Michelle Chen - Wal-Mart Circles Indian Markets, and Indians Push Back

 December 3, 2011 by In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12362/wal-mart_circles_indian_markets_indian_society_pushes_back/

by Michelle Chen

The marketplace has always been at the heart of India--exuberant bazaars brimming with local hawkers and traditional wares and foods. But the country’s old-fashioned markets may soon be eclipsed by the towering “free market” of globalization, as multinational superstores push the government to open the gates.

The India Cabinet wants to enable businesses with 51-percent foreign direct investment to enter India's retail sector--basically inviting in big box behemoths like Wal-Mart under the banner of efficiency and consumer choice. But many Indians aren’t buying it. This week, UNI Global Union reports that shops went on strike:

Over 50 million small traders across India have put down their shutters as part of strike action aimed at getting the India government to review its decision.

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Uri Avnery - The King’s Speech, Squeezing Jordan

DECEMBER 2-4, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/02/THE-KINGS-SPEECH/

by URI AVNERY

IN THE middle of the ’80s, a German diplomat conveyed to me a surprising message. A member of the Jordanian Royal family would like to speak with me in Amman. At the time, Jordan was still officially at war with us.

Somehow I obtained official permission from the Israeli government. The Germans generously provided me with a passport that was not strictly accurate, and so, with much turning of blind eyes, I arrived in Amman and was lodged in the best hotel.

The news of my presence spread quickly, and after some days it became an embarrassment to the Jordanian government. So I was politely asked to leave, and very quickly, please.

But before that, a high-ranking official invited me to dinner in a very elegant restaurant. He was a well educated, very cultured person, who spoke beautiful English. To my utter amazement, he told me that he was a Bedouin, a member of an important tribe. All my ideas about Bedouins were shattered in that moment.

This dinner stuck in my memory because, in (literally) ten minutes, I learned more about Jordan than in decades of reading. My host took a paper napkin and drew a rough map of Jordan. “Look at our neighbors,” he explained. “Here is Syria, a radical secular Ba’athist dictatorship. Then there is Iraq, with another Ba’athist regime that hates Syria. Next there is Saudi Arabia, a very conservative, orthodox country. Next is Egypt, with a pro-Western military dictator. Then there is Zionist Israel. In the occupied Palestinian territories, radical, revolutionary elements are in the ascent. And almost touching us, there is fragmented, unpredictable Lebanon.”

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Pratap Chatterjee - The New Cyber-Industrial Complex Spying on Us

Published on Saturday, December 3, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/02/cyber-industrial-complex-spying

WikiLeaks' Spy Files reveal the frightening scale and ambition of the industry now devoted to surveillance of all our daily lives

by Pratap Chatterjee

We live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network "friend" on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.

Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.

WikiLeaks has just released the Spy Files – a trove of almost 300 documents from these companies that shine a light into this industry. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where I work, we trawled through these documents, and tracked down yet more material which our research team – Matthew Wrigley, David Pegg, Christian Jensen and Jamie Thunder – used to create an online database that will soon cover over 160 companies in some 25 countries.

It's worth spending some time browsing through this material because what this new industry offers to do is nothing short of Orwellian.

"We all aware of traditional spy stories of intelligence agencies like MI5 bugging the phones of one or two people," Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told the Bureau. He continued:

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Bret Weinstein - A Horizontal World? Occupy Can't Win with Utopian Impossibilities

Sunday, December 4, 2011 by The Sunday News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington)

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/12/04/1931713/a-horizontal-world-occupy-cant.html

Listen to conversations within the Occupy movement and you will hear an emerging vision of the world’s future.

by Bret Weinstein

Listen to conversations within the Occupy movement and you will hear an emerging vision of the world’s future.

It is a world where power is “horizontal” and local. Where populations have organized into true communities that provide increasingly for their own needs and trade with each other for that which they cannot produce. It is a world much better suited, physically and socially, to the creatures that we are built to be, than is the cruel and self-destabilizing world we currently inhabit.

It is a world that, were it possible, I would embrace.

Unfortunately, this vast imagined world of sustainable and interconnected farming communities is not possible – not within our foreseeable future.

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Greg Palast - Romney's Billionaire Threatens BBC Investigative Reporter

Friday 2 December 2011

by: Greg Palast, Truthout | Author Commentary

http://www.truth-out.org/romneys-billionaire-threatens-bbc-investigative-reporter/1322851521

Palast is the author of  " [4]Vultures Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores." [5] [6]It is directly available from Truthout [7]. This column is Palast's commentary based on material in his book.

Last Monday, a call came in to BBC Television Centre, London, from the office of Mitt Romney's billionaire backer and "advisor" Paul Singer.

Singer, top donor to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had a message for the news chiefs at the prestigious broadcaster:

"We have a file on Greg Palast."

I bet they do.

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Kanya D'Almeida - US Inaction on Climate is "Criminal", Activists Say

Sunday, December 4, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106086

by Kanya D'Almeida

WASHINGTON - The United States' delegation at the 17th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCC) in Durban, South Africa has come under heavy fire from civil society leaders and activists around the globe for standing in the way of real solutions to climate change.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 farmers, unionists, teachers, peasants, students, garbage pickers, transport workers and other indignant citizens gathered outside the U.N. consultation chambers in Durban on Saturday calling for "system change, not climate change".

Many of these protestors marched to the U.S. embassy, demanding that the "world's biggest polluter" start supporting climate solutions that benefit the 99 percent.

In solidarity with their African counterparts, citizens in 20 cities across the U.S. rallied against the eco-destructive actions of the "one percent" as part of the Dec. 3 global day of action to save the planet and "occupy the climate".

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Helen Caldicott - After Fukushima, Enough Is Enough

Dr. Helen Caldicott is on the Progressive Radio Network every Sunday at 3pm(ET) with "If You Love This Planet." Listen live at PRN.fm

Published on Friday, December 2, 2011 by the International Herald Tribune

by Helen Caldicott

The nuclear power industry has been resurrected over the past decade by a lobbying campaign that has left many people believing it to be a clean, green, emission-free alternative to fossil fuels. These beliefs pose an extraordinary threat to global public health and encourage a major financial drain on national economies and taxpayers. The commitment to nuclear power as an environmentally safe energy source has also stifled the mass development of alternative technologies that are far cheaper, safer and almost emission free — the future for global energy.

When the Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered meltdowns in March, literally in the backyard of an unsuspecting public, the stark reality that the risks of nuclear power far outweigh any benefits should have become clear to the world. As the old quip states, “Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.”

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Marshall Auerback - Eurozone Catastrophe -- How Saving the Euro Could Mean Blood on the Streets

By Marshall Auerback, AlterNet

Posted on December 2, 2011, Printed on December 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153297/eurozone_catastrophe%3A_how_saving_the_euro_could_mean_blood_on_the_streets

The eurozone story is changing by the hour. Here's what you need to know to understand developments that will impact the entire global economy and potentially cause major social upheaval.

The eurozone is facing two distinct, but related, problems: Problem #1 is a national solvency issue, which only the European Central Bank (ECB) can solve. Problem #2 is deficient "aggregate demand" (a fancy term for the spending power of consumers), which calls for a stronger fiscal policy response to offset declining investment and purchases in the private sector.

As it stands, the ECB is the only show in town to save the eurozone from a very drawn out and damaging recession. Why is that? Well, because the individual member states in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) cannot spend without taxation revenue or debt-issuance, because they are users of their currency, rather than issuers. This is a key distinction, and one often missed in media coverage. Their position is in sharp contrast to, say, the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, all of which are issuers of their own currency and therefore not subject to the same kind of solvency risk because they are in control of their own money supply. The only institution in the EMU that can spend without recourse to prior funding is the ECB. That is the consequence of the flawed design of the monetary system that the neo-liberal conservatives in Europe forced upon the member states at the inception of the common currency.

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Michael Donnelly - Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup

DECEMBER 2-4, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/12/02/WALL-STREETS-FAILED-1934-COUP/

by MICHAEL DONNELLY

“In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

– Report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee

A Patriot, not the Traitor they wanted

You know the coup plot they teach all young Americans about in 10^th Grade History class? Oh yeah…

In November 1934, famed double Medal of Honor winner Marine Gen. Smedley Butler gave secret testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein committee – a precursor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In it, Butler told of a plot headed by a group of wealthy businessmen (The American Liberty League) to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with concentration camps for “Jews and other undesirables.”

Show Me the Money

Butler had been approached by Gerald P. MacGuire of Wall Street’s Grayson M-P Murphy & Co. MacGuire claimed they would assemble an army of 500,000 mostly unemployed WWI veterans and march on DC.  The plutocrats wanted Butler to lead the coup, thinking that, like the Bolsheviks, taking one major city (DC as Petrograd) would lead to the fall of the government.  They promised to put up $3 million as starters and dangled a future $300 million as bait. Butler went along with the plot until he could learn the identities of all the schemers. Not a one of them was ever called to testify or was charged with Treason. Virtually all of them were founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

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Amos Harel - Former Mossad chief: Israeli attack on Iran must be stopped to avert catastrophe

By Amos Harel

Global Research, December 2, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27998

Meir Dagan speaks out against military offensive on Iran, expresses concern that Defense Minister Barak believes Israel only has less than a year to carry out an attack. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned Thursday against an Israeli attack on Iran, saying such a move would likely lead to a regional war involving Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria. "I'm concerned about possible mistakes and I prefer to speak out before there is a catastrophe," Dagan said in an interview on the Israeli television program “Uvda." "I think that engaging, with open eyes, in a regional war is warranted only when we are under attack or when the sword is already cutting against our live flesh. It is not an alternative that should be chosen lightly." Dagan stressed that though he cannot predict how many casualties an attack on Iran would yield, he said, "I have to assume that the level of destruction, paralysis of every-day life, and Israeli death toll would be high." He said that he has no interest in hiding his fervent opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

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