Millions of displaced Colombians demand US respect human life, not money (3:06m video & script)

from RT (Russia Today). People in the US often must go to foreign sources in order to find information about some of the most egregious actions pursued abroad by their government and corporations.

US corporations are under fire for aiding the creation of world's second largest displaced population. Activists claim millions of Colombians have been driven from their homes.

In light of the issue, hundreds of protestors have gathered at Washington DC’s Capitol Hill. People brought pictures of those who have suffered as a result of the activities of major US companies in Colombia's indigenous territories, which are rich in natural resources. Millions have not only been displaced, but also are either missing, tortured or have been killed.

Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking

from Voltaire. The article examines a temporary program enacted under George Bush in 2004 that is being favored by powerful corporate interests as a method of "immigration reform".

While the guest worker program in the United States has been praised and recommended for expansion by President Bush, and is likely to be considered by Congress as a template for future immigration reform, human rights advocates warn that the system seriously victimizes immigrant workers. Workers, labor organizers, lawyers, and policy makers say that the program, designed to open up the legal labor market and provide a piece of the American dream to immigrants, has instead locked thousands into a modern-day form of indentured servitude. Congressman Charles Rangel has called the guest worker program “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

Common Security Clubs offer the jobless a lifeline

from the LA Times. The article reports on a clubs where people are getting together to help each other.

The clubs are citizen action groups designed to bring the unemployed — and the anxiously employed — together to help each other. Each club consists of 15 to 20 members, drawn from churches, union halls, environmental groups or neighborhoods.

Hopelessness in the Workplace

from Counterpunch. The article presents hard evidence that reveals a dramatic decline in worker satisfaction among people in 60 countries over the past 23 years.

The Conference Board’s study indicated that the drop-off wasn’t tied primarily to worries over job security, as critical as that concern is.  Rather, the responses were quite specific.  Among the complaints:  on-the-job pressure, longer hours, bad bosses, workplace intimidation, arbitrary decision-making and evaluations, and a sense of general hopelessness.

Miners and families denounce Massey and government inspectors for West Virginia mine disaster

from World Socialist Web Site. Miners tell their story of the mine disaster that you likely didn't hear from your boob tube.

If anyone complained about safety, Stewart went on, “we’d be marked men and the management would look for ways to fire us. Maybe not that day, or that week, but somewhere down the line, we’d disappear. We’d seen it happen and I told my wife, I felt like I was working for the Gestapo at times.”

Leading the world's green industrial revolution

from the Denver Post. 

A gaping gulf exists today between America's economic collapse, our melting globe, and the lackluster response of top leaders in the U.S. wind, solar and geothermal industries. You wouldn't know it, but these three industries, along with the energy efficiency sector, hold the key to ushering in a green industrial revolution for America, and the world.

I believe that the article suggests what I believe to be a fact--that the US ruling class is committed to the fossil fuel industry, and to a lesser extent to nuclear energy.

Thinking the Unthinkable in the Aftermath of Kandahar

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould from Boiling Frogs.

The upcoming campaign for the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar will be the crucial test for the United States’ military and the Obama administration’s AfPak strategy. It will clearly be an epic military battle and a test of the intellectual movement for counterinsurgency within the military known as COIN. But, like the battle for Marja in February, will the battle for Kandahar be more about the “perceptions” of American victory than about real success?

And managing perceptions is extremely important in any fake democracy. 

These journalists see a growing disaffection among NATO members as well as among the people in the US to continue this war. Hence the Empire's ruling class has some real dilemmas to confront.

Time out

Wall Street's War

by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone. This outstanding investigative reporter has been hanging around the US Congress to find out how it actually functions as it tries to pass a financial reform bill. Read all about it!

It's early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.

Read the rest to find out how the ruling elite manages your "democracy" so that it works for them while it continues the appearance that it works for you. This is a must-read for anyone who is not convinced that the system works to serve the elites and not ordinary people.
 
Otherwise, for those of you who are aware that what we have in the US is a fake democracy, you might be interested in reading only the following summary.

On the plus side, the bill will rein in some forms of predatory lending, and contains a historic decision to audit the Fed. But the larger, more important stuff – breaking up banks that grow Too Big to Fail, requiring financial giants to pay upfront for their own bailouts, forcing the derivatives market into the light of day – probably won't happen in any meaningful way. The Senate is designed to function as a kind of ongoing negotiation between public sentiment and large financial interests, an endless tug of war in which senators maneuver to strike a delicate mathematical balance between votes and access to campaign cash. The problem is that sometimes, when things get really broken, the very concept of a middle ground between real people and corrupt special interests becomes a grotesque fallacy. In times like this, we need our politicians not to bridge a gap but to choose sides and fight. In this historic battle over finance reform, when we had a once-in-a-generation chance to halt the worst abuses on Wall Street, many senators made the right choice. In the end, however, the ones who mattered most picked wrong – and a war that once looked winnable will continue to drag on for years, creating more havoc and destroying more lives before it is over.

Resilient gardening - Part I

by Christine Patton from her blog, Peak Oil Hausfrau.

At the same time that gardening is becoming more difficult due to factors such as climate change, declining resources, colony collapse disorder, etc., it also becomes even more necessary as we begin to rely on our food gardens for financial and economic reasons. Because of that transformation from hobby to necessity, I've become very interested in incorporating resilience into gardening.

Kyrgyzstan’s "Rose Revolution": Washington, Moscow, Beijing and the Geopolitics of Central Asia--Part 2

by F. William Engdahl from Global Research. The author is an expert on the Great Game that governing classes like to play on the world stage. Clearly the most important area of the world where this game is being played is in Eurasia. That is why the Empire has so much invested there in terms of military and political forces. Engdahl supplies the details of this game.

As you read the article, notice how all the players in this game are strategizing to gain control of the regions mineral and energy resources. 

What is especially important for us ordinary people to understand from all this is that we have reached a point in human history where such games can no longer be tolerated. Human ingenuity has enabled a small section of the human population to play these games at the expense of the rest of us. We fight and die in the wars that they create. We also pay with our jobs, pensions, future opportunities of our children when their games go wrong. They don't pay, or at least, not very much--more in the nature of pocket change that they gamble with. 

Likewise the environment in which we exist has become increasing threatened by their rapacious exploitation of earth's resources to the point where it appears likely that it will be unable to continue to support human and other life forms if the damage continues. As I and many others see it, there is really no alternative for us than to begin to replace this domineering rule by elites with rule by us--we, the people, of the earth.

If you take the long view of human history, this would not really be such a startling change. The feudal and industrial phases where elites have ruled constitute only a very small period in this long history--less than 2% for the history of most of humanity. For most of human history humans governed their affairs in a highly participatory manner with the welfare of all being very important for survival. We must return to this kind of arrangement. 

Of course, we can't exactly duplicate earlier participatory arrangements because we live in a very different world. But we must, if we are to survive, re-design our societies to eliminate rule by minorities who exploit the rest of us and the earth to serve their addictions to power and wealth.

Designing the Future

from Resurgence. 

...this is where you come in. As planetary citizens we can all now go beyond ‘business as usual’, by pooling our collective dreams and ideas and imagining a new kind of future. We can build it inside the existing system, using the worldwide web as the operating system, so that when the time comes for a new, truly democratic, open-source system of governance, there will be a blue-print ready and waiting.

Regional, Not Local, Sourcing May be the Solution to Our Broken Food System

from Politics of the Plate. 

It has all but become an article of faith that sourcing food locally is the most sustainable alternative to our current global food production system. But there is a growing body of evidence that local may only be part of the answer.

Holding Banks Responsible By Community Organizing

from New America Media.

“Our idea is that the congregations and large institutions -- unions, schools, universities, pension funds, local and state governments — should start moving their deposits and investments out of banks that are not working to keep families in their homes.”

Toronto Police Get 'Sound Cannons' for G20

from the Toronto Star. The New World Order will make sure that protesters (we, the people) will not interfere with their G20 conference. They use "new-speak" to call this weapon, which was first used last year in Pittsburgh, "a communication tool". 

Iran: Obama's other oil spill

by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

With its eye on full spectrum dominance, control of Eurasia and regime change in Iran, the Obama administration had lost control of the Iranian nuclear dossier, and Brazil and Turkey filled the void by starting down the diplomatic track. The real "international community" has interpreted the sequel for what it is - Washington undermining the emergence of independent, non-US-centric global diplomacy, pre-emptively striking both Brazil and Turkey, these annoying "threats" to the major power platinum club.  

First Person Observation of Oil Leak Impact

from Naked Capitalism. From an employee of a New Orleans community clinic, some inconvenient truths about how local people are experiencing the disaster in the Gulf.

Time out

US Space Weapon Now Circling the Globe

from Toward Freedom.

The US space weapon X-37 is now circling the globe in relative secrecy....This new weapon poses threats to global peace and risks sparking an arms race in space.

I wonder how many billions have been spent on this system. 

The military-industrial complex marches on as many people hunker down, growing their own food, "transitioning", watching the the Arctic ice cap melt and ocean life forms dieing due to acidification, watching the Gulf of Mexico fill up with oil, wondering about unusual local weather patterns, watching their sons and daughter and brothers and sister go off to fight the Empire's wars because higher education is too expensive and there aren't any job prospects. 

Meanwhile, enlightened academics write in liberal media how all these problems are due to "industrial civilization", the implication being that the only solution is to return to a pre-industrial civilization in order to survive. 

Now, I'm sure that this strategy is comforting to the profit addicted ruling class. While the riff-raff are busy eking out a pre-industrial existence, they can hoard whatever is left of the earth's resources, maintain their lavish lifestyles, and continue their dominion over all living things.

An Interview with Peter North, author of ‘Local Money: how to make it happen in your community’

by Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture. The author interviews North about his new book and discusses the problems and possibilities of local currency arrangements.

...I’ve become very aware...that it can be very easy to set up a local currency scheme, but harder to keep it going when the initial enthusiasm wears off. The fact is that at the moment we live in a very globalised world where next to nothing that we use everyday is produced locally. Its something that we need to change, but that won’t happen overnight. Making too many claims too quickly about what you can do with a local currency can be a problem if you find that local businesses actually don’t sell anything produced locally, so they can’t spend on the local currency they take in. And endlessly recirculating things made in China between ourselves does not make us very resilient.