Have You Been Denied Entry?
June 7, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Adam Shapiro, Arab American Institute, Huwaida Arraf, Israel, Palestine, United States | Leave a comment
Poetry for Palestine | Poetic Injustice with Remi Kanazi
breakingtheset · May 31, 2013
Abby Martin looks back at the third anniversary of the Gaza flotilla siege, and presents Remi Kanazi, Palestinian-American poet and activist, who uses his educational art to perform the poems ‘Normalize This’ and ‘Refuse’. Abby speaks to Remi about the Palestinian plight, grassroots activism, and his artistic inspirations.
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June 7, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Activism, Gaza flotilla raid, Israel, Palestinian American, Remi Kanazi, United States | Leave a comment
The Village Under The Forest
Documentary Trailer
May 10, 2013
Unfolding as a personal meditation from the Jewish Diaspora, The Village Under The Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called South Africa Forest.
Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure and persistence of memory and dares to imagine a future in which dignity, acknowledgement and co-habitation become shared possibilities in Israel/Palestine.
The Village Under The Forest is co-directed by Emmy-winner Mark Kaplan and scholar and poet Heidi Grunebaum. Captivating music by Gilad Atzmon is featured.
June 7, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Emmy Award, Gilad Atzmon, Lubya, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
Top-secret court order reveals NSA’s daily data collection on millions of Americans
RT | June 06, 2013
The US National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of unwitting individuals via a secret court order issued in April obtained by The Guardian newspaper, which has posted it online.
Unlike warrants that have been issued to collect the information of suspects targeted by intelligence agencies, the newly disclosed top secret order requires Verizon, one of the largest telecom agencies in the US, to provide both the FBI and the NSA information on all telephone calls made through its systems, both domestically and to foreign countries.
According to a copy of the order, Verizon is required to disclose the numbers of both parties during a call, as well as location, call duration, and other unique data on an “ongoing, daily basis.” Meaning that, regardless of whether an individual is suspected of or linked to any crime, the data of all Verizon customers is currently being delivered in bulk to the intelligence agency.
As to the authority claimed by the government via this order, that is specifically cited to fall under the “business records” provision of the PATRIOT Act of 2001, which was granted a four-year extension by President Obama in May of 2011.
It remains unclear as to whether the order, which spans a three-month period, represents a single instance, or is indicative of recurring cases of Verizon and other telephony providers being ordered to disclose all their clients’ call records.
The order itself, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, prohibits Verizon from alerting its customers of the FBI’s request for their records.
According to The Guardian, its reporters approached Verizon, the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment ahead of its story, though all declined.
Though the agencies have yet to respond to the publication of the secret order, justification for the thus far unprecedented, warrantless request made to Verizon in April would fall under the interpretation of such “business records.” The latter applies to a wide-ranging amount of electronic “metadata,” though not the actual content of texts and voice calls.
The order seems likely to be associated with the NSA’s longstanding collection program over telephone, Internet and email data, which was secretly authorized by former president Bush in 2001, though not disclosed publicly until a 2006 USA Today report. That particular authorization applied to multiple carriers: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, and was intended to allow US intelligence services “to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.”
Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the libertarian Cato Institute who spoke to The Guardian believes that the newly disclosed court order undermines the legal definition of reasonable suspicion.
“We’ve certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretense of constraint or particularized suspicion,” said Sanchez.
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June 6, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, National Security Agency, United States, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Verizon, Verizon Communications | Leave a comment
How the Pentagon Removes Entire Peoples
By David Swanson | Dissident Voice | June 5th, 2013
If we think at all about our government’s military depopulating territory that it desires, we usually think of the long-ago replacement of native Americans with new settlements during the continental expansion of the United States westward.
Here in Virginia some of us are vaguely aware that back during the Great Depression poor people were evicted from their homes and their land where national parks were desired. But we distract and comfort ourselves with the notion that such matters are deep in the past.
Occasionally we notice that environmental disasters are displacing people, often poor people or marginalized people, from their homes. But these incidents seem like collateral damage rather than intentional ethnic cleansing.
If we’re aware of the 1,000 or so U.S. military bases standing today in some 175 foreign countries, we must realize that the land they occupy could serve some other purpose in the lives of those countries’ peoples. But surely those countries’ peoples are still there, still living — if perhaps slightly inconvenienced — in their countries.
Yet the fact is that the U.S. military has displaced and continues to displace for the construction of its bases the entire populations of villages and islands, in blatant violation of international law, basic human decency, and principles we like to tell each other we stand for. The United States also continues to deny displaced populations the right to return to their homelands.
At issue here are not the bombings or burnings of entire villages, which of course the United States engages in during its wars and its non-wars. Nor are we dealing here with the millions of refugees created by wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan or by drone wars like the one in Pakistan. Rather, the following are cases of the intentional displacement of particular populations moved out of the way of base construction and left alive to struggle as refugees in exile.
In the Philippines, the United States built bases on land belonging to the indigenous Aetas people, who “ended up combing military trash to survive.”
During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated.
In 1942, the Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders.
President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.
On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and — in 2003 — to stop bombing the island.
On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.
The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.
Beginning during World War II and continuing through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia — where land and money were promised but not delivered.
In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.
DIEGO GARCIA
The story of Diego Garcia is superbly told in David Vine’s book, Island of Shame. Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants from this island in the Indian Ocean. On orders from, and with funding from, the United States, the British forced the people onto overcrowded ships and dumped them on docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles — foreign and distant and unwelcoming lands for this indigenous population that had been part of Diego Garcia for centuries. U.S. documents described this as “sweeping” and “sanitizing” the island.
Those responsible for the displacement of the people of Diego Garcia knew that what they were doing was widely considered barbaric and illegal. They devised ways of creating “logical cover” for the process. They persuaded the ever-compliant Washington Post to bury the story. The Queen of England and her Privy Council bypassed Parliament. The Pentagon lied to Congress and hid its payments to the British from Congress. The planners even lied to themselves. Having originally envisioned a communications station, they concluded that advances in technology had rendered that unhelpful. So, Navy schemers decided that a fueling station for ships might offer a “suitable justification” for building a base that was actually a purposeless end in itself. But the Pentagon ended up telling a reluctant Congress that the base would be a communications station, because that was something Congress would approve.
Those plotting the eviction of the island’s people created the fiction that the inhabitants were migrant workers not actually native to Diego Garcia. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent Under Secretary in the Foreign Office of the U.K., dismissed the island’s people as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.” This stood in contrast to the respect and protection given to some other islands not chosen for bases because of the rare plants, birds, and animals resident there.
On January 24, 1971, remaining inhabitants of Diego Garcia were told they’d need to leave or be shot. They were allowed to take a small box of possessions, but had to leave their homes, their gardens, their animals, their land, and their society. Their dogs were rounded up and killed in a gas chamber as they watched, waiting themselves to be loaded on ships for departure. Arriving in Mauritius, they were housed in a prison. Their fate has not much improved in the decades since. David Vine describes them as very forgiving, wishing nothing but to be permitted to return.
Diego Garcia is purely a military base and in some ways more of a lawless zone than Guantanamo. The United States has kept and may be keeping prisoners there, on the island or on ships in the harbor. The Red Cross and journalists do not visit. The United States has de facto control of Diego Garcia, while the U.K. has technical ownership. The Pentagon is not interested in allowing the island’s people to return.
JEJU ISLAND
The South Korean government, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, is in the process of devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island with a massive military base. This story is best told in Regis Tremblay’s new film The Ghosts of Jeju. This is not a tragedy from the past to be remedied but a tragedy of this moment to be halted in its tracks. You can help. Tremblay’s film examines the history of decades of abuse of the people of Jeju, and the resistance movement that is currently inspiring other anti-base efforts around the globe. The film begins somber and ends joyful. I highly recommend creating an event around a screening of it.
PALESTINE
We should not neglect to note here that the United States funds and arms and protects the Israeli government’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians and denial of the right to return.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner.
Related articles
- The U.S. Base on Diego Garcia: An Overlooked Atrocity (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Shame, Lies and Secrecy on Diego Garcia (alethonews.wordpress.com)
June 6, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | British Indian Ocean Territory, Diego Garcia, Enewetak Atoll, Human rights, United States, World War II | Leave a comment
Over 8,000 Mau Mau victims seek compensation from Britain
Press TV – June 5, 2013
More than 8,000 Kenyans, severely mistreated under British colonial rule during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, are seeking compensation from the UK.
According to the reports, thousands of names have been submitted to the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), seeking multi-million pound compensation from the British government.
“The Law Society of Kenya has received lists of ex-Mau Mau fighters seeking compensation running into billions of shillings from the British government,” LSK chief Apollo Mboya said in a statement.
More names are expected to be submitted from the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the statement added.
There are also reports that Britain agreed on a compensation settlement totaling £14 million. Britain’s Foreign Office, however, has refused to comment on the issue.
At least 10,000 people died during the 1952-1960 Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule, with some sources giving far higher estimates.
The British government has admitted to British forces’ torturing of detainees at the time following disclosure of a vast archive of colonial-era documents which the Foreign Office had kept secret for decades.
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June 5, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Africa, British Empire, British government, Human rights, Kenya, Law Society of Kenya, LSK, Mau Mau, Mau Mau Uprising | Leave a comment
The U.S. Base on Diego Garcia: An Overlooked Atrocity
By Sheldon Richman | FFF |June 4, 2013
The largest criminal organizations in the world are governments. The bigger they are, the more capable of perpetrating atrocities. Not only do they obtain great wealth through compulsion (taxation), they also have an ideological mystique that permits them uniquely to get away with murder, torture, and theft.
The U.S. government is no exception. This is demonstrated by, among many other things, the atomic bombings of noncombatants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World II. But let’s examine a lesser-known case, one we might know nothing about were it not for David Vine, who teaches anthropology at the American University. Vine has written a book, Island of Shame, and a follow-up article at the Huffington Post about the savage treatment of the people of Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Americans may know Diego Garcia as a U.S. military base. It “helped launch the Afghan and Iraq wars and was part of the CIA’s secret ‘rendition’ program for captured terrorist suspects,” Vine writes.
What’s not widely known is that the island was once home to a couple of thousand people who were forcibly removed to make room for the U.S. military. The victims’ 40-year effort to return or to be compensated for their losses have been futile.
Great Britain claims the island. According to Vine, African slaves, indentured Indians, and their descendants had been living on the Chagos islands for about 200 years. “In 1965, after years of secret negotiations, Britain agreed to separate Chagos from colonial Mauritius (contravening UN decolonization rules) to create a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. In a secret 1966 agreement, Britain gave U.S. officials base rights on Diego Garcia.”
But it did more than that. Britain “agreed to take those ‘administrative measures’ necessary to remove the nearly 2,000 Chagossians in exchange for $14 million in secret U.S. payments.”
The British kept their end of the bargain. In 1968, Britain began blocking the return of Chagossians who left to obtain medical treatment or to go on vacation, “marooning them often without family members and almost all their possessions,” Vine writes.
British officials soon began restricting food and medical supplies to Chagos. Anglo-American officials designed a public relations plan aimed at, as one British bureaucrat said, “maintaining the fiction” that Chagossians were migrant laborers rather than a people with roots in Chagos for five generations or more. Another British official called them “Tarzans” and “Man Fridays.”
Then, in 1971, the final order came down, reminiscent of a Russian czar expelling Jews from their village. “The U.S. Navy’s highest-ranking admiral, Elmo Zumwalt, issued … a three-word memo.… ‘Absolutely must go.’”
British agents, with the help of Navy Seabees, quickly rounded up the islanders’ pet dogs, gassing and burning them in sealed cargo sheds. They ordered … the remaining Chagossians onto overcrowded cargo ships. During the deportations, which took place in stages until May 1973, most Chagossians slept in the ship’s hold atop guano — bird crap. Prized horses stayed on deck. By the end of the five-day trip, vomit, urine, and excrement were everywhere. At least one woman miscarried.
Arriving in Mauritius and the Seychelles, Chagossians were literally left on the docks. They were homeless, jobless, and had little money, and they received no resettlement assistance.
Remember, this was happening, not in the 18th or 19th century, but in the late 20th century. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the last of the expulsions.
The personal toll has been great. The Chagossians remain poor, and many suffer from illnesses traced to their dispossession. “Scores more Chagossians have reported deaths from sadness and sagren,” or “profound sorrow,” according to Vine.
Five years ago the Chagossians had some ray of hope when three British courts declared the deportations illegal. But the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom overruled the lower courts. “Last year,” Vine adds, “the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the Chagossians’ final appeal on procedural grounds.…”
“A day after the European court ruling, the Obama administration rejected the demands of an online petition signed by some 30,000 asking the White House to ‘redress wrongs against the Chagossians.’”
The British were adequately looking after the matter, the administration said.
Here is government in all its glory.
Related article
- Shame, Lies and Secrecy on Diego Garcia (alethonews.wordpress.com)
June 5, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Britain, British Indian Ocean Territory, Chagos Archipelago, Chagossians, David Vine, Diego Garcia, European Court of Human Rights, Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, United States | Leave a comment
MODERNISING AFRICAN AGRICULTURE: WHO BENEFITS?
STATEMENT BY CIVIL SOCIETY IN AFRICA | May 15, 2013
African agriculture is in need of support and investment. Many initiatives are flowing from the North, including the G8’s “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa” and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). These initiatives are framed in terms of the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). This gives them a cover of legitimacy.
But what is driving these investments, and who is set to benefit from them?
The current wave of investment emerges on the back of the gathering global crisis with financial, economic, food, energy and ecological dimensions. Africa is seen as underperforming and in control of valuable resources that capital seeks for profitable purposes. The World Bank and others tell us Africa has an abundance of available fertile land, and that Africa’s production structure is inefficient, based as it is on many small farms producing mainly for themselves and their neighbourhoods (i).
Africa is seen as a possible new frontier to make profits, with an eye on land, food and biofuels in particular. The recent investment wave must be understood in the context of consolidation of a global food regime (ii) dominated by large corporations in input supply (seed and agrochemicals) especially, but also increasingly in processing, storage, trading and distribution.
G8 and AGRA: a new wave of colonialism
Opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 and AGRA interventions. Both initiatives are built on the basis of public-private partnerships (PPPs) with the large multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies setting the agenda, and states and institutions (like the G8, World Bank and others) and philanthropic institutions (like AGRA and others) establishing the institutional and infrastructural mechanisms to realise this agenda.
Multinational corporations like Yara, Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill and many others want secure markets for their products in Africa. In the first place, security means protection of their private ownership of knowledge in the form of intellectual property (IP) protection. Across Africa, so-called ‘harmonisation’ of laws and policies are underway to align African laws and systems with the interests of these multinationals.
Harmonisation of trade laws means opening borders across the continent to free trade. But this is a skewed free trade, one that favours the ‘formal sector’ of goods and services that have gone through approval and registration processes. Farmers and other producers of goods and services who cannot afford to enter the official approval system are marginalised and trading of their products is rendered illegal.
Private ownership of knowledge and material resources (for example, seed and genetic materials) means the flow of royalties out of Africa into the hands of multinational corporations. In some countries where laws protecting the interests of corporations are well established – for example in South Africa – multinationals have entirely occupied domestic seed and agrochemical sectors with profits flowing out of the country. The same is happening for agricultural services, trade, manufacturing and even selling of food.
The private companies are not acting on their own. They are using investment-friendly government policies and plans to advance their agenda.
CAADP and regional investment policies: facilitating ‘orderly’ processes of colonialism
There are many well-meaning organisations and individuals who view CAADP as an African-based investment plan. But Africa is not isolated from the world. CAADP emerged at the height of neo-liberalism globally in the early 2000s. African governments were mired in the consequences of decades of structural adjustment that saw the net outflow of financial and other resources from Africa to the rest of the world. The New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) was an initiative by selected African governments to integrate Africa into global flows of capital. The expectation was that profit-generating investment, and creating the conditions for protection of this investment, were Africa’s chance to catch up with the rest.
African governments, desperate for some financial relief, are willing to make whatever changes are necessary to bring capital into their countries. The multinationals are setting the terms: harmonisation, free trade and protection of private IP or no investment. It is therefore of little use calling for CAADP to be placed at the centre of investment plans. CAADP itself is a compromised instrument, calling for the very policies and programmes favoured by the multinationals.
Food security and corporate-driven investment in Africa
Harmonisation, free trade and the creation of institutions and infrastructure to facilitate multinational penetration into Africa are presented as the answer to food insecurity on the continent. Multinational corporations, African states, states outside Africa, philanthropic institutions, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and even some non-government organisations are all part of this agenda. Surely so many organisations and people cannot be wrong?
The logic is that of the Green Revolution: introduce yield- and sales-enhancing technologies and systems, provide credit for producers to access these technologies, and anticipate increasing returns from sales to cover the increasing cost of inputs. Expand access to markets globally and regionally to absorb increased production.
This model can benefit some, as Green Revolutions in Asia and to a lesser extent in Latin America have shown. However, it also has negative social and ecological side effects. Green Revolution technologies benefit relatively few farmers, often at the expense of the majority. These technologies produce concentration of land ownership, increasing economies of scale (production has to be at a large scale to get into and stay in markets), and a declining number of food producing households in a context of limited other livelihood options.
Ecological concerns about Green Revolution technologies are rising to the top of the global agenda, especially loss of biodiversity when commercial hybrids and GM seed dominate (especially maize as a staple crop in Africa, and the introduction of soya as the basis of biofuels and commercial intercropping approaches), soil degradation and water pollution caused by excessive use of manufactured chemicals in synthetic fertilisers, and water shortages caused by wasteful water use in irrigation.
The Green Revolution produces uneven benefits, favouring farmers with financial resources of their own, with access to more land, and with some formal education. The majority of resource poor farmers are excluded from public support for agriculture, with infrastructure and institutional frameworks designed for the minority to benefit.
Currently African food security rests fundamentally on small-scale and localised production. The majority of the African population continue to rely on agriculture as an important, if not the main, source of income and livelihoods. In most sub-Saharan African countries, agriculture is the primary economic activity for between 50% and 90% of the population (iii). Even though there is growing urbanisation, the majority will continue to rely on agriculture for their livelihoods for decades to come. The rural population continues to grow in absolute terms even while the urban population grows as a proportion of the total population.
We know that all of these people will not benefit from these new investments. Seen as more inefficient than those producers who are in a position to adopt the new technologies, many will be forced out of agriculture to become passive consumers. Instead of building the broad base of producers, G8 and AGRA investments, supported by African government policies and resources, will narrow the base of producers.
The practical results of the recent surge in investment in African agriculture expose the empty rhetoric of African food security. Blatant land grabs are well known across the continent. Mega projects such as the ProSavanna project in northern Mozambique are displacing farmers from their lands and imposing large-scale production structures for export. Favourable investment terms (for example tax free zones and laws on repatriation of profits) undermine even the questionable benefits increased foreign exchange brings. Meanwhile actual farmers are separated from the land and the only realistic option for a livelihood. African governments and their investment ‘partners’ enable and implement these projects.
Alternatives
First and foremost, differentiated strategies are required, so that local and informal markets, proven low-input and ecologically sustainable agricultural techniques including intercropping, on-farm compost production, mixed farming systems (livestock, crops and trees), on-farm biofuel production and use, and intermediate processing and storage technologies are recognised and vigorously supported. The emphasis here is on individual and household food security first, with trade arising from surpluses beyond this. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) provides detailed and scientifically sound proposals in this regard.
Open access technologies are an essential principle, especially seed, where all recent technological advances are based on 10,000 years of collective experimentation and sharing. No-one and no corporations should be allowed to privatise the results of ongoing research. Companies can sell their new varieties, but once sold, they re-enter the common pool that anyone should be able to use and improve on at will.
Green Revolution technological development leads to an ever-increasing gap between conception and execution, that is between the knowledge that goes into producing a new seed variety and those who use the seed. An alternative, based on open source technologies, is a far closer working relationship between decentralised technicians and producers to define the research and development agenda (what traits are farmers looking for in specific locations, what crops are priorities for further development etc). Plant breeders are still able to make profits by selling new varieties to those who want to buy fresh seed, especially commercial farmers. But if farmers choose to reuse and adapt seed once they have bought it, that must be their right.
Notes
i World Bank 2009 “Awakening Africa’s sleeping giant: Prospects for commercial agriculture in Africa’s Guinea Savannah zone and beyond”, World Bank Agriculture and Rural Development Unit, Africa Regional Office
ii McMichael, P. 2009 “A food regime genealogy”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36: 1, pp.139-169
iii World Bank, “World Databank”, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx
June 5, 2013 Posted by aletho | Economics, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Green Revolution, Monsanto, Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank | Leave a comment
Bilderberg agenda: Western elites meet to determine the future of Middle East and Africa
RT | June 4, 2013
During the world’s most secretive gathering the Bilderberg Group is set to discuss topics including cyber warfare, US foreign policy, “developments in the Middle East” and “Africa’s challenges” despite the glaring absence of regional representatives.
The Bilderberg Group, long criticized for a lack of transparency, has revealed details of its upcoming meeting. This year 138 politicians, bank bosses, billionaires, chief executives and European royalty have confirmed their attendance to the invitation-only event, set to take place in Watford, England. The list notably includes only 14 women.
The group is comprised largely of individuals from financial and business backgrounds – there will be nearly three dozen CEOs and more than two dozen Chairmen of banks and petroleum giants. Twenty-three financial institutions will be represented at the five-star Grove Hotel near Watford, Hertfordshire, including Goldman Sachs.
As the list was released, critics could not help but point fingers at problems some of the attendees are currently facing in their respective fields.
Special attention has been placed on Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Eric Schmidt, as the two are currently facing unprecedented political pressure over their tax avoidance strategies. Google, for its part, has faced scrutiny amid reports that it paid just £10 million in corporation tax in Britain between 2006 and 2011, despite revenues of £11.9 billion.
Chancellor George Osborne and his Labour shadow Ed Balls, who have been making headlines with their spending and tax offers for the UK, will also rub shoulders with other participants of the Bilderberg Conference.
One of the guests is group chairman of HSBC Holdings plc, which faced a stringent investigation in 2012 for allegedly assisting in the laundering of money from Mexico, Iran and Syria for terrorist networks and drugs cartels.
Among guests there are also the 75th and 70th US Treasury Secretaries, Tim Geithner and Robert Rubin, respectively.
There will be other leading figures such as Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, former US secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henry Kissinger, and David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA.
The list of prestigious names also includes the former Prime Ministers of France and Italy, François Fillon and Mario Monti.
There will also be scholars from some of the world’s most prestigious universities – one from Harvard University, two from Stanford, and one from both Oxford and Princeton.
Starting June 6 for three days, the delegates will be discussing of the record a list of topics of universal importance, determining how the world should proceed.
“The conference has always been a forum for informal, off-the-record discussions about megatrends and the major issues facing the world,” a Bilderberg spokesman said in a press release.
Originally founded in 1954 to foster dialogue between Europe and North America, this year’s topics include an expansive range of issues.
With Europe still trying to find solutions for financial problems and growing unemployment, the elite guests are set to discuss “jobs, entitlement and debt”, “politics of the European Union” and the broadly defined “current affairs”.
Among the 12 “key topics” for this year’s conference are “developments in the Middle East” and “Africa’s challenges.” The inclusion of “Africa’s challenges” is an interesting choice, as the guest list is notably absent of any major (or minor) political or academic figures from that vast continent.
Despite Bilderberg’s traditional exclusion of other areas of the world, six Turkish attendees are slated to be the only Middle Eastern voices at the conference. The inclusion of a large contingent from that country comes at an auspicious time, as political demonstrations continue throughout Turkey in opposition to the ruling AKP party.
The overlapping agendas of political and private sector leaders, as well as current and former political leaders is enough to make even the most conservative of observers start to wonder what may bear fruit as a result of the top-level, off-the-record conference.
As with gatherings of the G-8 and other international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, which tend to draw large, disruptive groups of demonstrators, Bilderberg has prepared a robust security apparatus to keep things running smoothly.
According to various reports by British media, UK taxpayers will have to bear the brunt of the ‘exceptional costs’ to police the meeting, which takes place in that country for the first time since 1998.
June 5, 2013 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Bilderberg Group, Middle East | Leave a comment
Monsanto can’t explain how GMO wheat survived
RT | June 4, 2013
Monsanto claims it has no idea how its herbicide-resistant strain of wheat made its way onto an Oregon field. The global biotech giant based in Missouri says it abandoned research on it in 2004 and is mystified by its emergence nearly a decade later.
Monsanto tested the GMO varieties in 17 US states between 1998 and 2004. Although it also tested the GM wheat in Oregon, the company claims it destroyed all of the material upon the conclusion of the program and that it never grew the wheat strain on the farm where it was found last month.
“The company’s internal assessments suggest that neither seed left in the soil nor wheat pollen flow serve as reasonable explanations behind this reported detection,” the biotech giant said in a news release Friday.
The company claims that even if the wheat seed had been left in the ground, it would not have survived longer than one or two years in the soil. Monsanto also states that its seed varieties could not have possibly traveled across the state, since 99 percent of wheat pollen is deposited within 10 meters of the plant.
“This report is unusual since our program was discontinued nine years ago, and this is the only report after more than 500 million acres (200 million hectare) of wheat have been grown,” the company said in its statement.
Since May 29, the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has conducted a multi-state investigation to determine how the GM wheat reached the Oregon farm.
A local farmer discovered it after dousing his field with Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” pesticide and realizing that some of the wheat plants were resistant to it. He alerted the USDA, which soon determined that the herbicide-resistant wheat crop was the same variety Monsanto tested nearly a decade ago.
The USDA never approved the strain, and environmentalists have expressed deep concern about potential health risks involving the mysterious GM crop. The finding has already had a detrimental impact on US trade: Japanese authorities last week announced that they would suspend imports of US wheat.
Shortly after the announcement, wheat for July delivery fell by 8.25 cents to $6.945 per bushel on the Chicago Board Trade.
And Monsanto’s asserted bewilderment serves as no comfort to those concerned about the presence of unapproved GM crops in the US, particularly foreign importers who fear that the GM variety may have been present in their crop purchases.
A USDA spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday that there are “no indications that there is any GE wheat in commerce.” But if investigators find any more of the unapproved wheat variety growing on US farms, the agriculture industry could take an even harder hit.
Genetically modified wheat has not been approved for commercial growing, and Asian and European buyers have expressed little interest in it, which in large part influenced Monsanto’s decision not to market the GM crop after testing it.
A team of 15 investigators is continuing its probe into the mysterious crop’s emergence – a phenomenon that Monsanto says it cannot explain.
June 5, 2013 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | Genetically modified organism, Genetically modified wheat, Monsanto | Leave a comment
One Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days for the past 13 years
MEMO | June 4, 2013
Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah have revealed that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel’s occupation forces from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013. That’s the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years. The ministry added that the number of children injured by the Israelis since the start of the Second Intifada against Israel’s occupation has now reached 6,000.
“The International Day for the Protection of Children is on June 1,” said a spokesman, “but Palestinian children are still subject to attacks by the Israelis and Jewish settlers on an almost daily basis.”
Noting that 2012 saw an unprecedented rise in the number of children arrested by Israeli forces, the report pointed out that 9,000 Palestinians under 18 years old have been arrested since the end of September 2000. Almost half of the Palestinian population is under 18. Almost two hundred and fifty Palestinian minors are being held in prison by Israel; 47 of them are children under 16 years of age.
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June 4, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
Fred Hiatt, fierce advocate of aggressive war, demands Other Countries obey the law
By Justin Doolittle | Crimethink | 6.03.2013
Sometimes, as an observer of the news, one comes across a particular opinion column that is so brazen, so audacious, that one must stare at the headline for thirty seconds or so, simply to make sure it’s not a hallucination. Such was my experience this morning when I saw that Fred Hiatt wrote a column for The Washington Post titled “Will Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream’ include the rule of law?” Irony is officially dead.
Hiatt, for those who don’t know, is the editorial page editor at the Post, and someone who lives and breathes for war. Not in the sense that he has ever volunteered to go fight in one, of course. That’s for Other People to do. Hiatt prefers to fight the good fight from his comfortable D.C. office. There’s much more money and prestige in doing it that way.
One must stipulate that, while he loves war with all of his heart, Hiatt, like all serious, sophisticated, reasonable Beltway intellectuals, has at times seemed fairly torn on the far more perplexing issue of torture. Whether or not to flagrantly violate domestic and international law and disregard the most basic conceptions of human morality by torturing other people – this always represented a profound moral quandary for the intellectual class. Hiatt did eventually make his thoughts on this matter clear, though, by hiring an absolute lunatic by the name of Marc Thiessen to grace the pages of his newspaper’s prestigious opinion section; Thiessen mostly used his space to explain why torture is so awesome and underrated.
We do know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Fred Hiatt does not believe in the rule of law. In enthusiastically supporting the attack on Iraq, which, as a war of aggression, constituted the “supreme international crime,” Hiatt forever forfeited any right to even talk about the rule of law. One doesn’t get to cheer-lead, fanatically, for the most colossal international crime in a generation, and maintain any credibility on “the rule of law.” This cannot really be debated, unless one also wants to argue in favor of consulting Bill Clinton on marital fidelity, or O.J. Simpson on domestic tranquility.
Hiatt, though, is evidently very concerned about the future of the rule of law. Not in the United States, naturally, but, rather, in China. In his new column, Hiatt worries that China, under Xi, might continue its heinous “bullying” in the international arena and its regular flouting of international norms. Fred Hiatt just hates when countries do this. He encourages President Obama – the man who refuses to investigate and prosecute the torturers and killers of the Bush administration on the astonishing grounds that it’s preferable to Look Forward, Not Backward – to lecture the Chinese on appreciating the rule of law and respecting human rights. Hiatt sternly warns the Chinese that they risk losing the “trust” of the United States if they don’t cease their unconscionable imprisonment of peaceful activists and their disregard for due process. He writes this as peaceful American activist Bradley Manning, after sitting in a cage for more than two years, is now going on trial for the offense of telling people about his country’s war crimes, and as more than 100 prisoners of the United States continue to wage a hunger streak to protest their lack of due process. Hiatt has apparently, through some sort of mental process, airbrushed both stories from his brain, despite the fact that both are currently receiving an astounding amount of international attention.
This column represents one of the most exquisite examples of Orwell’s “doublethink” in recent memory.
Related articles
- WaPo Really Thinks U.S. Should Be World’s Policeman (lobelog.com)
- incidentally, all these people (hiatt, diehl, rubin, and lobe himself) are jewish (niqnaq.wordpress.com)
June 4, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Fred Hiatt, Marc Thiessen, United States, Washington Post | Leave a comment
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