Thursday, May 24th 2012
As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans. Sign the petition.
John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
Excellent 12 minute news segment from the Real News on Haiti’s history of poverty, which includes a critical examination of how mainstream media is reporting this history without mentioning the impact that various foreign interventions has had on the country.
According to Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment Haiti’s poverty can be explained as a series of foreign responses to the independence and strength of the Haitian people, but since the media doesn’t acknowledge this, they are forced to propose weakness and bad luck as the sources of Haiti’s poverty.
Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, is talking about "Revolution" :
"So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life - it is what Zizek would call the "spontaneous unreflective ideology" of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively - the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over."
Over the years, I have conducted many investigations into dubious corporate practices for newspapers, radio and television programmes and the trail always leads to tax havens, which hold no public information about the individuals behind those companies. The registered address is about the only publicly available information. One building in the Cayman Islands, a UK overseas territory, is the registered address of 18,857 corporations. British Virgin Islands, another UK overseas territory, with a population of 23,000 has more than 813,000 registered companies, the highest number per capita in the world. These companies rarely carry out any trade in their locales, but facilitate secrecy to their owners.
A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.
Reports on the exodus of recent immigrants from Ireland serve an important political purpose. The Irish government has long acted under the illusion of temporary immigrants, motivated solely by economic considerations. When work dries up, the assumption is that these economic migrants will leave the country. This illusion negates the need for any long-term planning around migration or integration. Yet, as the CSO report ultimately shows, reports of an immigrant exodus from Ireland are premature. Instead, many recent immigrants continue to stay in Ireland – trapped, perhaps, in negative equity in the country’s ghost estates. We need to realize that tales of their mass departure are just that – empty tales, with no basis in fact.
I think it will become clear that Rohmer was one of a handful of really great filmmakers of the last half-century. I can’t think of a greater. His movies will be seen as aspects of a single enterprise in how they reply to one another and how each further variation deepens the effect of what came before. The rigorousness with which their pleasures are achieved will become more apparent if all the films are seen together. The near-absence of background music in Rohmer’s films has often been remarked on (although on closer examination the work is filled with illuminating fragments of ambient sound, musical and otherwise)—but symphonic underscoring was unnecessary in films so musical in their rhythms. He makes his own music with time itself. Likewise his notoriously dialogue-filled movies, from My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee on, are perhaps most remarkable for their evocation of silence. There is no pause like a Rohmerian pause.
There has been some reference to the Dirt Inquiry as a possible model for the inquiry into the financial crisis. But the fact is that the investigative work in that inquiry was done by the C&AG. An Oireachtas Committee cannot be a Court of Judgement on private individuals and cannot find on matters of fact. That is why the Government has decided to adopt the Commission of Inquiry mechanism.
As noted on Cedar Lounge Revolution, a stunning story about how big tabacco manufacturers used a front organisation to lobby intensively to shape EU policy making.
One of the biggest tobacco manufacturers in the world led a group of chemical, food, oil, pharmaceutical and other firms in a successful long-term lobbying strategy to shape European Union policy making in their favour, a new study says.
After trawling through some 700 internal documents from British American Tobacco (BAT), academics at the University of Bath and University of Edinburgh say they have found evidence that the cigarette giant in the mid-1990s teamed up with the European Policy Centre, the prominent Brussels think-tank, to create a front group to ensure that the EU framework for evaluating policy options emphasised business interests at the expense of public health.
And
The form of impact assessment pushed in this period by BAT and its front group - and the one ultimately embraced by the EU via changes to the EU Treaty in the Treaty of Amsterdam - was so desired, according to the survey, because they believed that it would hamper the introduction of public smoking restrictions and those against tobacco advertising.
The scientists uncovered BAT documents that revealed that senior managers had learnt that this form of impact assessment had been successfully used by cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris in the US for the same purposes.
