30-05-2014 17:42
| Analysis
| Anti-Nuclear
| Social Struggles
| World
When some commentators termed the numerical outcome of the recent Indian election historical, it reminded a bit of the pompous theatrics of North American democracy: There, every election is of “historical” dimension until the next item in the news cycle kicks in. But one can find a grain of truth in the comparison: Like for the current Unitedstates president, Modi´s biggest achievement is not being his predecessor. And with India having tasted gold austerity and women´s liberation, it is an easy temptation for any empty agitator to keep his loyalists happy with frog-marching “bitter clingers” through the global village until the rest of the world has better things to do with its time, such as it is an obvious clue that this very tactic has arrived at a dead end in Unitedstates where the phoney klan blamefest is over and any appearance of charisma finally spent. The farce set to follow the tragedy would be futile from its very outset. But in a deeper sense, the Indian election rather resembles an European pattern: The “winning candidate” is only the second choice, the religious conservative could take the ballot because the openly fascist “first choice winner” was spoiled out of it, in this case though not by splitting the vote along some virtual fault line but by material force of armed insurgency (see May 29, 2013). The place of the assassinated “Salva Judum” leader was taken by a replacement mirroring the same hierarchy in the state religion. Instead of an organiser of genocide came an apologist of genocide. As history knows when the automatic spy planes of imperialism saw that tactic, the first thing they did was to copy it, targeting their guns along succession speculations. The only remarkable thing about the predicted outcome of the Indian election is that the Naxal decided it a year ago.
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29-05-2014 15:07
| Analysis
| Health
| Social Struggles
| Sheffield
| World
Last time we looked at how mass communication technologies were shaped into the propaganda tool that big media is today. This time, a look at how the medical profession has responded to similar systemic pressures, gradually refining technologies and public expectations about physical and mental health so as to buttress the status quo. After Jess Martin's talk on 'disability' we hear Gary Greenberg on the DSM-5. We conclude with an alternative perspective from Tony Wright - that modern society, far from being a healthy norm from which any deviation is suspect, is itself a deeply dysfunctional result of millennia long changes in human brain biochemistry.
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23-05-2014 03:35
| Occupy Everywhere
| Analysis
| Terror War
| World
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was quoted as saying in a briefing to the UN Security Council that the actions of the forces of the Syrian government "far outweigh" the crimes by the “opposition” fighters. However, scrutiny of the statistics of the death toll and the facts of the humanitarian fallout of the conflict tell a different story.
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21-05-2014 00:02
| Analysis
| Anti-Nuclear
| Anti-militarism
| World
For the military-industrial complex it is a lethal menace, such as is sunlight for the ants under a pile of debris that is taken away to make room for a garden: The coming revolution of the political and economic system without which it would only take a few generations to leave nothing but debris of the planet. The environmental cost of war machines are so obviously totally irresponsible once the human consciousness expands across the generational horizon that it is an easy temptation to factor them out of any such calculation in an early stage. It appears perfectly reasonable to put out the debris on the street and treat the land as if it was already gone, so when it is finally being collected for incineration, the renaturation process has yet accumulated some momentum. But the political fallout of three major reactor meltdown incidents which were followed by the missile rampage (Three Mile Island), the fence breakdowns (Chernobyl) and the digital blowback (Fukushima) teaches a different lesson: With every deterioration of the state of the planetary waste, it has become ever more aggressive against its immediate surroundings. Under these circumstances, the disposal service might never arrive and all the efforts put into the garden be wasted to a predictable risk. Hence an analysis of the unsolicited remainder is mandated for the purpose to reduce its amount, its presence and its risks.
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15-05-2014 21:09
| Analysis
| Ecology
| World
Editorial Note: This analysis is being reproduced here for archival reasons because the indymedia site where it first appeared at June 3, 2013 went down or survived neighbouring sites going down in regime attacks. Please see the list at the bottom of this page for current writing and the complete Internationalist Observer archive.
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15-05-2014 21:07
| Analysis
| Anti-militarism
| World
Editorial Note: This analysis is being reproduced here for archival reasons because the indymedia site where it first appeared at May 25, 2013 went down or survived neighbouring sites going down in regime attacks. Please see the list at the bottom of this page for current writing and the complete Internationalist Observer archive.
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12-05-2014 15:03
| Analysis
| Anti-Nuclear
| Ocean Defence
| World
Historically, it is going to be read as the definitive acknowledgement that the “Giant Bike Basket” has failed and the predictions the Tokyo regime would be unsuitable as a tool to clean up its own mess have proven true: The so obviously phoney Japanese “peace initiative” is yet another instance of the observation that when it comes to capitalist states, behind the cry for peace there hide the murderers. Abolitionist movements remember: Because no one in Japan wanted to have the reactors in their backyard, but the regime was too evil to draw the consequence of abstention, the compromise had been to hide them behind a mountain. There they sat on top of a permanent groundwater stream carrying the precipitation captured thereby into the ocean. When the meltdown finally came, it was discovered that no waste-water storage system was sufficient to collect all the contamination and only a reduction of their water intake could stop the toxic clods that once were reactors from forever unloading their deadly cargo into the Pacific. Reflecting the sweatshop architecture conditions of the Nonproliferation treaty, which left the supervision over the Japanese-American disaster to a Japanese diplomat in the “Nuclear Lottery” of the Unitednations organisation, the Tokyo regime ordered the clean-up of the Fukushima disaster to the hierarchy that had produced it and the result was the project of the “Giant Bike Basket.” The hollow structure was projected to be assembled into the ground around the molten reactors, and then frozen by means of the insertion of a refrigerant into the tubes to bring about an emergency clod pool whose water throughput could be regulated. The current situation where it cannot equals a scenario in which the notorious serial killer continues to go around – just because the regime has proven to be too dumb to understand the effects of Natural water cycles, the contamination, proliferation and worldwide lethal effects thereof go on. When now, without being able to put an end to its disaster, Tokyo is attempting to sell itself as the crystallisation core of world peace, it bears all the hallmarks of replacement psychology – a “Japanese peace” would be a radiological catastrophe.
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11-05-2014 02:09
| Analysis
| History
| Social Struggles
| Sheffield
| World
This week, a look at the CCM, how the corporate media is commercially controlled - how large money successfully shapes its output. We adapt Jean-Phillipe Lemay's Shadows of Liberty, followed by an excerpted speech by Jeremy Scahill on war crimes carried out by the US but unreported in USA by the large media corporations.
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10-05-2014 05:58
| Occupy Everywhere
| Analysis
| Palestine
| World
Asian-Israeli exchanges deprived Israel of an influential incentive for making peace. They should have been at least postponed as an Asian prize for ending the Israeli military occupation of Arab lands in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
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04-05-2014 15:02
| Analysis
| Culture
| Social Struggles
| World
The future, according to the book, begins only when the false totality of the present is no more. If there was no such thing then there would be no such discontinuity, but since there is there is. On the other hand, the past is not over until the false consciousness of capitalism becomes a totality, and if it does not go away for that it may have something in common with the former. The pivot on the false totality that the two can pursue together, as the tell-tale narrators of market ideology would describe it in their vocabulary, is already a reality putting severe pressure on the military-industrial complex. With Boko Haram having entered the global war on capitalism with a doctrine of open tactical mimicry of the useless suicide army, it became an undeniable fact that the Atlantic Divide is not merely an European matter, but an African one as well. Otherwise it would have to be called Northatlantic Divide but obviously that is not the whole truth. The divide also finds expression in the fact that internal divisions which are remarkably dominant on the American side do not play any role on its Pangaean one. The nervous reactions of canary factions in the military-industrial complex demonstrate that from the Southern side as well, it is not merely a local rejection of imperialism but one yearning for it to be cleared out of the entire hemisphere. If imperialism was a patient, which it is not – it is the disease and Earth is the patient – then its military bases could be seen as hospitals. But even in the few instances where they are, actually they are not, since they do not heal it.
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01-05-2014 12:42
| Analysis
| Social Struggles
| Workers' Movements
| World
WITH only two years left in his term as he now enters his fourth year in office, President Aquino could now be described as either unwilling or unable to make the country’s much-hyped economic growth inclusive.
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30-04-2014 11:07
| Analysis
| Anti-militarism
| Social Struggles
| World
The small window of opportunity to forge an independent foreign policy that the Philippines gained with the expulsion of the US bases in 1992 will disappear with the impending signing of the Agreement on Enhanced Defense Cooperation with the US.
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25-04-2014 08:56
| Analysis
| Repression
| Workers' Movements
| World
BREAKING NEWS Eastern Ukraine, 25th April 2014. Workers in 5 mines belonging to the strategic coal basin around Krasnodon (Eastern Ukrainian Oblast of Lugansk) are on strike since 22nd April. Just one hour ago official media confirms, that public transport and other sectors in town have joint the strike in solidarity
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20-04-2014 11:43
| Analysis
| History
| Terror War
| Sheffield
| World
We conclude Massimo Mazzucco's film, The New Pearl Harbor, looking this time at the remarkable circumstances surrounding the instantaneous freefall collapse of 3 steel framed skyscrapers (the first such collapses in history, happening largely in freefall as even NIST was forced eventually to admit).
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18-04-2014 06:49
| Occupy Everywhere
| Analysis
| World
The Saudis could not trust the US’ “regime change” strategy in the region, which depends on the Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) as an instrument of change, sponsored by a regional rival like Turkey and a co-member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), like Qatar, which has been for long contesting the Saudi leadership of the GCC, the Saudi leading role in Arab politics and the Saudi political representation of Sunni Muslims.
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16-04-2014 16:23
| Analysis
| Policing
| Social Struggles
| London
| World
The London Met Police is reported by Wednesday's Guardian (16 April 2014) web site and by the Evening Standard to have found 'no evidence' of criminality in Tower Hamlets Council.
There will therefore be no investigation by the Police into Tower Hamlets Council, say those reports.
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09-04-2014 08:55
| Occupy Everywhere
| Analysis
| Anti-militarism
| World
Peaceful protesters were sidelined to oblivion. More than three years of bloodshed left no room for moderates. “Regime change” by force from outside the country, along the Iraqi and Libyan lines, has proved a failure. U.S. and western calls for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down is now a faint cry that can hardly be heard.
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08-04-2014 16:56
| Analysis
| Anti-militarism
| Globalisation
| World
If the people of the world were a happy family, then the so-called Atlantic relationship would be the nasty generation conflict dragging on at the extent of everyone else. But it is not so, since a kid that takes a sweet from the kitchen jar is harmless fun while a politician who facilitates a corrupt business deal is a threat to many lives. Though every aspect in the comparison is being scaled in size, the margin of inefficiency for a lethal failure to occur remains the same but takes quite a different percentage in the two scenarios. While the occasional hungry kid cannot loot the kitchen that much that anyone starves, already a little monetary incentive taken by a politician can cost the lives of a possibly unlimited number of people. For the purpose of an evaluation of the appropriateness of leniency that comparison is just unsuitable, since any shared criterion between the two situations would only amount to an attempt to balance false negatives with false positives. The organisation of large populations requires different structures than that of small ones, but that challenge is proven to be shrinkable to the effort of organisation among large numbers of small populations. The mathematical illusion of demographic scalability however does not add up any other than to a systematic failure to resolve the conflict. This gives the Atlantic divide a kind of surreal notion, since unless collapse of the centralist structure has occurred on either side this specific illusion of it cannot not be expected to disappear. But the contradiction in that relationship is widening, and that makes it more likely for the most favourable scenario to occur. It could also be said that the parting of ways between the two hemispheres is the necessary precondition for humanity to survive the era of unsaturated growth at whose end the logic of sustainable sustainability is locating us. Being its oldest toxic legacy, the deepening of the Atlantic divide signifies the finiteness of that era.
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