Police crackdown as striking miners march on Madrid

Click here to access article, videos, and photos posted by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution. 

The author provides videos and photos depicting attacks on civilians by the enforcers of Spain's One Percent. They are stepping up their aggression to inflict injuries on those who are protesting the austerity measures imposed by European bankers. Rubber bullets and beatings are now their methods of choice to subdue citizens in what is becoming an overt class war in a military sense. 

At least 73 were injured as riot police indiscriminately fired rubber bullets into the crowds and protesters retaliated by throwing bottles, trash and fireworks back at police. Images circulating on Twitter showed a journalist lying injured on the ground and a young child (below) with a massive bruise from a rubber bullet. One particularly disturbing image showed a woman bleeding protrusively from the head as she was being led away by riot police. The clashes are remarkable because, in contrast to Barcelona and Athens, protests in Madrid have tended to stay relatively peaceful so far.

“If [Spanish Prime Minister] Rajoy had any dignity, he would resign”

Click here to access article by Carlos Delclós from Reflections on a Revolution. (Includes 4:52m video from RT)

Spain is another example of capitalist "democracy" in action. They hold their carefully managed elections where candidates approved by the One Percent make all kinds of promises to citizens, then betray them.

Following yesterday’s violent police crackdown on peaceful protesters in Madrid, ROAR contributor Carlos Delclos, a lecturer in Sociology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, appeared on RT News to denounce the brutality of police and the sudden volte-face of Prime Minister Rajoy, who announced even deeper austerity measures yesterday — and whose government has so far broken virtually every election promise it made before coming to power.

Investing Cash Hoarded by Large Corporations

Click here to access article from InterOccupy. 

I am posting this article to point out that not all ideas presented under the banner of the Occupy movement are constructive or legitimate. I really don't know whether this website represents merely very naive, right-wing views within the Occupy movement, or if it is a subversive front to contain and confuse real activists in Occupy. I have seen other articles posted on this website that aroused my suspicion, but this one really rang my bells. Read it to see what you think.

It is hard to believe that the author of the proposal, Carmine Gorga, is sincerely offering his proposal to fix the economy. I can't believe that corporations and stockholders are going to be persuaded by his moral argument that they should redistribute their wealth in order to fix the economy. And, I can't believe any sane person would think such a thing.

The high cost of private profit in health care

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from his blog, Systemic Disorder. 

This author, activist, and journalist specializes in analysis of major issues so that ordinary people can understand them. 

Each U.S. citizen’s annual share of wasteful, excess spending on health care — excess spending that goes into the coffers of some of the country’s largest corporations among the many industry profiteers — amounts to $3,846. Business leaders, their lavishly funded think tanks and pressure groups, and the public-office officials who represent them continually assert that private enterprise is always more efficient. It would seem that the efficiency lies in extracting money and wealth. [my emphasis]

 Well, of course! That is what capitalism is all about: wealth (and power) accumulation by capitalists! What could be easier to understand? What is more difficult to understand is why the 99 Percent put up with it.

And, Diane Ravitch reports on capitalists looking to charter schools for more profits in her article entitled, "How to Make Big Money in Education".

Decriminalization of Drug Possession Doesn't Increase Drug Use, New Report Finds

Click here to access article by Ernest Drucker from Huffington Post.

Of course, evidence such as found in the report will have no effect on drug policies simply because the illicit drug trade greatly benefits major banking institutions whose directors and owners represent the key decision-makers in the ruling One Percent. See this, this, this, and this.

Lessons of the Cold War: [Part 1] The Corporate War on Labor, at Home and Abroad

Click here to access article by Gerard Colby from Toward Freedom. 

Check out the author's background:

Gerard Colby is the author of Du Pont: Behind The Nylon Curtain (Prentice Hall, 1974), Du Pont Dynasty (Lyle Stuart, 1984), and with Charlotte Dennett of THY WILL BE DONE, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 2005). He was the lead contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (ed. Kristina Borjesson), winner of the National Press Club’s first Arthur Kruse Award for Press Criticism. He has taught international economics, political science and the history of Latin American political economy at various colleges, has lectured throughout the U.S. and Brazil, and has done investigative journalism for national and local news services for over 30 years. From 2004 to 2009 he served as President of the National Writers Union, Local 1981 of the Technical, Office and Professional Division of the United Auto Workers.

Colby provides a much needed working class history of the US since WWII in this first of two(?) series. Such histories are vitally needed to correct all the falsifications and omissions presented to the 99 Percent through the One Percent's ownership and control of all mainstream ideological organs--schools and media. Only with a proper understanding of history and current events can the 99 Percent effectively mount a campaign for real change.

Part II is here. 

The Police and the Occupy Movement: An Interview With Kristian Williams

Click here to access the interview conducted by Collin Harris. [This is a must-read article for all activists]

It is quite rare that I run across an article that provides significant original thoughts on activist issues, and by doing so, advances the activist movement. This one definitely does that. Kristian William's views on the vital subject of relations with the enforcers of the One Percent (cops and military) is clearly based on a lot of research into a broad reach of history which is informed by a social justice perspective. This interview has inspired me to read his two books: Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination.

Mexico: the Neo-Liberal "Drugs War'

Click here to access transcript of interview with author Peter Watt from Latin America Bureau (UK). 

A new book looks beyond the clichés to examine the causes of the violence associated with illegal drugs trafficking in Mexico. LAB talks to one of its authors, Peter Watt.

If this author is correct, Mexico's political version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum will continue the violence, the battles over drug turfs, and even provide new venues of crime all participated in by Mexico's One Percent.

The Rules of the Game

Click here to access article by Jim O’Reilly from his blog Comments on Global Political Economy.

Although one might dispute the last clause of the last sentence in the article, this retired maverick banker knows full well that there are other alternatives to "business as usual" with the implication that capitalist rules of their game might be subject to change by the 99 Percent.

Iran won't crack

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

The author ridicules US political operatives and the directors in their mad pursuit of bringing Iran to its knees. They seem stuck in neoconservative policies which produced the Iraq disaster. 

In my opinion, they seem unable to face a deteriorating dominance that they have taken for granted since WWII. They remind me of the Nazi high command which saw Western capitalist countries cater to their every whim, giving them one country after another, until the Nazis began to see themselves as invincible. Instead of merely going east to attack the Soviet Union as was hoped by Western elites, they rolled their Panzers into Western European countries and sent bombing raids against Britain. Although I don't expect that a major war to break out over this Iranian obsession, Empire directors are playing a very risky game.

The Paraguayan Coup: How agribusiness, landowning and media elite, and the U.S. are paving a way for regional destabilization

Click here to access article by Francesca Fiorentini from Climate Connections. 

This author provides one of the most comprehensive explanations I've seen regarding the recent parliamentary engineered coup in Paraguay. 

...when looking at the powers at play in Paraguay it becomes clear that the past is not so far behind. They are the powers behind this unbelievably sordid coup, an event that appears to have been merely a step toward fulfilling longstanding agreements made between the Paraguayan oligarchy, multinational agribusiness interests, and the United States.

CIA torture whistleblower faces trial

Click here to access article by Vladimir Gladkov from The Voice of Russia. 

This is just another illustration of a basic and critically important truth:

...whoever is the president of the United States, the White House will continue to hide unpleasant truth from the public and will fight anyone who dares to stand in its way.

This is true simply because it doesn't matter whom the ruling class put into the White House, the real decision-makers always stay hidden behind the facade of official government.

Italy in Crisis: The Decline of the Roman Democracy and Rise of the ‘Super Mario’ Technocracy (Part 1)

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from his website. 

By using excerpts of recently written rough drafts from a forthcoming book, the author puts together all the details of Italy's process of surrender to European and US banking elites. This series offers an excellent study that illustrates how banking elites are taking over governments in Europe to serve the needs of bankers and banking shareholders.

Part 2 is here.

To understand what is happening in Europe, it would be desirable to have an understanding of the whole issue of derivative instrument trading on Wall Street that played a major role in the economic collapse. See this, this, and this.

Also, PBS TV has recently run a very good, though flawed in some respects, 4-part series on derivative trading called "Money, Power and Wall Street". They can be viewed online here, here, here, and here. Or you can purchase the 2-CD set that includes all four programs from PBS here for $29.99US.

Weird summer weather 'is what global warming looks like,' experts say

Click here to access article by Seth Borenstein from the Mercury News. 

Scientists are now saying, "we told you so". But, is that really fair? Mainstream media continues to ignore any linkage between weird weather and associated events like forest fires with global warming.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.

"Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

US war crimes from Vietnam to Obama

Click here to access article by John Pilger from Green Left (Australia). 

The presiding formal head of the Empire follows in what is becoming a tradition in the US--war crimes against humanity. Obama, of course, it just a flunky, a hired slick super-salesman working a gullible public to sell them the worst vehicles in history. The real criminals are the ones who hired him and control his actions. They are the political operatives of the One Percent who currently direct an Empire based on the most exploitative, the most hazardous of systems to organize human life ever before in human history. That system is capitalism.

On May 28, US President Barack Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free-fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society.

It was, said Mr Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history".

The next day, the New York Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age.

The Corporate Media Occupies a News Blackout

Click here to access article by Mickey Z. from World News Trust.

The author argues that we should stop complaining about mainstream media because they are only doing what they are supposed to do--maintain the ruling class in power. Our attention needs to be elsewhere.

The media can't be "fixed" any more than all the other dying institutions (banking, health care, education, etc.) can be. So, I say: Let the corporate press rot while we utilize our resources to create an entirely new model.

To help make this happen, we need more of the 99% to join us and thus, must reach out far and wide, keep whispering the truth, and continue working to model new alternatives.

STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage [supplemented at 8:00 PM Seattle time]

Click here to access article by Jill Fitzsimmons, Jocelyn Fong, Melody Johnson, and Shauna Theel.

The article provides the details on this study which revealed that...

Only 3 Percent Of Wildfire Coverage Mentioned Long-Term Climate Change Or Global Warming. The major television and print outlets largely ignored climate change in their coverage of wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and other Western states. All together, only 3 percent of the reports mentioned climate change, including 1.6 percent of television segments and 6 percent of text articles.

We have to go to "Democracy Now!" via Huffington Post to find a discussion about this lack of linkage between the recent catastrophic forest fires, record temperatures, and global warming.  

Democracy Now is an alternative liberal news agency that uses a variety of media including TV, radio, and internet. Note carefully my wordage to describe this news agency: "alternative liberal". Thanks to right-wing ascendency in the US and the influence of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News empire (re-branded as News Corporation) that has successfully used tabloid journalism to seduce its readers, liberal perspectives have largely disappeared from major mainstream media. The only source coming close is MSNBC TV broadcasts which seem to confine their coverage to news and analysis that favors the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, "Democracy Now!" is not completely independent. In a recent article (You may need to reload the page to get past the funding pitch.) Dr. Stuart Bramhall has confirmed my long held suspicions about this source.  She has uncovered well documented evidence that much of what passes for left media coverage, including "Democracy Now!", in the US is funded, at least in substantial part, by right-wing non-profit institutions such as the Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, other CIA front organizations, and various liberal foundations. 

These foundations do this to contain news coverage from targeted media within limits that are acceptable to governing class authorities. Hence, you will never find any questioning of capitalism in Democracy Now!'s programming; and you will note that in their coverage of the fires and global warming, no linkage is made to capitalism. In fact, you will have to look long and hard to find even the word "capitalism" in any of their programs. In other words, given this lack one might easily conclude from following this news source that "there is no alternative"--the mantra of all capitalists.

So, why is a linkage of the present extreme weather and related events to capitalism important? Let me quote some paragraphs written by Paul Messersmith-Glavin from his Foreward to the book entitled Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe by Javier Sethness-Castro.

The basic structure of capitalism is at the heart of the climate crisis. Carbon emissions, the primary source of our changing climate, are the by-product of industrial production. Capitalism is literally changing the weather. Often, industry is blamed for climate change. People frequently talk about burning oil and coal, or fault cars and factories, but this misses the underlying dynamic that ties all these things together: industry is an expression of a system. Ascending over the last four hundred years, capitalism continues to be the dominant organizing forced in the world, shaping life as we know it. All attempts at slowing--much less stopping--its growth have failed. The emission of climate-changing gases is intrinsic to the capitalist logic. Every day that this continues, the climate will continue to change. The year 2010 saw the highest emission of greenhouse gases in history.

Capitalism is based on a philosophy of "grow or die" and ruthless competition; companies need to continually expand and grow, or they will not survive. It is a system that seeks to maximize profit by exploiting labor as well as treating nature as both a "resource" and garbage dump. Despite all the warning signs--such as news of drought, heat waves, and new species being threatened by changing habitat--and what scientists say, the system marches on, with absolutely no sign of letting up. That is because it cannot change its fundamental nature. It is a form of economic and social organization at odds with nature and human community that has come to shape nearly everything in life, such that we can hardly imagine the possibility of life outside capitalism. It promotes qualities like greed and selfishness, and creates us in its image. Capitalism is more than an economic system; it is a way of life. Maximizing profit at the expense of all else is its very metabolism. To stop catastrophic climate change, we must stop capitalism.  

The Military Solution

Click here to access article by Tom Engelhardt from TomDispatch.

Normally I don't go for sensational headlines, but this one is understated. I think the title should be "Militarization: the New Normal in the US".  The author expresses this as a paradox:

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.

And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate.  The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. 

Venezuela: Interview with WRI Council Member Rafael Uzcátegui

Click here to access a transcript of the interview from War Resisters' International. (Although WRI is related, it is not the same as the War Resistors League which, I believe, is based in the US.) 

Rafael Uzcategui is a member of the group that publishes the anarchist newspaper El Libertario in Caracas (Venezuela). As antimilitarist, he is also a member of the War Resisters’ International and works in a Venezuelan human rights NGO called Provea. He is author of the books “Heart of Ink” and “Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle” in which he reports the so-called Bolivarian process of Chavez and the true face of his “revolutionary” government. Taking advantage of his conference tour in Germany, we interviewed Rafael for the magazine Gai Dao.

Although the transcript suffers a little from translation errors, one can gain important insights on what has really occurred in Venezuela under Chavez. According to this Venezuelan anarchist, despite all the early socialist and radical rhetoric from Chavez and the establishment of grass-roots populist organizations, this frequently lauded "revolution" in Venezuela was only another populist type of regime change that has occurred previously in that country and in other parts of South America. Moreover, the grass-roots organizations have been carefully brought under the political control of this popular caudillo and his administration. Popular measures such as the strengthening of social safety nets and some land re-distribution has occurred, but otherwise the economy is well integrated into the international capitalist economy. This view conforms to my view based on my visit to Venezuela in December of 2005 and subsequent reading material. 

The most relevant sections follow question 2 to the end of the interview.

Democracy from Below in Bolivia: An Interview with Oscar Olivera

Click here to access article featuring the interview by Peter Lackowski and Sharyl Green from Unside Down World. 

Oscar Olivera is an activist, thinker, and writer based in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He was a leader during the uprising in 2000 in Cochabamba in which the people of the city threw out Bechtel, the multinational corporation that had privatized all the water in the city – even the rain that people collected. (His book on that process is listed in the bibliography at the end of this interview.) This interview was conducted in Cochabamba, Bolivia on January 27, 2012.

Although Olivera seems to go out of his way to exculpate Evo Morales--who like Obama promised all kinds of changes, and then changed very little--he does shed light on the role that political actors play to front for the real political decision-makers. The former consist of political parties, caudillos (strongmen) or leaders, and nation states. He argues that the real decision-makers are the transnational corporations and the international banks. Thus, the critical task is to organize a new activism to promote a new social-political model that can challenge this reality.

People want to construct something different.  What we were proposing in 2000 and 2003, a new kind of economy, a way to recover politics for the people.  I think that people in Europe and the United States and here in 2000 and 2003 did not fight for a political party.  They fought to get back politics not understood as a form in which someone rules over other people, but politics as a form to establish a type of relationship, a way of living together.  A new way of living together not based on competition, individualism, but rather on solidarity, equality, complementarity.