Tag Archives | Geopolitics & Globalization

The Industry of Hunger

By Jin_TheNinja on January 9, 2012 in News 11

Photo: Tawheed Manzoor (CC)

Vandana Shiva on Al Jazeera English explains how, as mega-chains venture into industrial farming, they have created an epidemic of hunger- and generated billions in profit.

New Delhi, India – In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods.

But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement.

… Read the rest

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The Pentagon’s Invisible Third-World Army

By JacobSloan on July 7, 2011 in News 9

When enlistment is down, what’s the military to do? Outsource. Seventy thousand of the people in the Pentagon’s war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not U.S. soldiers, but “third-country nationals” — Filipinos launder our soldiers’ uniforms, Bosnians repair electrical grids, Indians serve up iced lattes. Many say they are being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law, the New Yorker reports:

In the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”. And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S.

… Read the rest

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A Bomb At Bilderberg 2011

By majestic on June 13, 2011 in News 1

The most entertaining reporting from the Bilderberg conferences is usually filed by Charlie Skelton on his Guardian blog. In one of his latest entries he reveals that someone tried to bomb the current meeting in Switzerland. Well, maybe it was a bomb…

Just when you thought the annual four-day Bilderberg conference couldn’t get any more exciting, a policeman goes and finds a bomb. Or at least, he went and found a “tubular device” that at certain angles, if you squinted a bit, looked sort of like a bomb. By that well known bomb manufacturer – Pringles.

All of a sudden the shout went up, out came the handcuffs, and two men (that nobody recognized) were bustled into custody. We’re still trying to find out who they were or what they’re charged with. Ownership of a tubular device is still frowned on in Switzerland. That’s why Toblerone is shaped like that.

In light of this new tubular threat patrols were stepped up, sniffer dogs began sniffing about, and everyone was moved a bit further back from the hotel.

… Read the rest

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U.S. Brings Subversive Portable Internet To Enemy Territories

By majestic on June 12, 2011 in News 2

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Photo: Zapyon (CC)

Looks like Uncle Sam still has some tech tricks up his sleeve, unveiled for the New York Times by James Glanz and John Markoff:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

… Read the rest

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Do UFOs Now Prefer To Visit Asia?

By JacobSloan on June 1, 2011 in News 6

We already knew that China will soon overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, but today comes news that we have fallen behind the East in a more important area, reports the Wall Street Journal:

Trackers at the Mutual UFO Network, one of the oldest unidentified-flying-object research organizations in this world, say that since the slump of the Western banking system in 2008, UFO sightings among Asia’s fast-growing economies have accelerated. Suspicious UFOs have shut down airports in China, buzzed resorts in Borneo and lit up the night sky in Myanmar.

“It’s not surprising, really,” says Debhanom Muangman, a 75-year-old Harvard-educated physician and one of Thailand’s leading UFO investigators. “Aliens have been coming to Asia for decades, but now they sense a change. This is where the progressive countries are, so they are coming here much more often now.”

Still, these aren’t American-style alien encounters. The aliens that Thai researchers say they have encountered bear little resemblance to the typical creatures depicted in Hollywood films, which have included resource-grabbing monsters or eerily calm, environmentally friendly creatures.

… Read the rest

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Are We Entering A New Age Of Feudalism?

By JacobSloan on May 10, 2011 in News 40

Everything old is new again. Current makes note of the growing belief that, in the era of postindustrial perma-recession, our sociopolitical structures increasingly resemble those that were found in feudalist societies — a concept called neofeudalism:

Among the issues claimed to be associated with the idea of neofeudalism in contemporary society are class stratification, globalization, mass immigration/illegal immigration, open borders policies, multinational corporations, and “neo-corporatism.”

… Read the rest

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Capital Is The Real Of Our Lives

By JacobSloan on May 4, 2011 in News 15

Via Adbusters‘s Kick It Over project, philosopher Slavoj Zizek sums up the reality that the financial meltdown laid bare:

Although we always recognized the urgency of the problems, when we were fighting AIDS, hunger, water shortages, global warming, and so on, there always seemed to be time to reflect, to postpone decisions (recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of world leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, was that they would meet again in two years to continue their talks…). But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of an unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the starving children…all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action.

Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?

… Read the rest

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IMF Says China To Surpass United States In 2016

By majestic on April 25, 2011 in News 7

China will become the world’s number one economy — and therefore most powerful nation — by 2016. Brett Arends provides some analysis at Marketwatch:

The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S.

… Read the rest

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China ‘To Pass United States In Science’ In Two Years

By JacobSloan on March 30, 2011 in News 51

For years we were warned that American students trailed other nations’ in math and science — now the chickens have come home to roost. The BBC reports that in 2013 China will pass the United States as the global leader in scientific output. But can scientific progress really be measured? And, must it be viewed as a battle between nations? This issue may be as much about Western fears as anything else:

The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected.

That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy. The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan. The figures are based on the papers published in recognized international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

… Read the rest

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The World As A Theater Of The Absurd

By Danny Schechter on March 25, 2011 in News 14

It’s been a long time since I sat in a college literature class and learned about the theater of the absurd, the work of great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Camus, among others. Their writing was their way of reacting to a world that seemed out of control and maybe out of its mind.

Wikipedia tells us “It expressed the belief that, in a Godless universe, human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.”

Significantly, the word theater is used for places putting on plays and countries conducting wars. The battlefield is considered as much a “theater” as Broadway.

Without waxing philosophically and commenting on the many unknowns that so obsessed Donald Rumsfeld, our modern day philosopher king of the Pentagonian School, one has to abandon logic and rationality to try to make sense out of what is happening in front of our eyes.… Read the rest

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