WHY SYSTEMS BECOME MURDEROUS EXPLOITATION MACHINES
by Denis G. Rancourt
On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism, as opposed to what would be needed.
August 2010. This essay was posted on the Activist Teacher blog [1].
Arguably the three most influential end-point models of political organization are best represented by Adam Smith (capitalism), Karl Marx (socialism/communism), and Mikhail Bakunin (anarchism).[2][3][4] These three men and many other persons who contributed to critiquing, perfecting and adapting or combining these end-point models were unquestionably brilliant, acute and incisive.
Problem is none of these models has ever been put into practice in a sustainable way. This is because none of these models or their adaptations and combinations can successfully be put into practice by engineering a system for people to inhabit.
PermalinkPalestinians Denied Access to Water
by Stephen Lendman
According to OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), Palestinians face a serious water crisis, being denied access to their own resources.
Cara Flowers with the Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Group (EWASH - a coalition of almost 30 water and sanitation sector organizations in Occupied Palestine) said many vulnerable communities in Israeli-controlled Area C (covering 60% of the West Bank) are hardest hit, the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) having limited say over its own resources, ones Israel uses itself, an international water expert saying:
It's "easy (making) the desert bloom by using someone else's water (and) denying them access to their fair share...." In some areas, it's easier denying them none except what they can obtain by other means or illegally.
Court Declares Israel Acted in Self-Defense in Brutal Slaying of Professor Kahled Salah and Son in 2004
By Genevieve Cora Fraser
It all seemed so hopeful in January when I visited Salam, the widow of murdered Palestinian professor Kahled Salah, in her new home in America. She described how six months earlier, five years after the attack, she had been summoned before an Israeli court in Jerusalem for a hearing into the deaths of her husband and their 16 year-old son, Mohammed. Her hope was that there would soon be a trial in open court.
“I want justice for Kahled and Mohammed,” she said. “I want the world to know what the Israeli soldiers did.”
In the early hours of July 6, 2004, Dr. Salah and his teenage son were gunned down in cold blood in their Nablus home by Israeli snipers. Earlier that evening, 1,000 Israeli troops had gathered to hunt down known resistance fighters who had been spotted in the neighborhood. But after they were killed, at some point, the order was given to turn their efforts on the Salah household.
Turkish Military Deep State Defies Civilian Rule
On July 24, an Istanbul Court ordered the arrest of 102 current and former high ranking Turkish military officers. The military responded by shielding the officers in locations that made arrests difficult, if not impossible. This provoked the current conflict between Turkey's constitutionally independent judiciary and the military. (Image)
The officers charged were allegedly part of Sledgehammer, the latest plan in a series of military plots and coups by the Turkish high command. The military and its allies were to blow up mosques, churches, and synagogues; then blame these acts on terrorists, Kurdish separatists, for example. In addition, the military planned to provoke the shoot down a Turkish aircraft by the Greek military and down a civilian airliner blaming it on terrorists.
Recent Israeli Provocations
by Stephen Lendman
Perhaps suggesting a larger-scale planned offensive, recent violent Israeli outbreaks struck Gaza, the West Bank, and Israeli/Lebanon border, the first there since the summer 2006 war.
Like Cast Lead, it was Israeli aggression - violent, lawless and unrelenting, a scorched-earth blitzkrieg, inflicting vast destruction, causing billions in damage, killing over 1,000 Lebanese, injuring thousands more, and displacing around a million others (about one-fourth of the country's four million population), including over 300,000 children fleeing north for their lives. In the end, Hezbollah handed Israel a humiliating defeat. Perhaps revenge is planned.
WHAT A GOVERNMENT CAN DO WITH ITS OWN BANK: THE REMARKABLE MODEL OF THE COMMONWEALTH BANK OF AUSTRALIA
Ellen Brown
Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, just won the Democratic nomination for governor of his state, making a state-owned Bank of Michigan a real possibility. Bernero is one of at least a dozen candidates promoting that solution to the states’ economic woes. It is an innovative idea, with little precedent in the United States. North Dakota, currently the only state owning its own bank, also happens to be the only state sporting a budget surplus, and it has the lowest unemployment rate in the country; but skeptics can write these achievements off to coincidence. More data is needed, and fortunately other precedents are available from other countries.
One of the most dramatic is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which operated successfully as a government-owned bank for most of the 20th century, until it was privatized in the 1990s. The Commonwealth Bank’s creative founders demonstrated that a government-backed bank can make loans without capital. Denison Miller, the Bank’s first Governor, was fond of saying that the Bank did not need capital because “it is backed by the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.”
Environmental and Health Impacts of the BP Gulf Oil Spill Plus Necessary Resources for the Healthcare Provider
By Tom Termotto, DCAE
THE COMING OF THE BLACK WAVE
Nothing in our shared cultural experience will prepare us better for the oncoming Black Wave throughout the Gulf of Mexico than the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. And yet even this environmental catastrophe falls far short of what is coming around the corner in the Gulf. Alaska is not Florida, or Louisiana, or Texas. The Deep South summer here in Tallahassee, FL has been as hot and humid, as any we’ve seen. This weather pattern is what will distinguish the BP Gulf Oil Spill from the Exxon Valdez just as the total volume of the spill and use of dispersants have.
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