Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow.1 While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:
… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
One of the main reasons that so many millions of basically good and decent people at first volunteered, and then complied with being conscripted, to take part in one of the greatest mass abominations in human history, known as the First World War, was ignorance.
Leading management consultants, top government officials and prominent financial journalists are proposing, what they dub, “labor reforms” as the solution for double-digit unemployment and underemployment, economic stagnation and the decline of capital investments.
“Labor Reform” as the Concentration of Power and Profits
First of all, the term “labor reform” is just a euphemism for labor regression, the reversal of laws and practices that workers and employees secured through decades of struggle against employers.
On July 4, the Washington Post headlined, “With Democrats split on inequality issues, Obama shifts talk away from income gap,” and Zachary Goldfarb summed up by saying that “Obama’s public statements suggest he is skeptical that members of either party would embrace some of the policies aimed squarely at reducing income inequality, such as taxing wealthier Americans in order to give more benefits to p
There is no question that over the past decade and a half, Europe, the US, and Israel have engaged in a series of bloody wars, inequalities have increased throughout the globe, economic crisis has become endemic and, more recently, right-wing military and civilian regimes have swept to power throughout Asia, North Africa, Europe and Canada.
Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation–an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.
The United Nations is far from perfect, but it’s real and suggests an embryonic solution to most of the planet’s worst problems.
The landslide election earlier this month of Narendra Modi does not bode well for the 800 million or so Indians living in destitution, or the 120 million minority Muslims in the country, or the Adivasi (indigenous) people and Dalit groups sitting on resource-rich land in Orissa, Jharkhand and elsewhere. He may well come from a humble background, but Mr. Modi’s loyalties lie firmly with the corporations of India, not the chai wallahs working the train station at Vadnagar in Gujarat State like his father once did.
SAO PAULO — One of the defining images of the World Cup, so far, has been the sight of the Mannschaft — aka the German team — fraternizing with Pataxo Indians a few hundred meters away from the spot where Brazil was “discovered” in 1500. Call it a European re-discovery of the exotic tropics.
