Danny Schechter - The Axis of Indifference in the Media World

Listen to Danny's show "The News Dissector" every Friday at 2pm (Eastern Time)

Foreign correspondents have always been revered within journalism. That's why covering Iraq or other wars are assignments so many reporters cultivate. Many see them as a ticket up the media pecking order.

Being "under fire" promise excitement, danger and -- let's face it, on TV -- precious "face time." Going overseas is often a route to more visibility and better jobs at home on the strength of your "bravery" -- war reporting can be the macho oxygen of ambition.

Just as covering a turbulent world is attractive in the ranks, up in the suites of media power, "foreign news" is, according to Michael Wolff, a 'nostalgist's beat' said to turn off American audiences and tune them out. That's why decision makers shutter bureaus and redefine news of the world as 'news of American power in the world'. (They also realize financial savings by doing so, of course.)

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-schechter/foreign-reporting-future_b_1511648.html

John Feffer - Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. “Wall Street’s financial meltdown marks the end of an era,” wrote Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers in Counterpunch at the end of 2008. “What has ended is the credibility of the Washington Consensus – open markets to foreign investors and tight money austerity programs (high interest rates and credit cutbacks) to ‘cure’ balance-of-payments deficits, domestic budget deficits and price inflation. 

Read More:

http://www.fpif.org/articles/waiting_for_copernicus

John Scales Avery - Adverse Effects Of Globalization

Today, economic globalization aims at increased trade throughout the world. At first sight, this might seem to be a benefit. However, laws preventing the exploitation of labor are not universal. The same unspeakable conditions experienced by workers in factories and mines during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in Europe can be found today among factory workers in Indonesia or children weaving oriental carpets in Pakistan; and it is estimated that in India alone there are 80,000,000 child laborers.

In many developing countries today, industrialization involves slave-like working conditions. Meanwhile, in the industrialized countries, workers may lose their jobs because they cannot compete with underpaid labor in the Third World. Large multinational corporations are tending to move their operations to regions where salaries and living standards are very low. For free trade to be truly beneficial to all the peoples of the world, universal laws must be established to regulate business and industry globally, and to ensure that multinationals act in a way that is both socially and ecologically responsible.

Adam Smith's followers advocated complete freedom from governmental restraint, but the history of the Industrial Revolution demonstrates the need for regulatory social legislation. The historical perspective makes it clear that laws establishing minimum wage levels and laws prohibiting child labor are needed to avoid horrors such as those described by John Fielden in “The Curse of the Factory System”. Today, birth control is also necessary on a global scale, just as it once was needed in England, to raise workers above the starvation level. Finally, unions must be permitted everywhere in the world. If trade is globalized, the hard-won reforms achieved by Charles Knowlton, Annie Besant the Fabians and others must also be globalized.

Read More:

http://www.countercurrents.org/avery080512.htm

Nigel Farage - There Will Be an Attempt to Install a Dictatorship

With escalating fears regarding the stability of the eurozone, today King World News interviewed former LBMA commodities broker and trader and current MEP Nigel Farage to get his take on the situation.  Farage told KWN he believes there will be an attempt, within months, to install a dictatorship in Europe.  Here is what Farage had to say about the deteriorating situation:  “Frankly, the whole thing is falling apart.  And in the middle of all of this, Mrs Merkel came out and said, ‘The fiscal treaty cannot be renegotiated, and it must hold.’  So, I suppose, for once, we’ve got the Germans providing the humor, because this thing isn’t going to hold.”

Nigel Farage continues:

“I now believe the euro and the whole euro system are now in, by far, the deepest crisis that we’ve seen.  We are in totally uncharted, chaotic territory.  In some ways the ball is very much on the German side of the court.  If they are unable to impose the discipline they thought this new Compact Treaty would give them, then maybe it’s the Germans that say, ‘Right, Greece you’ve got to leave.’  We know once Greece leaves, the dominos start to fall.

To say that it’s a total mess is entirely accurate.  You cannot have national democracy and this new form of economic and political government.  We’ve seen these guys do some terrible things.  I mean they’ve gotten rid of elected Prime Ministers in Greece and Italy. 

But they cannot at the moment, without imposing a total dictatorship, stop general elections from taking place in countries.... 

Read More:

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2012/5/8_Nigel_Farage_-_There_Will_Be_an_Attempt_to_Install_a_Dictatorship.html

Maria Margaronis - Greece takes a leap into the dark, driven by defiance and despair

The message of Sunday's election in Greece is clear: the Greeks have said no to more of the cuts and austerity measures that have devastated the country, pushing unemployment above 20%, shattering the healthcare system, tearing families apart and leading some to suicide. It was above all a vote of rage against the two major parties, Pasok and New Democracy, which between them ran the economy into the ground, signed up to a disastrous austerity programme in exchange for dead-end bailouts from the EU and IMF, and then allowed the blows to fall on the most vulnerable.

The medium, though, is more confused and troubling. As elsewhere in Europe, the draining away of the centre has revealed a jagged landscape: the shorthand of "extremes of left and right" doesn't begin to map it. The most obvious rift in Greece in the last months – a rift that's been described to me more than once as a "civil war"– has been between those who are for and against the "memorandum", the EU/IMF schedule of demands. The pro-memorandum forces want to keep Greece in the eurozone at any cost; most of their opponents also want to stay in Europe – but not of "Merkozy", austerity and the banks.

Across that rift runs an older, deeper one, whose roots go back at least as far as to the actual civil war that followed the Axis occupation, leading to 30 years in which the left was outlawed, and culminating in the neo-fascist junta of 1967 to 1974. The social and political collapse brought by the crisis has revived those memories, too, as well as old family loyalties. In the summer of 2011, when the aganaktismenoi ("outraged") of Syntagma Square briefly became the darlings of the foreign media, conservative truck drivers could rub shoulders with eco warriors and direct democracy mavens; the Greek flag could stand for self-determination as well as nationalism. But not any more.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/07/greece-leap-into-the-dark

Renee Parsons - NATO to Visit the U.S.

For the first time in more than a decade, representatives from NATO's 28 member nations will meet in Chicago on May 21 for a two day conference.

With the European continent devastated at the end of WWII and an ominous Russian presence in eastern Europe, the emergence of two superpowers with radically different political and economic agendas gave birth to an era of tensions and confrontations dubbed the Cold War -- a non-shooting conflict that dominated global politics for the next forty years. By early 1949, the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb and in an effort to halt the spread of communism, nip nationalistic militarism in the bud and encourage political integration amongst European nations, the United States and eleven western European counties formed NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Its charter, known as the Washington Treaty, included the admirable goals of settling "any international dispute... by peaceful means... that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain... from the threat or use of force... inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/nato-to-visit-the-us_b_1470710.html

Ron Unz - China’s Rise, America’s Fall. Which Superpower is more Threatened by its “Extractive Elites”?

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion? 

China Shakes the World

By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30621

'The Austerity Trap Has Sprung': Countries Should Choose Growth-Oriented Policies

The current global jobs situation is "alarming," and many countries have fallen into the "austerity trap," according to the new report “World of Work Report 2012: Better Jobs for a Better Economy” from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

The report finds the path of austerity that many countries have chosen to address fiscal crises  simply has not generated jobs and has worsened the economic situation. 

"The narrow focus of many Eurozone countries on fiscal austerity is deepening the jobs crisis and could even lead to another recession in Europe,” said Mr. Raymond Torres, Director of the ILO Institute for International Labour Studies and lead author of the report.

In contrast to the austerity chosing countries, "countries that have chosen job-centered macroeconomic policies have achieved better economic and social outcomes,” added Mr. Torres.

The report states bluntly:  "The austerity trap has sprung. Austerity has, in fact, resulted in weaker economic growth, increased volatility and a worsening of banks’ balance sheets leading to a further contraction of credit, lower investment and, consequently, more job losses."

However, the report notes that "it is possible to move away from the austerity trap."  And "more fundamentally, it is high time for a move towards a growth- and job- orientated strategy.

A growth-oriented strategy could bring about the creation of between 1.8 and 2.1 jobs over a one year period, the ILO states.

The report also finds "the weakening of collective bargaining likely to provoke a downward spiral of wages, thereby delaying recovery further."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/30-3

Stefan Kaiser - Austerity Backlash Unites European Leaders

Be it austerity queen Angela Merkel or Socialist François Hollande, European politicians are suddenly in agreement with ECB President Mario Draghi's proposal to round out the European fiscal pact's austerity measures with a "growth pact." But many seem to have a different idea about what this means.  

It's so nice to see Europe in agreement once again. Whether it's German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso or French presidential candidates François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy -- everyone seems to think a "growth pact" for the continent is a good idea. But it is precisely this agreement that should make one skeptical -- because all the vague phrase really does is verbally lump together Europe's tremendous conflicts of interest.

The suggestion came from European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. "We have had a fiscal compact," Draghi told the economic and monetary affairs committee of the European Parliament on Wednesday, referring to the treaty European governments signed in March, pledging to toughen their spending rules. "What is most present in my mind now is to have a growth compact."

Since then, the concept has garnered acceptance from all sides. "Growth is the key, growth is the answer," European Commission President Barroso said in a speech. In France, where the presidential campaign continues, both conservative incumbent Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger Hollande saw affirmation of their own positions on the issue. Hollande said it went in the same direction as his earlier policy suggestions, while Sarkozy said that a policy based on austerity alone would be a mistake.

Devil in the Details

But the unanimous approval of Draghi's suggestion conceals just how far apart its proponents are on details. What ECB President Draghi has in mind has little to do with Socialist Hollande's notions. "He doesn't necessarily have the same measures in mind as me to foster growth," Hollande admitted in a radio interview on Thursday. But this disagreement has somehow been overlooked.

Read More:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,830185,00.html

MIT Researchers Predict ‘Global Economic Collapse’ By 2030

Seems everyone’s getting in the doomsday-prediction business. That’s not all that unusual in Fourth Turnings; in the 1930′s, “tent revivals” were all the rage, and radio preachers gained notoriety with their apocalyptic predictions based on the moral decay of the Roaring ’20s and Prohibition.

Today, we have people using the Mayan calendar, Harold Camping’s Rapture calculations and any number of extraterrestial events to predict the end times, as well as global resource depletion and “climate shift” science. The bright minds at MIT have taken it a step further and have built a computer model to simulate when they believe it will happen. Their simulation points to no later 2030.

Whether any of these are based on fact or faith (or both) doesn’t matter. What matters is that society’s belief that something is terribly wrong and needs to be fixed will eventually create action. We all know, intuitively, that civilization is operating at unsustainable levels and cannot continue this way much longer.

Next Great Depression? MIT Researchers Predict ‘Global Economic Collapse’ By 2030

April 4, 2012

A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester’s institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from “global economic collapse” and “precipitous population decline” if people continue to consume the world’s resources at the current pace.

Smithsonian Magazine writes that Australian physicist Graham Turner says “the world is on track for disaster” and that current evidence coincides with a famous, and in some quarters, infamous, academic report from 1972 entitled, “The Limits to Growth.”

Read More:

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=32713