Over 309,000 Ecuadoran Children Leave Work For Schools
teleSUR | November 5, 2014
During a meeting Wednesday with the journalists in the coastal, economic hub of Guayaquil, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa said that over 309,000 children had quit working to attend school.
According to official estimates, the number of working children decreased from 17 to eight percent.
Correa reiterated his commitment to eliminate child work in Ecuador, and sharply criticized the recent initiative of Guayaquil’s mayor, Jaime Nabot, to inaugurate a statue representing a shoeshine boy in the city center.
The head of state called the statue a “shame”, saying “(it) is not part of the folklore, it is part of exploitation.”
During the inauguration, Nebot himself took a picture simulating the act of having his shoes shined by the boy depicted in the statue.
“While the oligarchy builds statues about our exploitation, we build schools so children can keep studying,” added Correa.
Hungarian law gives green light to South Stream in defiance of EU
RT | November 4, 2014
The Hungarian parliament has approved a law on Monday which allows building the South Stream gas pipeline without approval of the European Union. The European Commission has already demanded an explanation from Hungarian authorities.
The European Commission’s spokesperson said at a press briefing in Brussels on Tuesday that the EC was in contact with Hungarian authorities to get an explanation for their decision.
The law was passed with 132 votes in favor and 35 votes against, allowing a company to construct a gas pipeline even if it doesn’t have the licenses needed to operate it. According to the new law the only requirement for a company which wants to take part in construction is approval from the Hungarian Energy Office.
“This is meant to give a boost to South Stream and is to show Russia that Hungary is taking the project seriously,” Attila Holoda, an expert on energy regulation, said as cited by Bloomberg.
South Stream is “extraordinarily important” for Hungary because it enhances the security of gas supplies to the country, Janos Lazar, the Minister in Charge of the Prime Minister’s Office, told reporters on October, 22.
The South Stream gas pipeline was projected to deliver gas to south and central Europe via the Black Sea and the Balkans, bypassing Ukraine. The project, with a capacity of 63 billion cubic meters of gas a year, is seen as critical for European energy security. Ukraine has been an unreliable transit country, and building a new pipeline could result in avoiding numerous risks.
The South Stream would run across Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Slovenia before entering Italy and Greece. The crisis in Ukraine has made the South Stream project a political issue rather than a legal debate. The EU Commission has been pressuring member states to stop the building of the pipeline. Last year it started an investigation claiming the project contradicted the European Union’s Third Energy Package regulations.
Bulgaria and Austria have temporarily suspended the project but are leaving it on the table.
I have no idea why The USA is so keen on signing Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with other countries
Inca Kola News | November 3, 2014
Not a clue.
Data from here.
How does the Gates Foundation spend its money to feed the world?
GRAIN | November 4, 2014
“Listening to farmers and addressing their specific needs. We talk to farmers about the crops they want to grow and eat, as well as the unique challenges they face. We partner with organizations that understand and are equipped to address these challenges, and we invest in research to identify relevant and affordable solutions that farmers want and will use.” – First guiding principle of the Gates Foundation’s work on agriculture.1
At some point in June this year, the total amount given as grants to food and agriculture projects by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation surpassed the US$3 billion mark. It marked quite a milestone. From nowhere on the agricultural scene less than a decade ago, the Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the world’s major donors to agricultural research and development.
The Gates Foundation is arguably the biggest philanthropic venture ever. It currently holds a $40 billion endowment, made up mostly of contributions from Gates and his billionaire friend Warren Buffet. The foundation has over 1,200 staff, and has given over $30 billion in grants since its inception in 2000, $3.6 billion in 2013 alone.2 Most of the grants go to global health programmes and educational work in the US, traditionally the foundation’s priority areas. But in 2006-2007, the foundation massively expanded its funding for agriculture, with the launch of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and a series of large grants to the international agricultural research system (CGIAR). In 2007, it spent over half a billion dollars on agricultural projects and has maintained funding at around this level. The vast majority of the foundation’s agricultural grants focus on Africa.
Spending so much money gives the foundation significant influence over agricultural research and development agendas. As the weight of the foundation’s overall focus on technology and private sector partnerships has begun to be felt in the global agriculture arena, it has raised opposition and controversy, particularly around its work in Africa. Critics say that the Gates Foundation is promoting an imported model of industrial agriculture based on the high-tech seeds and chemicals sold by US corporations. They say the foundation is fixated on the work of scientists in centralised labs and that it chooses to ignore the knowledge and biodiversity that Africa’s small farmers have developed and maintained over generations. Some also charge that the Gates Foundation is using its money to impose a policy agenda on Africa, accusing the foundation of direct intervention on highly controversial issues like seed laws and GMOs.
GRAIN looked through the foundation’s publicly available financial records to see if the actual flows of money support these critiques. We combed through all the grants for agriculture that the Gates Foundation gave between 2003 and September 2014.3 We then organised the grant recipients into major groupings (see table 2) and constructed a database, which can be downloaded here.4
Here are some of the conclusions we were able to draw from the data.
1. The Gates Foundation fights hunger in the South by giving money to the North.
Click to enlarge – Graph 1: the Gates Foundation’s $3 billion pie (agriculture grants, by region).
Graph 1 and Table 1 give the overall picture. Roughly half of the foundation’s grants for agriculture went to four big groupings: the CGIAR’s global agriculture research network, international organisations (World Bank, UN agencies, etc.), AGRA (set up by Gates itself) and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF). The other half ended up with hundreds of different research, development and policy organisations across the world. Of this last group, over 80% of the grants were given to organisations in the US and Europe, 10% went to groups in Africa, and the remainder elsewhere. Table 2 lists the top 10 countries where Gates grantees are located and the amounts they received, highlighting some of the main grantees. By far the main recipient country is Gates’s own home country, the US, followed by the UK, Germany and the Netherlands.
When it comes to agricultural grants by the foundation to universities and national research centres across the world, 79% went to grantees in the US and Europe, and a meagre 12% to recipients in Africa.
The North-South divide is most shocking, however, when we look at the NGOs that the Gates Foundation supports. One would assume that a significant portion of the frontline work that the foundation funds in Africa would be carried out by organisations based there. But of the $669 million that the Gates Foundation has granted to non-governmental organisations for agricultural work, over three quarters has gone to organisations based in the US. Africa-based NGOs get a meagre 4% of the overall agriculture-related grants to NGOs.
2. The Gates Foundation gives to scientists, not farmers
As can be seen in Graph 2, the single biggest recipient of grants from the Gates Foundation is the CGIAR, a consortium of 15 international agricultural research centres. In the 1960s and 70s, these centres were responsible for the development and spread of a controversial Green Revolution model of agriculture in parts of Asia and Latin America which focused on the mass distribution of a few varieties of seeds that could produce high yields – with the generous application of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Efforts to implement the same model in Africa failed and, globally, the CGIAR lost relevance as corporations like Syngenta and Monsanto took control over seed markets. Money from the Gates Foundation is providing CGIAR and its Green Revolution model a new lease on life, this time in direct partnership with seed and pesticide companies.5
Click to enlarge – Graph 2: the Gates Foundation’s $3 billion pie (agriculture grants, by type of organisation).
The CGIAR centres have received over $720 million from Gates since 2003. During the same period, another $678 million went to universities and national research centres across the world – over three-quarters of them in the US and Europe – for research and development of specific technologies, such as crop varieties and breeding techniques.
The Gates Foundation’s support for AGRA and the AATF is tightly linked to this research agenda. These organisations seek, in different ways, to facilitate research by the CGIAR and other research programmes supported by the Gates Foundation and to ensure that the technologies that come out of the labs get into farmers’ fields. AGRA trains farmers on how to use the technologies, and even organises them into groups to better access the technologies, but it does not support farmers in building up their own seed systems or in doing their own research.6
We could find no evidence of any support from the Gates Foundation for programmes of research or technology development carried out by farmers or based on farmers’ knowledge, despite the multitude of such initiatives that exist across the continent. (African farmers, after all, do continue to supply an estimated 90% of the seed used on the continent!) The foundation has consistently chosen to put its money into top down structures of knowledge generation and flow, where farmers’ are mere recipients of the technologies developed in labs and sold to them by companies.
3. The Gates Foundation buys political influence
Does the Gates Foundation use its money to tell African governments what to do? Not directly. The Gates Foundation set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa in 2006 and has supported it with $414 million since then. It holds two seats on the Alliance’s board and describes it as the “African face and voice for our work”.7
AGRA, like the Gates Foundation, provides grants to research programmes. It also funds initiatives and agribusiness companies operating in Africa to develop private markets for seeds and fertilisers through support to “agro-dealers” (see box on Malawi). An important component of its work, however, is shaping policy.
AGRA intervenes directly in the formulation and revision of agricultural policies and regulations in Africa on such issues as land and seeds. It does so through national “policy action nodes” of experts, selected by AGRA, that work to advance particular policy changes. For example, in Ghana, AGRA’s Seed Policy Action Node drafted revisions to the country’s national seed policy and submitted it to the government. The Ghana Food Sovereignty Network has been fiercely battling such policies since the government put them forward. In Mozambique, AGRA’s Seed Policy Action Node drafted plant variety protection regulations in 2013, and in Tanzania it reviewed national seed policies and presented a study on the demand for certified seeds. Also in Tanzania, its Land Policy Action Node is involved in revising the Village Land Act as well as “reviewing laws governing land titling at the district level and working closely with district officials to develop guidelines for formulation of by-laws.”8
The African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) is another Gates Foundation supported organisation that straddles the technology and policy arenas. Since 2008, it has received $95 million from the Gates Foundation, which it used to to support the development and distribution of hybrid maize and rice varieties. But it also uses funds from the Gates Foundation to “positively change public perceptions” about GMOs and to lobby for regulatory changes that will increase the adoption of GM products in Africa.9
In a similar vein, the Gates Foundation provides Harvard University University with funds to promote discussion of biotechnology in Africa, Michigan University with a grant to set up a centre to help African policymakers decide on how best to use biotechnology, and Cornell University with funds to create a global “agricultural communications platform” so that people better understand science-based agricultural technologies, with AATF as a main partner.
Gates & AGRA in Malawi: organising the agro-dealers
One of AGRA’s core programmes in Africa is the establishment of “agro-dealer” networks: small, private stockists who sell chemicals and seeds to farmers. In Malawi, AGRA provided a $4.3 million grant for the Malawi Agro-dealer Strengthening Programme (MASP) to supply hybrid maize seeds and chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers.
The main supplier to the agro-dealers in Malawi has been Monsanto, responsible for 67% of all inputs. A Monsanto country manager disclosed that all of Monsanto’s sales of seeds and herbicides in Malawi are made through AGRA’s agro-dealer network.
“Agro-dealers… act as vessels for promoting input suppliers’ products,” says one MASP project document. Another states: “supply companies have expressed their appreciation for field days because MASP trained agro-dealers are helping them promote their products in the very remotest areas of Malawi.” Training the agro-dealers on product knowledge is carried out by the corporate suppliers of the products themselves. In addition, these agro-dealers are increasingly the source of farming advice to small farmers, and an alternative to the government’s agricultural extension service.
A project evaluation report states that 44% of the agro-dealers in the programme were providing extension services. According to the World Bank: “The agro-dealers have… become the most important extension nodes for the rural poor… A new form of private sector driven extension system is emerging in these countries.” The agro-dealer project in Malawi has been implemented by CNFA, a US-based organisation funded by the Gates Foundation, USAID and DFID, and its local affiliate the Rural Market Development Trust (RUMARK), whose trustees include four seed and chemical suppliers: Monsanto, SeedCo, Farmers World and Farmers Association.
Listening to farmers?
“Listening to farmers and addressing their specific needs” is the first guiding principle of the Gates Foundation’s work on agriculture.10 But it is hard to listen to someone when you cannot hear them. Small farmers in Africa do not participate in the spaces where the agendas are set for the agricultural research institutions, NGOs or initiatives, like AGRA, that the Gates Foundation supports. These spaces are dominated by foundation reps, high-level politicians, business executives, and scientists.
Listening to someone, if it has any real significance, should also include the intent to learn. But nowhere in the programmes funded by the Gates Foundation is there any indication that it believes that Africa’s small farmers have anything to teach, that they have anything to contribute to research, development and policy agendas. The continent’s farmers are always cast as the recipients, the consumers of knowledge and technology from others. In practice, the foundation’s first guiding principle appears to be a marketing exercise to sell its technologies to farmers. In that, it looks, not surprisingly, a lot like Microsoft. … Full article with tables and notes
Argentine Government Suspends Procter & Gamble Operations
teleSUR | November 3, 2014
Argentine authorities this Sunday accused Procter & Gamble of tax fraud and suspended its operations in the country.
The government of the South American country suspended domestic operations for the transnational company Procter & Gamble for fiscal fraud and capital flight in import operations from Brazil for US$138 million that were being billed through a Swiss subsidiary.
The Argentina Tax Bureau (AFIP) stated that the alleged operations allowed for currency to leave the country and to reduce its tax payments.
“Our main goal is for P&G to return the dollars taken out of the country to the central bank and to pay customs penalties and the income tax that was evaded by manipulating transfer prices,” Ricardo Echegaray, the chief tax collector said in the statement.
Procter & Gamble has been conducting business in Argentina since 1991 and currently manages three manufacturing plants and two distribution centers.
Meanwhile, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has been enhancing efforts to fight against tax evasion and capital flight to boost tax collections.
Last week, Argentina was among 51 countries to sign an agreement to automatically share tax information as part of an OECD and G20 initiative to tackle tax evasion.
Argentina made up the group of 48 nations who pledged to launch their first information exchanges by September 2017, with the three remaining countries on the list expected to follow in 2018.
Canadian police attack anti-austerity rally in Montreal
Press TV – October 31, 2014
Police have attacked thousands of demonstrators protesting against government spending cuts in the Canadian province of Quebec.
The anti-austerity protesters gathered outside the office of Quebec’s Premier Philippe Couillard in Montreal on Friday to condemn the local government’s plan to cut $3 billion from the province’s budget.
The Canadian police used force to disperse the anti-austerity protesters, saying the demonstration, which was dubbed “Austerity: A Horror story”, was unauthorized.
The demonstration, which started at 11 a.m. and ended at around 3 p.m. local time, was organized by a coalition of student unions, including Quebec House of Labour (Centrale des syndicats du Quebec), independent teachers’ federation, as well as Quebec Solidaire, a provincial political party.
“On the one hand, they’re very clear in their intention to cut. On the other hand they’re very clear in their intention not to get any money from people who actually have money,” said Joel Pedneault, a spokesperson for the coalition.
Pedneault further stated, “The orientation behind that is they just want to cut social spending. It’s an orientation against social spending and against our social programs which we fought so hard for in Quebec.”
Several demonstrators were arrested in the crackdown. The demonstration also caused heavy traffic in the area.
Argentina warns US against slandering Buenos Aires over debts
Press TV – November 1, 2014
Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner has warned the United States against the serious consequences of what she called US officials’ slandering Buenos Aires over its debts.
In a harsh five-page letter on Friday, the Argentina president criticized US President Barack Obama’s choice of hire for a high-level advisory position in his administration.
“Could this be a case of namesakes?” Fernandez asks her American counterpart, referring to Nancy Soderberg, a politician who Obama appointed as head of a board at the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), while also holding co-chair position at the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), the most prominent well-funded lobby group in opposition to Argentina’s debt refinancing efforts.
According to the letter, the ATFA, which has spent millions of dollars lobbying against Argentina, is “an entity specifically created to attack and slander the Argentine Republic and its President.”
The Argentina president said it is a conflict of interest for Soderberg to give sound advice to the president and other US officials because Soderberg’s organization has received payments from one of the vulture funds.
“If confirmed by you, [this] would have grave implications for relations between our two countries,” Kirchner wrote in her letter.
“As you are certainly aware, the functions of the PIDB encompass sensitive issues of national security and include giving advice to the president and to other US executive branch officials,” she added.
Argentina is currently contesting its disputed debts in US courts.
Will the EU and IDB Fund Human Rights-Free Zones in Honduras?
By Dan Beeton | CEPR | October 31, 2014
Karen Spring of the Honduran Solidarity Network writes that in a recent meeting
… Juan Orlando Hernández (President of Honduras), Daniel Ortega (President of Nicaragua), and Salvador Sánchez Cerén (President of El Salvador) defined their nation’s [sic] interests in projects that would develop the [shared area of the Gulf of Fonseca] and came to an agreement on investments in the following sectors: Infrastructure, tourism, agroindustry, and renewable energy.
The meeting declaration mentions, among other projects
… the “implementation of a Employment and Economic Development Zone (ZEDE) [known as a Model City] that includes a logistics park.” The idea is to convert the Gulf into a “Free Trade and Sustainable Development Zone.”
Radio Progreso has noted that the Honduran government is courting investment for the projects from “the European Union [and] the Inter-American Development Bank and is seeking investors in Panama and the United States.”
The ZEDEs, or “model cities,” are areas in which large portions of the Honduran constitution will not apply, including various sections that apply to fundamental and internationally-recognized human rights.
A National Lawyers Guild (NLG) delegation recently traveled to Honduras to investigate the legal implications of the proposed ZEDEs. In a report released in September, the NLG described how few articles of the constitution residents of the ZEDEs would actually enjoy:
Chapter I, Article 1 of the ZEDE law states that Articles 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 19 of the Constitution are fully applicable. These provisions define the territorial limits of Honduras, obligate Honduras to international treaties and forbid the ratification of treaties that damage Honduras’ territorial integrity or sovereignty. The remaining sections of the Honduran Constitution, a document of 379 articles, will have only the effect that they are given by an agreement between the Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices (CABP), the independent governing board of the ZEDEs and the corporate promoters seeking to develop the land. [Emphasis added.]
Many fundamental rights of Honduran citizens who live within the borders of ZEDEs are not protected under the new ZEDE law. These rights include: the right to Habeas Corpus or Amparo 20 , Article 183; the inviolability of a right to life, 65; guarantees of human dignity and bodily integrity, 68; the guarantee against the extraction of forced labor, 69; freedom of expression, 72; protections for a free press, 73; freedom of religion, 77; guarantees of assembly and association, 78, 79, and 80; freedom of movement, 81; the right to a defense, to court access, and to counsel for indigents, 82 and 83; and freedom from non-legal detainment, 84 and 85.
Who is this CABP who will govern the ZEDEs and determine which basic human rights will be granted to their residents?
The 21-member CABP, which was announced in February 2014, includes nine US citizens, three Europeans and only four Hondurans. The CABP is dominated by neoliberal and libertarian activists, several with close connections to former President Ronald Reagan [including Grover Norquist and Mark Klugmann].
Ironically, the ZEDEs are being promoted by some libertarian intellectuals and “activists” as perhaps “the freest cities in the world” despite the fact that the zones will shred another fundamental right, and one usually considered sacred to libertarians: property rights. The NLG explains:
A further particularly troubling aspect of the ZEDE law relates to the provisions that allow for the placement of ZEDEs in areas of “low population density,” and in municipalities in the departments adjoining the Gulf of Fonseca and the Caribbean Sea, without prior consultation with the affected communities.
As an example, the report cites the historic Garifuna community of Rio Negro at Trujillo in Colón, which was disrupted by shady land deals ahead of foreign investment. “ZEDEs have created an increased the fear of such incidents in the future,” the NLG states.
Further down, the report elaborates that “ZEDEs do not present Hondurans with authentic choice because they can be imposed on unwilling communities without any referendum,” and that “If the Honduran National Statistics Institute declares the area to have a lower than average population density for a rural area, Congress may impose a ZEDE on any existing communities in that area without even the basic protection of a referendum.”
The NLG notes that “These provisions … violate international law.”
As both the NLG report and Radio Progreso describe, communities in Zacate Grande and Amapala are among those threatened with losing property to ZEDEs that might be “imposed” on them. As attorney Lauren Carasik, one of the authors of the NLG report, wrote in Foreign Affairs in August, “If Zacate Grande is subsumed into the first ZEDE, the island’s 5,000 inhabitants will lose the right to help determine what happens to its land or its resources.”
This is why, as Spring reported,
Last week on October 23, communities and individuals from all over Southern Honduras (El Transito, Nacaome, Amapala, Zacate Grande, Tegucigalpa, etc) crossed the beautiful Gulf of Fonseca – from Coyolito to Amapala – to participate in a march against the ZEDE project proposed for the area. While some participants handed out copies of the ZEDE law, over 500 people marched from the Amapala dock to the municipality office.
Amapala and neighboring communities are being sidelined from the decision-making process that could lead to ZEDEs in their region of Southern Honduras. Radio Progreso reports that while the Korea International Cooperation Agency is funding a feasibility study for the Gulf of Fonseca region, the study has not been presented to the mayors of the relevant municipalities, Alianza, Nacaome and Amapala en Valle. Residents of the areas being considered for ZEDEs are being told very little. NLG investigators explain that
Virtually everyone in the Gulf of Fonseca region who spoke with the delegation voiced concerns about the government’s unwillingness to explain the effects that ZEDEs will have on existing communities within their borders.
…despite the ZEDEs’ potential to nullify existing labor contracts and labor laws in their territory, members of the union of workers at the port that operates in the Gulf of Fonseca have been told nothing. They fear that the arrival of a ZEDE will spell the end of their jobs when a proposed port at Amapala replaces their livelihood.
The Gulf is just one of 14 “potential zones” the Honduran government is considering.
As Radio Progreso notes, the Liberty and Refundation (LIBRE) party is hoping to see the repeal of the constitutional amendment and the organic law facilitating establishment of the ZEDEs. Instead, LIBRE is proposing forms of investment that don’t involve “the surrender of national sovereignty and territory.”
Corporate Destruction of Free Markets Rules Us
By Ralph Nader | October 30, 2014
The ruling dogma of our political economy is corporatism. Corporatism claims to draw legitimacy from the free market theory that all vendors who do not meet market demands will go under. Corporatism uses this illusion to exert power over all aspects of our political economy.
Free markets, corporatists believe, are the best mechanism to allocate resources for the exchange of goods and services. They believe markets free of regulation, taxation or competition from government enterprises produce the best results. Their favorite metaphor is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people by the exertions of many willing sellers and many willing buyers (Adam Smith, they neglected to add, favored public works, public education and social safety nets like decent wages and public welfare as needed.)
Many things intrude on free market theories including military expenditures, wars, taxation, public infrastructure, health and safety regulation and governments’ emergency duties. What financier George Soros has called “market fundamentalism,” is opposed to any interference with free markets. Yet, corporatism makes massive exceptions that rig markets and tilt the seller-buyer balance heavily in favor of the former who become bigger and bigger global corporations.
Market critics call this hypocrisy. Corporations push for larger military budgets, which have concentrated power in ever fewer military contractors. What are less recognized and more part of the culture of acceptance are the other interferences with free markets, which corporate power has entrenched so deeply that they are rarely part of any political or election-time debate.
Let this point be made in the form of questions rarely asked and therefore rarely answered.
Can there be a free market without freedom of contract? Corporatism has stripped consumers of freedom of contract with fine-print standard-form contracts that become more dictatorial every decade. They now often take away consumers rights to go to court for their grievances via compulsory arbitration clauses. They stipulate that the vendors can change the contract anyway they want – called unilateral modification – which takes away the last vestiges of consumer bargaining power. An example is the unilateral changes in what you have to pay in penalties, late fees or any hundreds of fees hidden in the fine print. And you can’t shop around because companies don’t compete over the fine print. (See faircontracts.org.)
Can there be a free market if workers cannot join together to bargain with large employers whose investors have expanding freedom to form companies, holding companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures and partnerships to advance their bargaining power? Moreover, in comparison with the freedom of investors, workers are besieged with union-busting intimidations, lockouts and a system of corporate-driven labor laws that present far more obstacles to go through than is the case with the labor laws of other Western nations.
Can there be a free market without strong and comprehensive anti-monopoly, anti-cartel and other laws against the myriad of anti-competitive practices that Adam Smith alluded to back in 1776 when he warned of the motives when businessmen gather together?
Today, the antitrust laws are weak, dated and little enforced with puny budgets.
For example, thousands of joint ventures between direct competitors are being formed without concern of the moribund antitrust police. There is globalization of businesses without globalization of law enforcement. Big companies can leverage the differences between nations in a race to the bottom to unfairly gain market power against buyers, workers and small businesses.
Can there be a free market without a free market of retaining lawyers to pursue wrongful injuries and fraud by both direct negotiation with the perpetrators or resorting to open, public courts? In our country, such private disputes are not socialized by government. They are given over to a market system of legal and other supplementary services. Yet corporatism strives strongly to block or limit, through captive legislators, access to the courts or tie the hands of judges and juries, the only people who see, hear and evaluate the evidence in each case.
Can there be a free market when corporatists produce crony capitalism or torrents of corporate welfare tax escapes, subsidies, handouts and bailouts that rig markets against other smaller businesses that are playing by the rules of the market?
Can there be a free market when corporate-managed trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO), subordinate civic efforts to secure better labor, environmental and consumer treatments to the supremacy of commercial trade? (Seehttp://www.citizen.org/trade/.)
Finally, can there be a free market when the banks fund and control the powerful, secretive Federal Reserve that tightly regulates interest rates and can buy trillions of dollars in bonds (aka quantitative easing – QE) to juice the stock markets and the banks, while tens of millions of savers receive less than half of one percent in interest on their savings? Libertarians, to their credit, have noted this abuse by this corporate government more clearly than have many liberals.
There are other corporate controls against the free market, such as politically extending already lengthy patent monopolies to ward off competition by, for instance, generic drug producers.
Suffice it to say that the American people have enough evidence to abandon the ideological hypocrisy that corporatism uses to control them.
Corporatism, in reality, is the corporate state – a tyranny, greased by big money in elections – never envisioned by the framers of our Constitution when they started its preamble with “We the People.”
Wake up call, anyone? (See citizen.org for more information.)
US military spending hits 5 year high
Press TV – October 31, 2014
US military spending has dramatically surged, reaching its fastest rate in the past five years despite the planned withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.
According to a new report by the US Commerce Department on Thursday, the military spending for the third-quarter of this year has increased by 16 percent.
Experts believe while the surge in the military spending could be attributed to several causes, the military action in the Middle East against the ISIL terrorist group is a major contributing factor.
The anti-ISIL operations have forced the Pentagon to spend more money on missiles and ammunition and support a larger military presence there.
According to figures released by the Defense Department, the new military actions in Syria and parts of Iraq will cost roughly 10 million dollars a day.
There are also speculations that the Obama administration has increased the military spending to inflate the figures of economic growth ahead of the November elections.
The projected figure on US economic growth for the third quarter is 3.5 percent, more than the predicted 3 percent with military spending being mentioned as the cause.
The American Resistance to Israel
By Paul Larudee | Dissident Voice | October 29, 2014
The movement to prevent Israeli cargo ships from being unloaded or loaded is potentially one of the greatest challenges that Israel faces from ordinary citizens around the world. Amazingly, it doesn’t even require huge numbers or even very much unity of organization, only of purpose.
The August, 2014 picket of the Zim Piraeus in Oakland, California, is a case in point. It began with a massive demonstration of thousands that responded to a call from the Block the Boat coalition to picket the port on August 16 and 17. During that time, the ship chose to remain in a stationary position more than 100 miles away. The organizers then declared victory on the basis that the ship had been delayed more than 24 hours, and the ship came into port.
For some of the picketers, however, this was not enough. They chose to continue the picket after the ship had docked and was ready to be worked. This required maintaining the picket line on a sustained basis and eliciting the cooperation of the workers in not crossing the line. Because of these efforts, there was no one to work the ship for another three days.
Finally, the employer, Ports America, tried to trick both the picketers and the workers by reassigning workers from another ship (an illegal practice). This was only partly successful, and the ship left on August 20 for Russia with most of its Oakland-bound cargo still on board and without taking on any of the cargo that it was to pick up.
One of the volunteers did follow-up research, even calling Zim’s clients. What she discovered was that the extra cargo on board created problems for the loading operations in Russia and had to be off loaded without a clear picture of when it would reach Oakland. At least two of the clients also decided to stop using Zim because of uncertain delivery. The cost of delays, fuel, berthing fees and additional transport must have been staggering.
The following month brought even worse news to Zim. This time, a group calling itself the Stop Zim Action Committee succeeded in completely blocking the Zim Shanghai from unloading or loading any cargo at all in the port of Oakland. After trying for only 24 hours, it left for Los Angeles, where it had apparently made alternate arrangements for the cargo to be offloaded and transported to Oakland by other carriers (possibly by truck). Again, the result was extra cost and delay.
Unfortunately for Zim, Los Angeles and other cities decided to follow the Oakland example. On August 26, Block the Boat – LA held its first protest against the Zim Haifa. Then, on October 18, the Zim Savannah remained at anchor for two days while picketers stayed at the port, calling on workers not to work the ship. In the end the workers agreed to cross the picket lines with police herding the protesters away, and the ship came in.
Protests and pickets were also held against Zim ships in Seattle/Tacoma, Washington and Tampa, Florida, but officials claimed that there were no delays. In Vancouver, Canada, an informational picket was held in order to initiate a dialog with the workers.
Indeed, workers were the key to the degree of success or failure at each port. Oakland has an activist union tradition with a keen socio-political conscience. In 1984 ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) Local 10 refused to unload a South African ship for eleven days, and in 2010 it refused to cross 24 hours of picket lines set up to block another Zim ship from unloading. That tradition may be less strong in other ports, but it argues for a partnership that may empower both labor and activist communities in ways that we have not seen in decades.
But what about other countries? Palestinians and others were quite frankly astonished that the first successful denial of service to an Israeli ship would happen in a U.S. city, to say nothing of demonstrations in at least five different North American ports. The American resistance surprised everyone. Why, then, do we not see similar actions in other parts of the world?
Part of the reason is that Zim doesn’t operate everywhere. It has no ports of call on the west coast of South America, for example, or in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, its ships sail to Barcelona, whose dockworkers union sent a message of congratulations and solidarity to the Oakland workers. Why are no Zim ships being turned away in Barcelona?
South Africa also seems a likely location. COSATU, the giant South African union, has repeatedly declared its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Why is it not participating? What about Cuba and Venezuela? Other possibilities might be Malaysia, Brazil, Greece and even Liverpool in the UK.
Until now, Zim and the Israeli government have been very cool about the potential impact of a movement that ought to terrify them to the depths of their souls. It takes only a small amount of disruption to cause shipping customers to take their business elsewhere. As noted, this has already happened, starting with the first picket in August. We can only guess at the effect when a second Zim ship had to leave Oakland untouched.
In October, a third Zim ship, the Zim Beijing, was scheduled to arrive in Oakland, and another picket was planned. This time, however, the ship kept delaying its arrival date until it was de-listed from the port arrival schedule. There are no Zim ships currently scheduled to arrive in Oakland for the foreseeable future, although Zim bravely refuses to declare this as a policy.
Zim and the Israeli government dare not reveal how vulnerable they are. It will take only a few major ports around the world to sound the death knell for an Israeli shipping giant that is the tenth largest cargo carrier in the world (more than $3 billion in annual revenue). The loss of a few million in Oakland may not seem like much to them, but uncertain and unreliable delivery can put them at a huge disadvantage – perhaps even out of business. This is why we saw no counter-demonstrators at the port (actually one): they have to pretend it means nothing to them.
On the other hand, the Oakland victory cannot be sustained alone. If it does not spread to other countries, it will wither. Israel knows that, but all their power and influence may be insufficient to prevent the movement from happening. We have been looking for a way to strike a blow for Palestine. Now is our chance.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
‘Russian distress call’ prompting Swedish sub hunt never existed – sigint source
RT | October 28, 2014
There was no Russian distress call. That’s the opinion of a Swedish signal intelligence (SIGINT) source after a massive $2.8mn military and media sub-hunt consumed the country for a week.
Reports of a Russian distress signal and a grainy-picture were enough to deploy the navy while the media widely concluded the vessel had to be a Russian submarine spooking Stockholm.
The proof of this was an alleged comms intercept, at distress call frequency, between the supposed sub and Kaliningrad base.
But the Dagens Nyheter daily cited a Swedish Intel source who confessed there was no distress call.
Citing freedom of information requests and its own sources, the paper said Sweden’s signal intelligence agency knows nothing about the alleged distress calls, and registered no spikes in communication with Kaliningrad at the time.
“I’d be glad to read about that emergency call myself. But it didn’t happen, this information is incorrect,” the newspaper cites a source as saying.
The navy operation, which was dubbed ‘Hunt for the Reds in October’ by the Swedish media, was reminiscent of the Cold War era, when Swedish warships patrolled the Baltic Sea looking for Soviet submarines.
During the search, many recalled the infamous 1981 incident, when a Russian submarine got stranded near Karlskrona, a major naval base. The incident, which caused serious diplomatic waves, was dubbed ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’ because the S-363 sub in question belonged to the Whiskey-class.
Russia has denied sending any subs to spy on Sweden, or having one suffer an emergency in Sweden’s waters. Sources in the Russian military suggested that the fuss was caused by a sighting of a Norwegian U-boat participating in a joint NATO drill in the Baltics.
The Swedish Navy’s efforts to find the elusive foreign activity cost the country 2.2 million euros ($2.8 million), it reported last week. The operation was the biggest in decades in a nation, where military spending accounts for about 1 percent of GDP and has seen steady cuts during the years of the European economic slowdown.
According to the latest draft budget published in the wake of the naval operation, Sweden plans to increase military spending for 2015 by $93.7 million.
READ: Sweden ready to use force to surface foreign sub as search continues
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The run up to the Iran war exposes inner workings of the US/Israeli deep state
By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | June 9, 2026
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
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