual brutality by seeing it as “complaisant.”

So, I read Columbus’ journal, I read las Casas. I also read Hans Koning’s pioneering work of our time—Columbus: His Enterprise, which, at the time I wrote my People’s History, was the only contemporary account I could find which departed from the standard treatment.

When my book appeared, I began to get letters from all over the country about it. Here was a book of 600 pages, starting with Columbus, ending with the 1970s, but most of the letters I got from readers were about one subject: Columbus. I could have interpreted this to mean that, since this was the very beginning of the book, that’s all these people had read. But no, it seemed that the Columbus story was simply the part of my book that readers found most startling. Because every American, from elementary school on, learns the Columbus story, and learns it the same way: “In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue.”

How many of you have heard of Tigard, Oregon? Well, I didn’t until, about seven years ago, I began receiving, every semester, a bunch of letters, 20 or 30, from students at one high school in Tigard. It seems that their teacher was having them (knowing high schools, I almost said “forcing them”) read my People’s History. He was photocopying a number of chapters and giving them to the students. And then he had them write letters to me, with comments and questions. Roughly half of them thanked me for giving them data which they had never seen before. The others were angry, or wondered how I got such information, and how I had arrived at such outrageous conclusions.

One high school student named Bethany wrote: “Out of all the articles that I’ve read of yours I found ‘Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress’ the most shocking.” Another student named Brian, seventeen years old, wrote: “An example of the confusion I feel after reading your article concerns Columbus coming to America…. According to you, it seems he came for women, slaves, and gold. You say that Columbus physically abused the Indians that didn’t help him find gold. You’ve said you have gained a lot of this information from Columbus’ own journal. I am wondering if there is such a journal, and if so, why isn’t it part of our history. Why isn’t any of what you say in my history book, or in history books people have access to each day?”

I pondered this letter. It could be interpreted to mean that the writer was indignant that no other history books had told him what I did. Or, as was more likely, he was saying: “I don’t believe a word of what you wrote! You made this up!”

I am not surprised at such reactions. It tells something about the claims of pluralism and diversity in American culture, the pride in our “free society,” that generation after generation has learned exactly the same set of facts about Columbus, and finished their education with the same glaring omissions.

A school teacher in Portland, Oregon, named Bill Bigelow has undertaken a crusade to change the way the Columbus story is taught all over America. He tells of how he sometimes starts a new class. He goes over to a girl sitting in the front row, and takes her purse. She says: “You took my purse!” Bigelow responds: “No, I discovered it.”

Bill Bigelow did a study of recent children’s books on Columbus. He found them remarkably alike in their repetition of the traditional point of view. A typical fifth-grade biography of Columbus begins: “There once was a boy who loved the salty sea.” Well! I can imagine a children’s biography of Attila the Hun beginning with the sentence: “There once was a boy who loved horses.”

Another children’s book in Bigelow’s study, this time for second-graders: “The King and Queen looked at the gold and the Indians. They listened in wonder to Columbus’ stories of adventure. Then they all went to church to pray and sing. Tears of joy filled Columbus’ eyes.”

I once spoke about Columbus to a workshop of school teachers, and one of them suggested that school children were too young to hear of the horrors recounted by las Casas and others. Other teachers disagreed, said children’s stories include plenty of violence, but the perpetrators are witches and monsters and “bad people,” not national heroes who have holidays named after them.

Some of the teachers made suggestions on how the truth could be told in a way that would not frighten children unnecessarily, but that would avoid the falsification of history now taking place.

The argument about children “not being ready to hear the truth” does not account for the fact that in American society, when the children grow up, they still are not told the truth. As I said earlier, right up through graduate school I was not presented with the information that would counter the myths told to me in the early grades. And it is clear that my experience is typical, judging from the shocked reactions to my book that I have received from readers of all ages.

* * * * *

Read more of Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization” and other thought-provoking essays from a variety of contriubtors in Russ Kick’s You Are Still Being Lied To, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

In You Are Still Being Lied To, An unprecedented group of researchers including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Sydney Schanberg, Michael Parenti, Riane Eisler, Jim Marrs, and many, many others-investigative reporters, political dissidents, academics, media watchdogs, scientist-philosophers, social critics, and rogue scholars-paints a picture of a world where crucial stories are ignored or actively suppressed and the official version of events has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. A world where real dangers are downplayed and nonexistent dangers are trumpeted. In short, a world where you are being lied to.

The Problem with Social Democracy

Jin_TheNinja — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 04:17:11 +0000

An interesting article that highlights some inconsistencies Center-Left parties have in implementing a social-democratic platform while effectively maintaining and strengthening capitalism … Via Socialist Worker:

With the electoral breakthrough of the NDP in the federal election, attention to the nature of social democracy has returned to the political agenda. What do socialists say about the NDP and social democracy today?

There are two main views about parliamentary — or electoral — democracy in the history of the socialist movement. The social democratic view sees the liberal democratic state as a neutral body that can be peopled by delegates of the right or the left. Marxists, however, have stressed the limitations of the liberal democratic state. This view dates back to Marx’s analysis stated simply in the Communist Manifesto.

Contemporary social democratic parties, like the NDP or the Labour Party in the UK, keep a close eye on every aspect of parliamentary practice. Social movements, student activism and trade union struggles are seen as important at times. But what is considered “extra-parliamentary” work is seen as a means to influence “political” outcomes, which are narrowly defined in terms of parliamentary elections, debates or policies.

But the difference between a reformist, or social democratic, view, and a revolutionary, or Marxist, one, has not always been easy to discern.

The New Religion of Shaolin

Jin_TheNinja — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:57:32 +0000

Photo: Robin Chen (CC)

Chinese capitalism has something uniquely in common with historical Maoism: atheism. Vast economic growth met with a huge demand for traditional culture has meant Chinese cultural institutions are increasingly trading in their social values for growth-based business plans. Via the Independent:

Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by “finger punches” of warrior monks over the centuries.

This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.

The commercial success of the temple is obvious, even if some of the sights are jarring – the telephone kiosks with Buddhas on top, for example. It has some monks shaking their heads and fearing that its spiritual peace is threatened. One monk said he was leaving after decades at the temple to be a hermit in the mountains of eastern China.

“There are internal conflicts here, and it’s complicated. When I came here it was very shabby, and it has improved a lot. But I don’t think this is a place for religion anymore,” he says.

Many others are inspired by the Shaolin tradition. Kung fu is the epitome of martial arts, and practitioners say other fighting arts including karate originated from kung fu. There are more than a million learners of kung fu around the world and many centres of Shaolin culture globally.

So Who Really Runs The World? A Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate Control …

DrLechter — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:38:50 +0000

An outline of the adversary emerges from Michael Ricciardi on PlanetSave:

In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.

When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global corporate ownership; it’s all too vast and complicated to get any clear sense of the reality.

But now we have the results of a global network analysis (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) that, for the first time, lays bare the “architecture” of the global ownership network. In the paper abstract, the authors state …

Read More from Michael Ricciardi on PlanetSave

Gibson Guitars Vs. the U.S. Government

Easy Rider — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:35:35 +0000

Via Brooklyn Vegan and Gibson.com:

The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

On August 24, 2011, around 8:45 a.m. CDT, agents for the federal government executed four search warrants on Gibson’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. Gibson had to cease its manufacturing operations and send workers home for the day, while armed agents executed the search warrants. Gibson has fully cooperated with the execution of the search warrants.

The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of (Video)

BananaFamine — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:33:22 +0000

Americanization Training At An Indian Call Center

JacobSloan — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:49:38 +0000

The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.

An American spends his summer at an Indian call center, including a boot camp in which new employees try to change their nationality in three weeks by shedding their accents, gazing at photos of Walmart, watching Seinfeld, and eating pepperoni. Via Mother Jones:

I am waiting for a company cab, now an hour and a half late, to drive me across town to a call center, where an Indian “culture trainer” will teach me how to act Australian. For three weeks, a culture trainer will teach us conversational skills, Australian pop culture, and the terms of the mobile-phone contracts we’ll be peddling.

Bright recent college grads pore over flashcards and accent tapes, intoning the shibboleths of English pronunciation—”wherever” and “pleasure” and “socialization”—that recruiters use to distinguish the employable candidates from those still suffering from MTI, or “mother tongue influence.” The lucky ones will secure Spartan lodgings and spend their nights (thanks to time differences) in air-conditioned white-collar sweatshops.

Indian BPOs work with firms from dozens of countries, but most call-center jobs involve talking to Americans. New hires must be fluent in English, but many have never spoken to a foreigner. So to earn their headsets, they must complete classroom training lasting from one week to three months. Speaking Hindi on company premises is often a fireable offense.

Next is “culture training,” in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture”—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. “The most marketable skill in India today,” the Guardian wrote in 2003, “is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.”

When I first decided to apply for a call-center job, I headed to Gurgaon, a commercial suburb of Delhi. Gurgaon was built 30 years ago by a corporation, for corporations. It was fallow farmland until 1979, when DLF, India’s biggest developer, began buying up property. Gurgaon is a non-city. In my time there, I saw no sidewalks, convenience stores, or public parks—only stray cows foraging in the sun-baked dirt between office towers.

Read the rest at Mother Jones

Chris Hedges’s Endgame Strategy: Why The Revolution Must Start In America

BananaFamine — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 07:59:13 +0000

Synopsis via The Raw Story:

Pulitzer-winning author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has a revolutionary worldview. In the video below, his recent “Endgame Strategy” piece for AdBusters is read aloud by George Atherton. His conclusions are chilling, but not entirely hopeless. “We will have to take care of ourselves,” he wrote. “We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Here’s Chris Hedges’ article in AdBusters:

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking …

Piece continues at AdBusters.

Paranormal Investigator Richard Thomas on Alex Jones and the New World Order (Interview)

henrybaum — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 07:23:06 +0000

An interview with Richard Thomas, author of the excellent book, PARA-NEWS — UFOs, Ghosts, Conspiracy Cryptids, and More — a collection of essays and interviews (with Nick Redfern, Nick Pope, and others) that first appeared on Binnall of America, UFO Mystic, Sci-Fi Worlds, and other venues. Interviewed by Henry Baum, author of the conspiracy novel, The American Book of the Dead.

Henry Baum: In your book, you frequently raise the specter of Alex Jones and his ideas on eugenics, the New World Order, and so on. Personally, I take some issue with Alex Jones for a few reasons, and I wonder if you could address them. The main thing that leaps out about Alex Jones is that he never raises the UFO issue — you actually interview someone at Infowars who seems pretty disinterested in the whole subject. This seems like a fairly impossible assertion to make — it’s pretty clear that there is something going on with the UFO issue, if only because the government explanation for many sightings is so suspiciously stupid. If that’s the case, and there is also a conspiracy to bring about a New World Order, then the two cannot be separated. When you look through at the NWO through the lens of the UFO issue then the NWO makes more sense – not just a way to aimlessly enslave us, but perhaps to make the population more controllable in the event of first contact. Do you think that’s a possibility?

Richard Thomas: I’ve been following Alex Jones off and on since about 2000 when I saw him in an episode of Jon Ronson’s “Secret Rulers of the World” series for Channel Four. He’s had a big impact on the way I see the world and interpret world events. However, I do agree that he is missing a huge piece of the puzzle by not looking at the UFO topic in more depth. That said, trying to get the average person to accept that the Bilderberg Group really does exist is hard enough … so I can understand why Alex Jones doesn’t cover the topic as much as UFO researchers would like him to.

More recently, however, I have noticed that Alex is talking about UFOs a lot more on his radio show. Here you can listen to him and David Icke talk about Project Blue Beam.

I myself believe that the globalists will use any crisis be it real or manufactured to further their goal of a one world government, be it global warming, terrorism, Colonel Gaddafi, or yes, UFOs.

A lot of UFO researchers tend to romanticize what they call “Disclosure”, the day when the world is finally told the truth (whatever that is) about what the US government and others really know about UFOs. I’m more cautious. I think if Disclosure ever really does occur (and that’s a big if) we have to be careful that the existence of extraterrestrials or whatever isn’t used as a justification to turn the world into a giant police state. Rahm Emanuel said “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” and his words sum up the mentality of the globalists perfectly.

HB: I guess another way of saying this is that what he sees as nefarious might actually have a purpose. Granted, the way they’re going about globalization is a total nightmare. I just can’t shed the feeling that they have a grander plan than just profit or enslavement. I mean if you have a billion dollars, what’s 2 billion? Maybe they’re just addicts, I don’t know. But I also think all that profit might be going to black projects – sort of like the arks in the otherwise-terrible “2012″ movie. That’s not a way of excusing them, but just saying that there’s more purpose to this than enslavement for the hell of it. Of course, Hitler had a “purpose” too, so there’s a lot to be wary of. In sum: do you think it’s possible that a one world government could — in the very long term — potentially be positive?

RT: No, I don’t. Lets say just for the sake of argument that the globalists have a higher purpose of some kind for what they’re doing. Maybe they know about a fleet of marauding alien spaceships heading for Earth like in the film Independence Day or something like that, and the reason they want a world government and world army is so that the Earth will be able to defend itself against the alien invaders. That doesn’t change the fact that we’ll still be living inside a giant dictatorship created in stealth … maybe we would be better off under the aliens, lol.

But seriously even if the globalists were honest and open about what they were doing, and openly said they wanted to create a world government but it’s okay because it’s going to be a democratic one, I would still be very against the idea. I don’t believe something the size of a world government could function as a democracy and it wouldn’t be long before it became a dictatorship. Which is why I believe a world government and even the European Union are bad ideas to begin with.

HB: I’m playing devil’s advocate here a bit because the globalists have really tipped their hand about the kind of world they want and it’s a bad one. But for the sake of argument – say there was disclosure of an alien that was totally benign. Given the state of the world, releasing this info could be apocalyptic. If people get this upset about sharia law and illegal immigrants, what will the American public – let alone Middle Eastern terrorists – do with a literal alien? Seen through the lens of disclosure, the Patriot Act makes more sense. Not just to stop terrorism in 2011, but to keep an eye on the total global freakout that could be coming. I’m not longing for a police state or anything, but supposing 1% of what we know about the UFO is true — that amounts to a massive amount of world-changing information. Everything that’s happened — 9-11, the war in Iraq, and so on — takes on a new meaning. So I wonder if those romantics about disclosure would trade some of their liberty for the big reveal if it meant finally getting some answers to the UFO enigma.

What’s always troubled me is that people like Bush Sr. or Dick Cheney are the ones who are more likely to know the story behind UFO secrecy. There’s a strange alignment between UFO secrecy and right wing ideology. Do you think it’s possible to have disclosure without the world turning into a police state — given the impact it would have on religious ideology and technology?

RT: Well it depends what we’re told. Not everyone is convinced we’re dealing with aliens from outer space. But if we are I suppose if they were “totally benign” and no threat it is possible to have Disclosure without the world turning into a police state. But if they‘re not, no I don’t think it looks good. After 9/11 many people were willing to give up their civil liberties to fight a couple Islamic terrorists, imagine what they would be willing to do to combat a threat from outer space. But this is all just speculation.

HB: I also wonder about Jones’ ideas on Christianity. In his Bohemian Grove video, he points out that the men are sinister because they worship “the occult.” He’s even targeted Peter Joseph of “Zeitgeist” for being part of the New Age conspiracy, as if Christianity is the one true faith. If you watch “Zeitgeist” or “The God Who Wasn’t There” it’s pretty clear that the story of Christianity is fabricated. So Alex Jones believes in many conspiracies except one of the biggest: the fabrication of the Jesus story. Personally, I’d rather there be a universal religion than saying this one book (which advocates stoning heretics, among other things) is the be all end all of religious principles. What’s your view of spirituality as it pertains to the NWO, or even to UFOs?

RT: There’s no question that early Christianity was hijacked by the Roman Empire. Christmas is as about as Christian as Halloween, December 25 was an important day to pagans. But I still celebrate it and I believe everyone has the right to believe, think, say, or do as they please as long as they don’t knowingly lie or physically try to hurt anybody else.

HB: Finally, I wonder about things like population control. Studying population growth is not the same thing as advocating genocide, nor is advocating birth control. Planned Parenthood isn’t evil — as he says in “Endgame” (which you reference). The Bilderberg conference might be totally sinister, but on the surface a bunch of powerful people all getting together to discuss the state of the world makes sense — why wouldn’t they do that? I’m not even going to get into Global Warming science, as that’s so loaded. I guess I never see in him any possible solutions — just a lot of paranoia about people who are looking for solutions. Certainly, some of these people are evil, but not all. Plainly our world is disordered, so people looking for a (lowercase) new world order might not all be dangerous.

I’m beginning to sound like a fat-cat apologist. It absolutely pisses me off that Obama and Bush are so identical and the wealthy elite are profiting off the backs of everyone else and raping the planet. They really seem to be sowing the seeds of disorder, rather than sustainability. If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention. Jones’ answer is to support Ron and Rand Paul — which I don’t see as feasible. Giving corporations even more power via deregulation isn’t the solution — i.e. Big Business isn’t any better than Big Government. So I’m wondering what your ideal system would be, politically or economically.

RT: Well my main problem with the Bilderberg Group is that most people have never even heard about them. I don’t think that many powerful people should be allowed to meet in secret once a year and nothing be said about it in the media. Thankfully because of the hard work of dedicated researchers and activists around the world that is starting to change.

I get what you’re saying about birth control etc, but there’s no question that population reduction seems to be a big part of the globalist agenda. You just have to look at the comments of people like Prince Philip or Ted Turner and others.

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” — Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, in the foreword to If I Were an Animal

“A total population of 250 to 300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” — Ted Turner, founder of CNN

“And I actually think the world will be much better when there’s only 10 or 20 percent of us left.” — Dr. Eric Pianka, University of Texas biologist

What kind of system would I like?

First I think its important to stress I don’t believe in Utopia. There’s no such thing, you’ll never have a perfect world and every attempt at creating one has always led to mass slaughter and tyranny. I think we need to recognize that first.

I think the founders of the United States had some good ideas. Things like a written constitution that protected the freedom of speech and other rights of the people, and an educated, informed public who could understand what that constitution said. Now, of course, even the early United States had its problems, slavery being a big one. But I think that’s a good place to start. But if readers want to disagree with me … great … it’s called freedom. Hopefully we can all agree on that.

Why The World Isn’t As ‘Flat’ As Thomas Friedman Says…

BananaFamine — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:05:58 +0000

Rana Foroohar writes in TIME:

Tis the season to be selfish. Right after the global financial crisis exploded in 2008, many economists fretted that countries looking to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie would become more self-interested and protectionist, plunging the planet into an even sharper downturn, just as happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression. Thanks to panic-fueled crisis management by policymakers, it didn’t happen. But after three years of pain and very little economic gain, it may be happening now.

The signs are everywhere. Europeans are in the middle of a potentially calamitous debt crisis, one that threatens not only the survival of the euro zone but the idea of the European Union itself: politicians are starting to talk about rolling back visa-free travel between countries. Meanwhile, OPEC is falling apart as the Saudis and the Iranians bicker over how to control the world’s energy spigots. (Result: higher oil prices for all of us.) Then there’s the rise of populist politics not only in the U.S. but throughout the rest of the world. Anti-E.U. political parties are gaining support around Europe, and despite the recent overthrow of several Middle Eastern strongmen, nationalism is on the rise in places like China, Brazil and Russia.

All of which underscores the point that globalization, if we define it as the free movement of goods, people and money, was never all it was cracked up to be. The world is just not as flat as pundits would have us think. More than half of global trade, investment and migration still takes place within regions — much of it between neighboring countries…

Article continues at TIME.

Alex Jones On WWIII (Video)

BananaFamine — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 17:11:16 +0000

Apply as many grains of salt as you see fit (personally I think he makes many good points, but WWIII? I’d be surprised), but here is Alex’s predictions on the impending WWIII:

Aerotropolis: Will The Cities Of The Future Be Giant Airports?

JacobSloan — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:28:09 +0000

The Utopianist discusses one (slightly hellish) idea of what the city of the future may look like — the ‘aerotropolis’, in which the airport is at the city’s geographic and economic core, and daily life increasingly resembles being inside an endlessly sprawling airport:

It’s a city that’s built around an airport, the bigger the better, with factories and/or traders, both dependent on air freight, close by, followed by a ring of malls and hotels, followed by a ring of residential neighborhoods. The airport isn’t an annoyance, located as far out of the way as possible, but the city’s heart, its raison d’être.

While the vision of a city based around an airport may seem novel, there are such aerotropolises already in existence, like Ecuador’s capital, Quito. We already have a few cities in the United States that roughly adhere to this model — Memphis, our nation’s major FedEx hub, and Seattle, the home of Boeing. But the idea is really gaining ground in the place you’d expect, the place where giant cities are being built before our eyes at feverish rates. China, of course: “The aerotropolis phenomenon … is happening with a vengeance in Asia. China is currently building scores of airports, many intended to shift economic activity to its isolated western cities.”

On its face, the concept of the aerotropolis seems like a solid, adequately ambitious vision for the cities of the future — yet it’s anything but. Metropolis points out that aerotropolises will essentially be glorified company towns, whose economies are pegged to the corporations that produce goods and ship them out there. If the industry wired to the air freight infrastructure declines, so does the city, and we’ve got a bunch of futuristic Detroits on our hands.

United States Becomes Sweden’s Third-World Outsourcing Destination

JacobSloan — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:04:21 +0000

“It’s ironic that IKEA looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico,” Street said.

When a large multinational corporation is looking to cut costs, what does it do? Send jobs overseas to a less modernized country — one where salaries are a fraction of those at home and the law provides few rights or protections for workers — and watch the profits roll in. We are speaking, of course, of Sweden’s IKEA, and Virginia, USA. Is this our economic future? Current reports:

Here we are, folks. Sweden’s third-world sweatshop. IKEA takes advantage of the destruction to our economy caused by outsourcing jobs by outsourcing their own jobs to the U.S. — and paying less than the workers in Sweden get ($8 in the U.S., $19 + better benefits in Sweden, for making the same products), about 50% of what the median income is in Danville (the town where IKEA’s sweatshop is located), with much stricter and abusive practices in the Danville facility, and with many less rights.

They even use the same reason for the poor pay that American corporations use for their poor pay of their own third-world sweatshops in India:

(quoting from the article): ” …She acknowledged the pay gap between factories in Europe and the U.S. ‘That is related to the standard of living and general conditions in the different countries,’ Steen said.”

The Last Free People On Earth

BananaFamine — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:49:42 +0000

Joanna Eede writes for National Geographic:

Deep in one of the remotest parts of the Brazilian Amazon, in a clearing at the headwaters of the Envira River, an Indian man looks up at an aeroplane.

He is surrounded by kapok trees and banana plants, and by the necessities of his life: a thatched hut, its roof made from palm fronds; a plant-fiber basket brimming with ripe pawpaw; a pile of peeled manioc, lying bright-white against the rain forest earth.

The man’s body is painted red from crushed seeds of the annatto shrub, and in his hand is a long wooden arrow — held, in seeming readiness, close to its bow. At his side, children, naked but for cotton waist-bands, gaze up in amazement.

It is a photograph of one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world, taken in June 2010 by FUNAI, Brazil’s Indian Department, together with what is thought to be the first-ever film footage. Survival International published the images in order to help protect the lives of the tribe by proving their existence…

For more information, see original article.

The Economics Of Happiness (Video)

BananaFamine — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 19:28:43 +0000

Photo: Jessica Tam (CC)

I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

The film shows how globalization breeds cultural self-rejection, competition and divisiveness; how it structurally promotes the growth of slums and urban sprawl; how it is decimating democracy. We learn about the obscene waste that results from trade for the sake of trade: apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US. We hear about the suicides of Indian farmers; about the demise of land-based cultures in every corner of the world.

For more information, see this website for The Economics of Happiness. To get involved with the message through activism or setting up a screening, click here.

75-Year-Old Woman Single-Handedly Cuts Off Internet for Two Countries

HAL9000 — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:49:44 +0000

Helena Bedwell writes on Bloomberg:

Georgian authorities detained a scrap-metal hunter for cutting a main Internet cable near Tbilisi, the Interior Ministry said. The break in the cable left tens of thousands of residents and businesses without Internet access in Georgia and all of Armenia on March 28, the ministry said.

A 75-year-old woman was arrested on evidence given by several witnesses and was “temporarily released due to her old age,” ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze said today in a phone interview in Tblisi. She will be questioned again and may face charges, Gvenetadze said.

The incident cut Armenia’s Internet access for more than 12 hours, Gvenetadze said. An unidentified spokeswoman for Caucasus Online, one of the largest Georgina Internet service providers, said customers lost access to the World Wide Web for almost five hours.

Georgian Railway Telecom LLC spokesman Giorgi Ionatamishvili said the cable belonged to the company and customers suffered “massive and catastrophic” damage. Georgia provides 90 percent of Armenia’s Internet.

By The Top One Percent, For The Top One Percent

JacobSloan — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:36:27 +0000

In a fantastic piece for Vanity Fair, acclaimed economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses what America’s vast income inequality means for our future — in short, how it will corrode and distort every aspect of society:

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window.

The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

The Human Agency of Revolution

BananaFamine — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 20:41:19 +0000

Scholar Tarak Barkawi argues revolutions are caused by human agency; not telecommunications technologies, in Al Jazeera:

To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.

Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.

Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.

But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.

For more information, see original article.

Rise Of The Precariat: The New Working Class

JacobSloan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:50:31 +0000

British economist Guy Standing has coined the term “precariat” to refer to the fast-growing working-class caste of the 21st century. With labor markets now globalized and “flexiblized,” the risks and uncertainties of capitalism have been transferred almost completely away from capitalists and onto workers. Below, citizens discuss living and working in post-industrial England, where large numbers scrounge to obtain low-wage, unstable jobs.

Heavy Metal Solutions For The Middle East?

JacobSloan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:00:27 +0000

Writing for Al Jazeera, Mark LeVine explores the uncanny popularity of dinosaur metal band Iron Maiden amongst a young, Middle Eastern fan base and “asks if heavy metal music offers a blueprint for modernization in the Middle East.” I certainly hope LeVine’s geopolitical thesis is correct — reconfiguring staid Mideast nations using the tenets of Maiden as a basis sounds brilliant, for the resultant national flags alone.

I first saw Iron Maiden in Dubai in 2007, at the Dubai Desert Rock Festival, which although only three years old was becoming known as the “Mecca for Middle Eastern metal”.

This was pre-crash Dubai, in all its excessive splendor, and the festival was filled to capacity with 20,000 metalheads, mostly Arabs, Iranians and South Asians, cheering, screaming and even crying during Maiden’s headlining show.

The members of Iron Maiden still recall that first Dubai show fondly, but in reality Dubai represented the very antithesis of everything Maiden has always stood for – consumption without reason, style over substance, the pursuit of wealth and celebrity without a solid foundation or sustainable principles.

The group’s unique philosophy offers interesting lessons for its large fanbase across the Arab and Muslim worlds – a young generation that is struggling to define a new role for themselves and the region in a globalised system that, much like the music business, seems rigged against them.

First and foremost, do not play their game. Neoliberalism, the dominant system of globalisation, will never produce greater prosperity, democracy or sustainable development for the vast majority of the peoples of the region, precisely because this model of economic integration inevitably concentrates wealth, and through it power, in fewer hands.

Secondly, think historically, stay true to your roots, and “do it yourself”. One of the main reasons why heavy metal, and Maiden in particular, are so popular across the Middle East and Muslim world is precisely because the genre, and the band, represents a “DIY,” or do it yourself, philosophy that has allowed artists and fans to avoid the compromises that have plagued other genres like hiphop and mainstream rock.

For centuries the peoples of the Arab and Muslim world have been told that they had to follow someone else’s model. They have had to contend with policies imposed from above and outside – first through colonialism and then again, beginning in the 1970s, through the “structural adjustment programmes” that have been at the heart of IMF, World Bank and other Washington consensus policies towards the region.

Subway Passes McDonald’s As Dominant Global Fast Food Empire

JacobSloan — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:15:36 +0000

In the grim future years to come, we will be mandated daily to eat not a McDonald’s burger, but a Subway sandwich. Some credit for Subway’s ascension goes to the chain’s willingness to expand fast food franchising to nontraditional locations such as schools, churches, and bodies of water. CNNMoney introduces our new corporate overlords:

Subway has surpassed McDonald’s to become the world’s largest restaurant chain in terms of units, the sandwich company confirmed Monday.

Subway had 33,749 restaurants around the globe at the end of 2010, said company spokesman Les Winograd. McDonald’s had 32,737 at year end, according to a February regulatory filing from the burger giant.

“Last year was actually pretty average for us, growth-wise,” Winograd said. “We aim to open between 1,000 and 2,000 locations globally each year.”

About half of the company’s unit growth is overseas, Winograd said. Subway now has more than 1,000 locations in Asia, and it just opened its first store in Vietnam. Other high-growth nations include Brazil, Mexico, India, China, Russia and France.

“A lot of our growth has been in non-traditional spaces that our competitors might not touch,” Winograd said. “We have really unique ones, like on a riverboat in Germany, a church in Buffalo, car dealers, bowling alleys and casinos. We’re not just in strip malls.”

‘Democracy’, ‘Extremism’, ‘Stability’: Decoding The Code Words In News Media

JacobSloan — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:53:13 +0000

Terms such as “stability”, “democracy”, and “religious extremism” in political discourse are generally used in a way that is different or opposite to their generally understood meaning.

Metadeniz presents a quick, amusing, and insightful primer on what Noam Chomsky calls “words with a technical meaning.” Including:

Promoting Democracy verb installing a government friendly to our interests in another country.

Freedom Fighters noun a proxy terrorist army that we support

National Interest noun the interests of the ultra-rich, particularly those in the U.S.A.

Stability noun (used referring to other countries) subordination to US power interests -> Usually achieved through war against the population.

Example: “We should promote democracy by supporting the freedom fighters in Nicaragua because it is in America’s national interest to promote stability in Central America.”
Translation: “We should send weapons to a proxy terrorist army that murders civilians to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, for the benefit of U.S investors and to intimidate other countries into doing what we say.”

Egyptian Dad Names Child ‘Facebook’

imkaan — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:37:11 +0000

Via CNN:

A man in Egypt has named his newborn daughter “Facebook” in honor of the role the social media network played in bringing about a revolution, according to a new report.

Gamal Ibrahim, a 20-something, gave his daughter the name “to express his joy at the achievements made by the January 25 youth,” according to a report in Al-Ahram, one of Egypt’s most popular newspapers.

Many young people used Facebook and other social media networks to organize the protests, which began January 25 and ultimately led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who organized a Facebook page on his own time, became a central figure of the revolution.

The Power To Control Information And Culture Itself

5by5 — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:01:03 +0000

Seems Bank of America was so nervous about what Wikileaks would be revealing about them, that they went on the attack, and now we have some of the details about this, ironically thanks to both Wikileaks and a similar organization, Crowdleaks.

A very interesting anonymous post on this matter was made over at the Slashdot website:

Three information security consultancies with links to US spy agencies cooked up a dirty tricks campaign late last year to destroy Wikileaks by exploiting its perceived weaknesses, reads a presentation released by the whistleblowers’ (pdf) organization that it claimed to be from the conspirators. Consultants at US defense contractors Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary proposed to lawyers for a desperate Bank of America an alliance that would work to discredit the whistleblowers’ website using a divide and conquer approach. Since the plan was hatched, disgruntled volunteers mentioned in the PDF broke away from Wikileaks, financial institutions withdrew services, Apelbaum was harassed by the US Government and Amazon denied service to Wikileaks’ website.

I think this should be understood/considered in conjunction with three magnificent panel discussions/interviews conducted by REAL journalists with Julian Assange himself (another REAL journalist) available as a podcast on the “Big Ideas” program on ABC TV (not the American Broadcasting Company, which hasn’t engaged in real journalism for some time, but rather the Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

The podcasts in question are here (And I recommend listening to these in the order presented below too):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/abc-big-ideas-tv/id376778455
Episode 11: Julian Assange: Wikileaks (Released 12/2/10)
Episode 2: Wikileaks: A Discussion (Released 2/9/11)
Episode 1: Assange Meets Ellsberg (Released 2/9/11)

Mr. Wikileaks explains why they built their distributed journalism model the way they did:

Assange: “We have developed an organization that from the ground up, is multi-national — from the ground up, we spreads assets around the world like multi-national [corporations] do to avoid tax, like multinationals do to avoid asset seizure….”

I utterly LOVE that he’s using the very model that corporations have used to evade their responsibilities, globalization, in order to force them to be responsible. That is so rich with irony, I hardly know what to do with it.

In fact, it reminds me of movie/music companies that refer to individuals who exercise their fair use rights to share information, movies, or music as “thieves”. The fact is, they do so less because those people actually are thieves, and more because those companies wish to reserve the right to “thievery/copying” all to themselves. As is exemplified by these wonderful videos:

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/?p=20
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/?p=58

So they can do that, but an independent producer can’t? And instead that artist gets what I like to call “The Sita Treatment”?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcvd5JZkUXY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmy5cr_cV8
http://sitasingstheblues.com/

To quote the great Nina Paley:

What do religious fundamentalists and big media corporations have in common? They believe that they own culture…. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

Forced to pay crushing licensing fees, many artists are actually blocked from making new works, simply because some part of the new work is derivative. What is virtually never talked about is that these abuses of the concept of “information ownership” are actually serving to STOP new creative works from being born (not to mention blocking how many works re-enter the public domain, thanks to the DMCA). Often copyright-happy lawyers in fact are killing culture, and doing next to nothing to preserve artists rights, while in reality simply protecting parasitical mega-corporations that only exist thanks to artists who themselves refer to the culture at large.

And of course, these same corporate oligarchies think they own information itself too. Indeed, whether we’re talking about film, music or journalism, thanks to monopolistic corporate consolidation rubber-stamped by a compliant government, they ARE the same companies.

So the next time you hear a “mainstream” journalist/talking head in the well-healed, and perhaps too well-”connected” corporate media refer to either Julian Assange as a “terrorist”, or dismissively snear at “bloggers” as engaging in something less than journalism, remember that perhaps the characterization is less than accurate, and may indeed just be the product of jealousy and fear.

Relevant Links:
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack-against-WikiLeaks
http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf
http://www.securecomputing.net.au/News/247706,secret-plan-to-kill-wikileaks-with-fud-leaked.aspx
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Booz_Allen_Hamilton
http://crowdleaks.org/
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/creators-must-move-beyond-suing-audience
http://www.musicaeninternet.com/courtney-loves-speech/

Over US$100 Trillion Additional Credit Needed to Support Global Growth

Cocomaan — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:16:00 +0000

The World Economic Forum reports that:

Credit levels will need to double over the next 10 years, growing by US$ 103 trillion, to support consensus-projected economic growth. “This doubling of credit could be achieved without increasing the risk of major crisis, finds “More Credit with Fewer Crises: Responsibly Meeting the World’s Growing Demand for Credit,” a report released by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with McKinsey & Company. The study develops a detailed global credit model using historical credit volumes and forecasting potential credit demand to 2020 across 79 countries, representing 99% of world credit volume. The study applies a sustainability methodology to the projected credit demand, using newly developed metrics to answer the following two questions: Will credit growth be sufficient to meet demand? Is there a risk of future credit crises and, if so, where?”

That is, we have to hand out $10+ trillion dollars every year until 2020 in order to sustain global economic growth. United States GDP is around $14 trillion dollars, so we’d be creating more than half a United States each year in available credit. Better get those printing presses warmed up!

Detroit Globalized

judy_hollister — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 19:10:37 +0000

Being from the Lansing and Detroit, Michigan area, it’s so heartbreaking visiting my former home state now. The state feels empty; the GM Oldsmobile factories that I drove past all the time have been flattened. Sad.

Detroit Globalized is a documentary explaining the effects that globalization has had on Detroit, MI.

Deathbed Globalist ‘Spills Gut’ On Plan to Destroy America

phunkychic666 — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:36:33 +0000

Kurt Nimmo writes on Infowars:

Pastor Lindsey Williams provides details on the ongoing plan by the global elite to destroy America, consolidate financial power, usher in world government, and reduce humanity to a slave class.

Lindsey Williams told Alex Jones his source — described only as a CEO in the Big Three Oil industry who traveled in Bilderberger circles – is suffering from terminal cancer and “spilled his guts” to him on particular details of the globalist agenda now unfolding.