Measuring Up As Men

By Volaar

“I call on men and boys everywhere to take a stand against the mistreatment of girls and women. It is by standing up for the rights of girls and women that we truly measure up as men.”  — Desmond Tutu, November, 2012

Not three months prior to Tutu’s statement, two teenage boys brutally assaulted, humiliated and traumatized a sixteen year old girl who was inebriated past the point of being able to take care of herself, let alone call for help from others.

To this very day, the victim’s family and the victim continue to receive death threats and threats of bodily harm from the victim’s teenage peers in the Ohio town of Steubenville, population under 19,000.

The End Times

By Robert C. Koehler

“All the evidence shows that we are nearing the end of man’s tragic experiment in independence from God.”

Wow, I thought. They get it. And suddenly I felt a burst of solidarity with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The words are from one of their tracts, which was given to me because I have this passion for talking about God — a wild glee, almost, for stepping up to The Big Serious and wrestling theology with the neighborhood proselytizers.

There are other ways to express the urgency of our situation, leaving God out of it. An eco-conscious soul might warn that the human species must reconnect with indigenous wisdom and the circle of life. But no matter. What strikes me is the growing recognition, in so many quarters, of the unsustainability of our global culture and the need for, and inevitability of, profound change.

William Engdahl, *Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century*

Globalization and de-industrialization were the opening moves of the trap- privatization is the trap closing on our necks.  Of course the rest of the world has been experiencing all this for a long time; but we are no longer the minor beneficiaries of American Imperialism, we have become the next course in its move to devour the world.- Claudia

Find the book at: Amazon Review of: Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century (Paperback) by Reg Little

William Engdahl’s latest book is another awesome exploration and explanation of the boldness and failings of Anglo-American global strategy over most of the past century and a half. Engdahl recalls in his introduction a statement from the 1970’s attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the powerful Rockefeller circles, in which he declared, “If you control the oil, you control entire nations; if you control the food, you control the people; if you control the money, you control the entire world.”

Egyptian Labor Uprising Against Rubinites

By Matt Stoller
Naked Capitalism

Via Wikileaks, we learned that the son of the former President of Egypt, Gamal Mubarak, had an interesting conversation in 2009 with Senator Joe Lieberman on the banking crisis. Gamal is a key figure in the forces buffeting Egypt, global forces of labor arbitrage, torture, and financial corruption. Gamal believed that the bailouts of the banks weren’t big enough – “you need to inject even more money into the system than you have”. Gamal, a former investment banker trained at Bank of America, helped craft Egypt’s industrial policy earlier in the decade.

North American Integration Back on the Front Burner‏‏

By Dana Gabriel
Be Your Own Leader

In the last year, the bilateral process has been the primary means used to advance North American integration, which has drawn little attention. With the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) seemingly stalled after being exposed and discredited, the U.S. channelled trilateral negotiations to parallel bilateral discussions with both Canada and Mexico. Recent reports of a tentative Canada-U.S. security and trade agreement has once again highlighted the whole process of deep continental integration. The U.S. is formulating a strategy with the aim of implementing a North American security perimeter. [Image by NAUresistance]

Google’s “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” to Avoid US Taxes

By Numerian

Google, which encourages employees to “Do No Evil”, managed this past quarter to reduce its international tax rate to 2.4% of net income, despite earning most of its revenue in countries like the US, the UK, Germany, and Japan that have corporate tax rates of at least 25%. In comparison, the average recent effective US tax rate for 2,000 companies was 28.3%.

In a report published today in Bloomberg, Google was described as using tax techniques known as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” to avoid paying taxes in the countries in which it earns most of its revenue. Google uses a Dublin subsidiary and declares that 88% of its overseas sales are generated by this office which employs 2,000 people. Ireland maintains a very low tax rate to encourage foreign investment, but it then adds an important benefit: it allows companies to shift revenues to low-tax countries using transfer pricing. Google shifts its Ireland revenues to The Netherlands (Irish law requires using an EU country for the first leg of this shift). The revenue is then transferred to Bermuda, which has a minimal tax rate. In the meantime, Google uses transfer pricing to shift its expenses to high-tax countries in order to declare tax write-offs.

Review of The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century

Review of the book by Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Editors

By Kéllia Ramares

This is not an ordinary book on financial literacy that will tell people about the differences between banks and credit unions, the role credit scores play in our personal lives, or how to access small business financing. This book is a compilation of essays by some of the most socially conscious political and economic minds of our time, writes Kéllia Ramares.

The neo-liberal assault on Bhopal

BUZZ THIS

Guest blogged by Anil Sadgopal

India’s ruling class refuses to learn any lessons from the biggest industrial genocide in human history that took place in Bhopal more than 25 years ago

Within two days of the Bhopal verdict amounting to burial of justice, the Government of India, at Washington’s request (read ‘US nuclear corporations’ insistence’), agreed to dilute a key provision of the draft Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, now before the Parliament. This related to Section 17 (b) of the Bill, the only provision that had the teeth to deter the nuclear industry from taking its safety obligations lightly. Not that the rest of the Bill had drawn any lessons from Bhopal either. The Bill provides for only a limited liability of the operators of the nuclear plants by putting a ‘cap’ of Rs 500 crores for the compensation to be paid by them, the rest of it to be borne by the State out of public funds. If the Bill is passed by the Parliament in its present shape, the people of India would be required to pay for being killed and maimed by transnational corporations! This is the latest government model of Public Private Partnership (PPP).

S 510 is hissing in the grass

BUZZ THIS!

Guest Blogged by Steve Green

S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.

“If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” ~Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower

Social Costs of Globalisation

By Helena Norberg-Hodge
CounterCurrents

“… America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being – confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented – is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.”

– Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About America

Implicit in all the rhetoric our leaders spout about globalisation is the idea that the rest of the world should eventually be brought up to the standard of living of the West, and America in particular. Read between the lines of the ‘sustainable development’ argument and you’ll find the American Dream lurking: it is globalisation’s touchstone, its apparent endpoint.

But if this is the direction globalisation is taking us, it is worth examining where America itself is headed. A good way to do so is to take a hard look at America’s children, since so many features of the global monoculture have been in place their whole lives. They are like canaries in a mineshaft: if the American Dream isn’t working for them, why should anyone, anywhere, believe it would work better for their own children?

The Impoverishment of the Middle Class: When Empire Hits Home, Part 2

“The world has already, in the past two years, witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.[78] What will follow is a global restructuring of class structure as the western educated middle class will largely be decimated and liquidated of all its material wealth. This is a new phase of globalization.”

By Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, March 30, 2010
This is Part 2 of the series, “When Empire Hits Home.”

see also Part 1: War, Racism and the Empire of Poverty

and  Part 3:  Riots, Rebellion and Revolution

The western nations of the world have built their great wealth and societies on the exploitation and plundering of the people and resources of the rest of the world. The wealth, freedom, and structures of our societies have been built on the starvation, robbery, deprivation and murder of millions upon millions of the world’s people, both historically and presently.

It seemed for a time that “Western Civilization” had worked, even if only for the west. We saw the emergence and growth of a vibrant middle class, which has its origins in the Industrial Revolution, out of which we also saw the formation of the “nuclear family.” The middle classes of the west grew in wealth, education, and access. While the great problems of the world, and for the majority of the world’s people, persisted and expanded exponentially, the great purpose of the middle class was siphoned and expanded into facilitating the development of a massive consumerist society. The function of the middle class became that of consuming, not necessarily contributing to determining the direction of society.

UN thugs in Haiti

By Rady Ananda

For those interested in a populist view of Haitian neocolonialism, recommended are two independently produced documentaries. The Media Haiti site has posted a 15-minute film, Haiti as Invisible and BrassCheck TV has posted an 88-minute film, Haiti: We would rather die standing.

The Triumph of Complete Idiocy

Boyz Will Be Boyz....

My day job involves work in the defense industry.  I love my job, but not because it involves helping people bomb innocent civilians back to the Stone Age.  In fact I am quite certain that if my job did involve helping people hurt innocent civilians, I wouldn’t be doing it.  Alas I am here and if for no other reason than helping my organization absorb every last defense industry concern until there is only one left, I do my job to the best of my ability.  As Grover Norquist is fond of insisting with respect to government, I want to make the environment in which armed conflict takes place so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub.  As a species we need to move beyond the limits inherent in the care and feeding of a lizard brain.

WTO: From Seattle to Geneva

By Devinder Sharma

My friend Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines. Like me, he was among the protesters in the streets of Seattle during the WTO’s third ministerial meeting and has participated in parallel civil society events at all the other ministerial meetings. He represents the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, including Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy.

I have always admired Walden Bello for his realistic understanding of the global economic system. He wrote this comment for the Yes! magazine, December 2009 issue. I am sure you will find it thought-provoking.

The Meaning of Seattle: Truth Only Becomes True through Action

Extinctions, Over-Population and the Profit Paradigm

The six great extinction spasms, with projection thru 2100. From http://bit.ly/7Eaq5Q

By Rady Ananda

Human activities are blamed for what may be Earth’s greatest extinction spasm. Of the five categories of these activities, the world’s wealthy focus on over-population, ignoring their own environmentally destructive actions from which they wrought their wealth. 

“Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?” Mathew 7:3