Organic Consumers Assocition / ETC Group

New report warns of corporate concentration, commodification of nature; highlights global resistance grounded in "Food Sovereignty".

ETC Group today releases a 48-page report, "Who Owns Nature?" on corporate concentration in commercial food, farming, health and the strategic push to commodify the planet's remaining natural resources.

In a world where market research is becoming increasingly proprietary and pricey, ETC Group's report names names, discloses market share and provides top 10 industry rankings up and down the corporate food chain. Not all the corporations identified in ETC Group's new report are household names, but collectively they control a staggering share of the commercial products found on industrial farms, in our refrigerators and medicine cabinets. An international advocacy organization based in Canada, ETC Group has been monitoring corporate power in the industrial life sciences for the past 30 years.

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Mike Whitney

Without any public debate or authorization from Congress, the Federal Reserve has embarked on the most expensive and radical financial intervention in history.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is trying to avert another Great Depression by flooding the financial system with liquidity in an attempt to mitigate the effects of tightening credit and a sharp decline in consumer spending. So far, the Fed has committed over $7 trillion, which is being used to backstop every part of the financial system, including money markets, bank deposits, commercial paper (CP) investment banks, insurance companies, and hundreds of billions of structured debt-instruments (MBS, CDOs). America’s free market system is now entirely dependent on state resources.

With interest rates at or below 1 percent, Bernanke is “zero bound,” which means that he will be unable to stimulate the economy through traditional monetary policy. That leaves the Fed with few choices to slow the debt-deflation which has already carved $7 trillion from US stock indexes and another $6 trillion from home equity. Bernanke will have to use unconventional means to stabilize the system and maintain economic activity in the broader economy.

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Gaither Stewart

(Paris) It is counterproductive to attempt to debunk Parisian cafés and café culture. Whether revisionists and debunkers approve or not, the Café de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard Saint Germain is a living institution. Since its founding in 1870 it has existed as a café and second home for writers, artists and intellectuals of the likes of Apollinaire, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and frequented by Hemingway and even Truman Capote. In the 1920s and 30s, the Flore was the meeting place of the Right, after World War II of the Left. Forming a triangle with the famous but touristy Deux Magots (today “out” and taboo for the Parisian intelligentsia) and the Brasserie Lipp just across the street, the history of the Flore has always been linked with Paris, culture and political ideas.

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Ahmed Quraishi

Mumbai’s night of terror underscores a phenomenon concealed by the Indian government and intelligence agencies and deliberately ignored by a biased Anglo-American media for a long time: The rise of a virulent form of Hindu terrorism that begets violence from other minorities. Here is a list of almost one hundred groups that are fighting the Indian government. All of them thrive in India. The context for what has happened in Mumbai is stunning only for those unaware how a cocktail mix of wrong policies, official patronage to extremism, and separatist movements have come together to destabilize India. The night of Nov. 26, 2008, will go down in history as the day when India’s homegrown terrorism reared its head after years of silent mushroom growth.

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Stephen Lendman

The Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was the largest American Muslim charity until the Bush administration falsely declared it an enemy of the state and shut it down.

On December 4, 2001, the Treasury Department declared HLF a terrorist group, froze its assets, and falsely claimed they were being used to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas. HLF appealed at the time but in court was denied.

On January 25, 1995, Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12947 - Prohibiting Transactions With Terrorists Who Threaten To Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process. The same year Hamas was declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). It's still one today, so any individual or group charged with providing it material support (true or false) becomes a convenient target for prosecution.

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Andrew Hughes

So, 3 months since the arrival of the Storm which has redefined the modern world, what has happened and what can we expect ?

What we have seen and what we have received as the remedies to the problem have just been more of the same chicanery that led to the disaster in the first place. We still have the same players, the same crooks and the same "remedies".

Have you ever noticed that the more it changes, the more it remains the same ? Like the French phrase...plus ca change..

We have seen whole industries collapse because they did not take account of the real economy. We have seen the inflation of real estate bubbles, credit bubbles and others too numerous to mention. I remember talking to my mother 3 years ago about the property bubble in Ireland at the time. People were buying houses to beat the band and you were nobody unless you had a property or two. I remember saying to her that this has got to end when the price of property will be too expensive for people to afford and I was right. Property prices took a nosedive and the same people who bet on increased equity and a permanent gravy train were in the can.

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Mickey Z.

By now, we should expect the soft Left (and more than a few radicals) to gleefully guzzle the Democrat Kool Aid every four years. In 2004, it was Anybody-But-Bush. This year, it was Attack of the Obamatrons. Hey, when you’re a liberal, harboring multiple delusions comes with the territory, e.g.

*Sooner or later, the Democratic Party is gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country

*No matter what we think of war, we must always support the troops because sooner or later, the men and women in uniform are gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country

*There’s a mysterious mass of Americans out there—just sitting on the proverbial fence as they wait for us to convince them we are right so they can wake up and help us “take back” the country

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David Kendall

This is supposedly what everybody shouts at a "surprise birthday party" when the guest of honor enters a room filled with his best friends and family who have gathered to celebrate the fact of his/her existence:

"Surprise!!" -- and then everybody sings "Happy Birthday" or "Auld Lang Sine" or some crap.

Has anybody ever actually attended one of these parties, or do they only happen in the movies or on television? If you've ever had one -- were you "surprised"? Or did you somehow find out about it in advance -- like they always do on TV?

In this digitized, computerized, sensationalized, homogenized, and hegemonized age of "Homeland Security", is there really any such thing as a "surprise"?

No.

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Muhammad al-Arabi

Muhammad al-Arabi argues that the clue to the motive for the attack on Mumbai lies in India's increasingly close relations with Israel and its identification with Anglo-American policies in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

At long last, the Mumbai horror show that we have been witnessing on our television screens for the past two days is over. So far, the death toll is 195 people, most of them innocent civilians.

We are still no wiser about the identity or motives of the gunmen responsible for this outrage. Predictably, the Indian government has seized the opportunity to blame Pakistan without having a shred of evidence to back its claim.

This is macabre opportunism at its worst by a government that is more concerned with enriching the super rich than with feeding its people, some of whom resort to eating rats in order to survive.

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S.A.S.

Part 1: Democracy

In 1945, observing the new socialist Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill observed, ‘Mr. Attlee is a very modest man – and he has much to be modest about!’

Jack Kennedy, on hearing that Reagan was to be put up as Governor of California, said, ‘No, no! John Wayne for Governor, Ronald Reagan for Best Friend!’

At the famous Round Table of American intellectuals at the Algonquin Hotel, when they received the news of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, Dorothy Parker drawled cynically, ‘How could they tell?’

Since mid-20th century, that is following World War II, among a tiny enlightened minority – for mass education produces only fools – Democracy, even among its political elite, had become a joke. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, with capitalism in the full flush of its final expansionist phase, motored by 24-hour electronic trading in paper and electronic signal money, Democracy is no joke.

It must be remembered that the adulation and elevation of Democracy is a relatively new affair. Its promotion from being ‘a good thing’ to being a necessary thing has evolved alongside the evolutionary emergence of the capitalist financial system from being a hegemony of private properties and projects into a totalitarian network that, from the leveraged buyout of a great corporation to a mere magazine subscription or football ticket, has engulfed the social nexus on a world scale.

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