by AMY KAZMIN and JAMES LAMONT
Though Mr Jain had never heard of Oxfam, a leading global charity, the fundraisers had not even finished their pitch before he opened his wallet to contribute Rs5,200 ($112, €91, £75) to the cause. “Anything which can be for my nation to bring it success, I will do that thing,” he said.
Financial Times for more
(Submitted by reader)
by VINAY LAL
“A protester shouts slogans in front of an ARCO station owned by BP,” in Los Angeles, California. PHOTO/Times
In India, with its love of acronyms, BP has always meant something different from British Petroleum. BP is blood pressure, and a rather common middle-class preoccupation is the measurement of BP with home BP kits, not least of all because there are many things, from the oppressive heat to the traffic snarls caused by CPWD’s lazy habit of leaving behind large amounts of debris on every road, that tend to make an average person’s BP shoot up. [CPWD, for the uninitiated, is Central Public Works Department.] It appears that the BP of the unflappable Barack Obama, hitherto renowned (and sometimes criticized) for never exploding with anger, has likewise suddenly registered a rapid increase. The spill from the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico, which has caused anger and consternation among the residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, has created environmental havoc and there seems to be no end in sight to this crisis. In an interview with NBC News Today on June 8, where Obama was questioned about the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill, he is reported as saying: “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick.”
Continue reading “BP and Union Carbide: Shifting standards of corporate ‘responsibility’”
by HUGH GUSTERSON
And yet, historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed. This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents’ territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians’ counterinsurgency campaign against black guerillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed–although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for more
via Counterpunch
by NELVIS QEKEMA
June 16 was not just an isolated spontaneous revolt. It was a volcanic eruption that was preceded by years of mass mobilisation of the masses under the tight grip of the radical philosophy of Black Consciousness (BC). Unlike the African National Congress (ANC) that was inclined to run with their tails between their legs to the British Queen complaining about the mischief of the Boers, the BCM grabbed the approach that no amount of moral lecturing would change the attitudes of the stone-hearted white settlers. The only available option was to fight. Isn’t it ironic that the ANC-chosen mediator was the same Britain that excluded the rightful owners of the land and decided to place the rule of the land on the greedy lap of the white minority? This they did not do before they had ‘laid their sponges flat on the ground to suck the wealth of Africa my beginning, Africa my ending’. Those of us that have been forced to drink the poison of Bantu education cannot forget the narrations of the so-called Anglo-Boer War, which led to the so-called Union of South Africa in 1910. Does it imply any political bankruptcy that the ANC-led government recently celebrated a 100th anniversary of the union of foreigners to plunder our resources?
Pambazuka for more
by GLEN FORD
Plus, let’s be real: Marc Morial and Ben Jealous are not really fighting mad at the Tea Party’s white nationalists, anyway. These are men from the “moral uplift” school of Black politics, which for more than 150 years has held that Black progress comes when whites are convinced that African Americans are as “civilized” as whites imagine themselves to be. The strategy has never worked except on the token level, but – Keep hope alive!
Black Agenda Report for more
by RICHARD MONCRIEFF
In Cameroon, the head of the National Assembly is also the constitutional successor to the president, unless you are reading the new constitution, which came into force in 1996. According to this, the head of the Senate is the constitutional successor. But the Senate doesn’t exist.
In the meantime the country is run according to a provision in the 1996 constitution, which determines that the old constitution can still be applied while the country waits for the new constitution to be enacted. Confused? So are Cameroonians, which is exactly as President Biya clearly wants them.
All Africa for more
by LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN
If you read more carefully, you find that this is a debate over how to manage an inherited error of metabolism called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Patients with CAH lack an enzyme that converts androgen precursors into cortisol. Even in utero, their adrenal glands are pumping out androgens, which can cause girls to be born with male-looking genitals. As I explained earlier, the potential medical consequences of virilization go far beyond cosmetic appearance or even gender presentation. In severe cases, the patient may need multiple painful surgeries to create separate vaginal and urethral openings. Dreger and her colleagues dismissed dex as “fetal cosmetology” until they were called to the carpet by authors from Harvard who forced them to acknowledge the medical consequences of severe masculinization. The ill-effects include incontinence, kidney damage from recurrent UTIs, vaginal narrowing that interferes with menstruation and the future ability to have PIV intercourse. Girls may need multiple painful surgeries to correct these abnormalities.
Big Think for more
via 3 Quarks Daily
via Women News Network for more
by WILLIAM BLUM
A child victim of the Tokyo bombing. “The US deployed air power in a campaign to burn whole [Japanese] cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate, and kill their largely defenseless residents, in order to force surrender.” PHOTO/Japan Focus
Most important thought: I’m sick and tired of this thing called “patriotism”.
The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from “communism”.
General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: “I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country.” 1
P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: “I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country.” 2
Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.” 3
Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: “I did what I thought was right for our country.” 4
At the end of World War II, the United States gave moral lectures to their German prisoners and to the German people on the inadmissibility of pleading that their participation in the holocaust was in obedience to their legitimate government. To prove to them how legally and morally inadmissable this defense was, the World War II allies hanged the leading examples of such patriotic loyalty.
I was once asked after a talk: “Do you love America?” I answered: “No”. After pausing for a few seconds to let that sink in amidst several nervous giggles in the audience, I continued with: “I don’t love any country. I’m a citizen of the world. I love certain principles, like human rights, civil liberties, democracy, an economy which puts people before profits.”
I don’t make much of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Some people equate patriotism with allegiance to one’s country and government or the noble principles they supposedly stand for, while defining nationalism as sentiments of ethno-national superiority. However defined, in practice the psychological and behavioral manifestations of nationalism and patriotism are not easily distinguishable, indeed feeding upon each other.
Howard Zinn called nationalism “a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands. … Patriotism is used to create the illusion of a common interest that everybody in the country has.” 5
Strong feelings of patriotism lie near the surface in the great majority of Americans. They’re buried deeper in the more “liberal” and “sophisticated”, but are almost always reachable, and ignitable.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the mid-19th century French historian, commented about his long stay in the United States: “It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.” 6
George Bush Sr., pardoning former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others in connection with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, said: “First, the common denominator of their motivation — whether their actions were right or wrong — was patriotism.” 7
Continue reading “The Anti-Empire Report”
by NOAM CHOMSKY
The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. Congress has just strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding its offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacking the Middle East and Central Asia. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.
“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.
Z Net for more