Indonesia

Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)

November 26, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - On TV, upon the magazine rack, in schools, and on billboards around the country, the coming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is being heralded everywhere across Southeast Asia. Upon ASEAN's official website, the AEC is described as: 

By ANDRE VLTCHEK | CounterPunch | November 21, 2014 Perhaps you thought that the security at the Atlanta or Newark, or Dallas airports is bad, obnoxious, the worst in the world… Think twice… Of course it all began there, in the United States, from the first glory days of that hypocritical and deranged “War On […]

With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public.
— Julian Assange, July 29, 2014

By William R. Polk | Consortium News | May 30, 2014

Indonesians are no amateurs when it comes to mass murder and genocides. They managed to slaughter with their bare hands, between 1 and 3 million people in 1965/66, mainly those who belonged to the educated class, and of course the Communists, teachers, artists and members of the Chinese minority.

Righting wrongs. It’s often quite subjective. In the United States it’s the province of fantasy superheroes or government torturers. Elsewhere it took the form of a window decal I was too bashful to photograph, a life-sized bin Laden standing tall with that hebephrenic grin and three airliners zooming toward us over his head, fluffy contrails in perspective.

Everywhere you look in the West, you find political pygmies rather than statesmen. In France, we see a pathetic man whose own people intensely dislike him, François Hollande, attempt to speak as though he were something other than a dry, pompous school teacher-like purveyor of American views. Almost forgotten are the strong, independent voices of a de Gaulle or a Chirac.

She was holding on to a supporting beam of her timeworn and now badly damaged house. Her name is Ibu Pinarti, and she is most likely over 80 years old, although perhaps she does not even know her real age, as so many women in Indonesian kampungs, villages, do not know.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing was projected on the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Thursday in an action by the East Timor and Indonesian Action Network. The group is calling on the World Bank to acknowledge its role in the 1965 military coup in Indonesia that lead to the massacre of an estimated one million civilians. The World Bank helped prop up the corrupt government of Suharto, the general who lead the coup and ordered the mass killings.