| Thursday, March 18, 2010 3:19PM |
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| Coming Together |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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I was just reading a casual exchange between some British and Portuguese bloggers, and they mentioned how every town and village in their respective countries has citizen's advice centres, where for free people can get help in dealing with government agencies, utilities providers, landlords, and other aspects of life. All done by volunteers with special expertise, this civil society institution seems to fit well with what I've been yammering about here.
They were surprised that I had to ask them what an advice center was.
Working together, or in Irish, meitheal, is something rarely seen in the US. We compete rather than cooperate. We consume rather than create. We exclude rather than include... |
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| Wednesday, March 17, 2010 12:24PM |
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| Unity in Struggle |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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As the Obama Administration attacks public education, one has to ask, “What next?” Not in a rhetorical sense, but literally, “What essential sector will Goldman’s golden boy go after next?” His betrayal already has the nurses union in California pushing through single payer medical care legislation in the state assembly. With the massive layoffs of teachers, health and education looks like the nexus of opposition to Obama’s privatization plans.
Unity in struggle; we’re watching for emerging leaders. |
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| Tuesday, March 16, 2010 10:23PM |
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| The Right to Live |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| As I stood along the Sacapulas bridge rail, I glanced up and was startled to see a fully armed military patrol in camouflage gear marching toward me,. The line grew until I could see fifty or sixty soldiers, armed with everything from machine guns to mortars. The 1960's and '70's, leading up to the worst of the recent violence, had been the first period of church idealism in Guatemala since the [16th century] Verapaz experiment. Foreign priests, many of them Spanish and North American, had evangelized among the [Mayan] Indians, founded cooperatives, and taught literacy. The civil and military authorities in Guatemala had apparently found the resulting Indian political consciousness threatening, because in the late... |
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| Monday, March 15, 2010 3:44PM |
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| Doomed |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| In their working paper The Global Financial Crisis and the Shift to Shadow Banking, Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray argue that downsizing the financial sector is a prerequisite to saving the system. As a sector that is too complex to manage, as well as too politically powerful to regulate, the failure of the Obama Administration to downsize the publicly rescued financial sector, say the authors, means the system is doomed. |
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| Saturday, March 13, 2010 1:30PM |
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| Ethnic Cleansing in Chiapas |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| Mexican Army and police increase harassment of Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Ethnic cleansing in preparation for ecotourism and biofuel includes burning the Mayan villages. |
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| Friday, March 12, 2010 2:19PM |
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| Supporting Apartheid |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| Electronic Intifada examines how European Union trade preferences support Israeli aggression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. |
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| Wednesday, March 10, 2010 1:35PM |
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| Principles of Organizing |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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Learning to use communications technology, while valuable, should not be overemphasized at the expense of learning the principles of organizing. While computer-based research and education has expanded our access to information, learning to evaluate information for its applicability requires greater focus. Analysis of communications in conflict, otherwise known as psychological warfare, thus serves as a prerequisite to effective engagement in netwar.
Comprehending how activism functions in this context, helps to distinguish between consciousness-raising and capacity-building. While not mutually exclusive, they are also not synonymous.
As more young people become involved in politics, they will, like us, live and learn from their mistakes. What they need to know in the digital age, is that connecting with millions through mass communication means little if... |
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| Tuesday, March 9, 2010 2:48PM |
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| A Socialist Republic |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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Americans might be able to secure socialist concessions from the two capitalist political parties, but it isn't very likely. Social Security was only garnered under the threat of mass insurrection against the capitalists that caused the Great Depression. Securing universal health care, housing vouchers, and free college education is not going to happen until we elect enough socialists to Congress.
In the meantime, withdrawing support from the capitalist parties and giving our support to socialist parties and candidates will give them the voice they need to push our two-party capitalist state toward a multi-party socialist republic. |
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| Friday, March 5, 2010 2:06PM |
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| A Plan of War |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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When Michel Chossudovsky wrote his seminal book The Globalisation of Poverty, the dismembering of Yugoslavia was still underway. As a project of globalization, the orchestrated monetary attack on the socialist republic, that culminated in civil war, served to illustrate the fact that globalization is not just an economic model, but a plan of war. That war, which is by definition global, is quite simply the exercise of power by the financial sector in undermining the powers of the state to the benefit of the free market.
As states cede their social obligations in favor of transfers of public wealth to private accounts, all public needs suffer, and perhaps more importantly, become dependent on private rules, no matter how criminal, stingy or punitive. This, is... |
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| Thursday, March 4, 2010 1:20PM |
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| Identity of Possession |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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A while back, I wrote about the fabric of identity, and if insufficiently authentic, how it can unravel. In our consumer society, identity is closely associated with possession, and as millions become dispossessed, their identity crumbles. Losing one's possessions in a culture of imbeciles (a term used here to indicate political illiteracy) can make one vulnerable to recruitment by all sorts of ideologues, and this can lead to pathological behavior. And in a state where access to quality counseling often depends on a measure of possessions, the dispossessed are adrift.
We may indeed witness a return of active domestic terrorism in the form of Christian Patriot militias, but unlike the farm crisis of the 1980s and the millenarian mania of the 1990s, this... |
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| Wednesday, March 3, 2010 3:28PM |
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| Life Goes On |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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As the Obama Administration navigates us into the new Dark Ages, it is inevitable that random adaptations will emerge. Necessity being the mother of invention, new means of survival and creativity are indeed already springing up. As of last week, a dozen states were exploring the establishment of state banks in order to protect state employee pensions and benefits from Wall Street, and several states were considering single payer health plans to guard against federal betrayal in that regard.
Admittedly, we are in for some soul-searching disruptions as millions more are laid off, foreclosed, or terminated from private health care. Yet, we aren't the first generations to encounter wide-scale government corruption and economic failure. Yes, it is systematic and global, but it isn't entirely... |
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| Tuesday, March 2, 2010 1:14PM |
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| War in the Andes |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| From 1980-2000, the government of Peru fought a civil war against indigenous guerrilla fighters in the Andes mountains. Last year, the Peruvian government fought to a standstill with the indigenous communities over the right of indigenous peoples to determine their own future under international law. The Peruvian state now plans to expedite dam and mining projects on indigenous lands using forced relocation of indigenous communities. The civil war could resume. |
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| Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:09PM |
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| Murder and Theft |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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Murder and theft are big business on Wall Street, and if one looks at almost any sector of financial investment, murder and theft aren't hard to find. Sometimes it's as obvious as the war and energy industries, other times it's as obscure as banking and health. The invisibility of murder and theft on a global scale is aided by media that portrays this official US policy as defense and development. Nevertheless, if one examines the situations where this policy is deployed by US troops, advisors and mercenaries, murder and theft is the only conclusion an honest person can reach.
As the Obama Administration perpetuates this policy of murder and theft on behalf of the industries it represents, the lives of indigenous peoples worldwide... |
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| Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:25PM |
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| Fighting the Financial Cartel |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| In the wake of the colossal betrayal of Americans by the Obama Administration, Cyrano's examines the move toward state-owned banks as a means of fighting the financial cartel on Wall Street. |
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| Tuesday, February 23, 2010 1:08PM |
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| Illuminating the Rift |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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The difference between appearance and substance is illuminated by the rift between those who support the corporate state while retaining social security and civil rights (liberals), and those who wish the corporate state to be more accountable to their notions of human rights (progressives). Both want reform of the existing corporate system, but neither advocate democratizing capital in order to achieve their goals. That would also entail a shift in posture from begging to demanding, and involve risking those corporate paychecks and foundation grants.
Socialists who've succeeded in attaining a better deal for everyone, though, have endured blacklisting, harassment and assault from church and state and their lackeys. Sometimes the lackeys are conservative, sometimes liberal, but the marginalizing of peace activists by Obama supporters... |
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| Monday, February 22, 2010 12:26PM |
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| The Corporate Choice |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| Glen Ford speaks about the role of the Democratic Leadership Council in demobilizing American progressives and resuscitating the US empire. |
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| Sunday, February 21, 2010 2:26PM |
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| Marketplace of Ideas |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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Pimping ethnic diversity or democracy, like pimping poverty or the environment, isn’t anything new. Remember the we are the world Coca-Cola ads?
Nowadays, though, with the advent of unmediated online communication threatening corporate control of public discussion, the marketplace of ideas has been invaded by corporate messaging in the guise of grassroots media. Witness the numerous alternative news sites and blogs funded by neoliberal philanthropies like Ford, Soros, et al.
In fact, if you look at the funders of any well-heeled progressive new media, you’ll find they have ties to the neoliberal philanthropic network. Taking corporate ad money is bad enough; feigning integrity and independence when beholden to thieves who launder blood money via foundation grants is particularly loathsome. |
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| Saturday, February 20, 2010 2:09PM |
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| A Racial Framework |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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International conventions and domestic legal prohibitions against discrimination based on perceived racial difference are arguably useful tools in promoting equality, even if academia and the moral theatrics industry sometimes mischaracterize social conflict within a racial framework. The danger comes when this mischaracterization leads policy makers and activists to believe that oppressive relationships like those between Indigenous nations and corporate states can be resolved by equal opportunity within a capitalist system.
While not all states employ race as a criteria in exercising oppression, many utilize the colonial model developed by racially-biased European powers, and have adapted to the assimilationist structures for denying human rights to Indigenous peoples, regardless of skin color. In the end, it is this authentic distinction between ways of life that... |
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| Friday, February 19, 2010 7:46PM |
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| CWIS Notes |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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| Center for World Indigenous Studies Fellow and Associate Scholar Mirjam Hirch has been accepted to present a guided poster presentation at the 20th International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) World Conference convening in Geneva, Switzerland from July 11-15. CWIS Chair Rudolph Ryser has been nominated for an appointment to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for the 2011-2013 term. |
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| Tuesday, February 16, 2010 12:41PM |
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| Promoting Militarism |
Posted By: Jay Taber
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In 1980, Canada and the U.S. led a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism.
--Derrick O'Keefe |
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