Michelle Chen: Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities

Published on Sunday, July 31, 2011 by Colorlines

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/us_investors_and_universities_join_the_land_rush_in_africa.html

by Michelle Chen

When a massive tire corporation rolled into Nigeria’s Iguobazuwa Forest Reserve a few years ago, just one thing stood in the path of the CEOs’ plans to set up a rubber plantation: the communities that lived there. With cruel precision, the communities that got in the way were uprooted and displaced, their farmland devastated. As documented by Friends of the Earth International, the bulldozers of the French conglomerate Michelin sowed the ground for “increased hunger, malnutrition, poverty and forced migration, as food became harder to find or produce.”

“It was as if there was no reason to live again,” recalled a local woman. “Now, no land, no farm, no food.”

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Joe Conason: Why China Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_china_is_laughing_all_the_way_to_the_bank_20110729/

Posted on Jul 29, 2011

By Joe Conason

The global impact of the American debt crisis—and the likelihood of permanent damage to American interests—are already visible to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Indeed, he is not only seeing but hearing those effects.

“The Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank,” said the former Democratic presidential nominee, because a downgrading of U.S. Treasury securities will mean enormous and completely unnecessary increases in our interest payments to the nation’s largest creditor—and our most important competitor in the international arena.

“If we suffer a downgrade of our (U.S. Treasury) debt simply because of the brief time before we have to go through this exercise again,” said Kerry, referring to the House Republican insistence on a debt-limit increase that will expire before next Christmas, “it would mean billions of additional dollars that would have to be paid to the Chinese.”

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Glenn Greenwald: Obama's Whistleblower War Suffers Two Defeats

Published on Saturday, July 30, 2011 by Salon

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/30/whistleblowers/index.html

by Glenn Greenwald

The Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers suffered two serious and well-deserved defeats.  The first occurred in the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was accused of multiple acts of espionage, only for the DOJ to drop virtually all of the charges right before the trial was to begin and enter into a plea agreement for one minor misdemeanor.  Today, The Washington Post -- under the headline "Judge blasts prosecution of alleged NSA leaker" -- reports that the federal judge presiding over the case "harshly criticized U.S. prosecutors’ treatment of a former spy agency official accused of leaking classified material."

As the transcript of Drake's sentencing hearing published by Secrecy News reflects, Judge Richard Bennett of the U.S. District Court for Maryland was infuriated by two aspects of the DOJ's conduct: (1) after the Bush DOJ executed a search warrant of Drake's home in 2007, the Obama DOJ -- 2 1/2 years later -- finally indicted him, meaning he had to live with that cloud of criminal uncertainty over his head for that outrageously lengthy period of time; and (2) despite dropping all of the serious charges right before the trial was about to begin, the DOJ demanded that Drake be forced to pay a $50,000 fine as "a deterrent" (on top of the tens of thousands of dollars he spent in legal fees until he had no money left and had to use public defenders, as well as the fact that he was five years away from earning a federal pension when he was fired and ended up working at an Apple Computer store to support his family); to justify the requested fine, the prosecutor cited a $10,000 whistleblowing prize Drake was awarded earlier this year.

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Tarak Barkawi: Neoliberalism, Not Multiculturalism Is Biggest Threat to Western Values

Published on Friday, July 29, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/2011726131835154941.html

by Tarak Barkawi

The paranoid style in politics often imagines unlikely alliances that coalesce into an overwhelming threat that must be countered by all necessary means.

In Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington conjured an amalgamated East - an alliance between "Confucian" and "Islamic" powers - that would challenge the West for world dominance. Manyjihadis fear the Crusader alliance between Jews and Christians. They forget that until recently, historically speaking, populations professing the latter were the chief persecutors of the former.

Now Anders Breivik has invoked the improbable axis of Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism, together colonising Europe. As he sees multiculturalism as essentially a Jewish plot, Breivik has managed to wrap up the new and old fascist bogies in one conspiracy: communists, Jews and Muslims.

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"Sarah Jaffe" - $230,000 For a Guard Dog: Why the Wealthy Are Afraid Of Violence From Below

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Posted on July 29, 2011, Printed on July 31, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151837/%24230%2C000_for_a_guard_dog%3A_why_the_wealthy_are_afraid_of_violence_from_below

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.”

That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world.

He noted:

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