Dokumentar: The End of Poverty?

We're Not Broke, Just Twisted: Extreme Wealth Inequality in America.

Dagens Citat: John Stuart Mill.

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Why Privacy Matters.

Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University, has a highly recommendable essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website in which he refutes the most common argument against privacy, namely "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

Monsanto pesticide found to infect plants with AIDS-like disease.

Research conducted by a team of senior plant and animal scientists found that Monsanto's glyphosate chemical, which is the primary ingredient in its popular RoundUp herbicide formula, appears responsible for infecting plants with an AIDS-like syndrome that destroys their immunity, blocks their absorption of certain vitamins and minerals, and eventually kills them.

Why Nuclear Energy Isn't Going to Power the World.

A quite interesting analysis by Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia, concludes that nuclear energy isn't a very promising alternative to the fossil fuel based economy due to a number of factors.

[Research]: Food Speculation.

The following is a bit of research clearly indicating that economic liberalism in practice - in the form of speculation in food prices - leads to starvation and misery for the most impoverished people on the planet.



Economic Times August 8 2008: "Speculation behind global commodity price rise."

PRI August 9 2008: "Orchestrating Famine – a Must-Read Backgrounder on the Food Crisis."

The Guardian January 24, 2011: "Food Speculation: 'People Die from Hunger While Banks Make a Killing on Food'"

The Guardian, Feburary 05, 2011: "How Banks and Investors are Starving The Third World."

Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011: "How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis."

Al Jazeera English, May 09, 2011: "Glencore: Profiteering from hunger and chaos."

CNN: As food speculators make money, the world's poorest suffer.

Danwatch (23/09/2011): Banker har ingen politik for fødevarespekulation.

Oxfam International Report (October 2011): "Not a Game: Speculation vs Food Security".

Monthly Review (Jan. 2012): Food as a Commodity.

New studies link lowered IQ in children to pesticide exposure.

Three studies undertaken independently, but published simultaneously last month, show that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides — sprayed on crops in the Salinas Valley and used in Harlem and the South Bronx to control cockroaches and other insects — can lower children’s IQ by an average of as much as 7 points. While this may not sound like a lot, it is more than enough to affect a child’s reading and math skills and cause behavioral problems with potentially long-lasting impacts, according to the studies.

Source - Yale Environment 360: From Fields to Inner City, Pesticides Affect Children IQ.

Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World.

Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World

By Jeremy Rifkin

With the passage of health-care reform, President Obama has turned his attention to reforming education in America. In his State of the Union Message, he called for a significant increase in support for his "Educate to Innovate" campaign, which puts renewed emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to ensure "our nation's economic competitiveness." The goal, according to the White House, is to equip every student with the knowledge that he or she needs to become a productive worker in the global economy.

Maybe it's time to ask the question of whether simply becoming economically productive ought to be the primary mission of American education. Shouldn't we place at least equal attention on developing students' innate empathic drives, so that we can prepare the next generation to think and act as part of a global family in a shared biosphere?

The biosphere is the narrow band, from the ocean floor to outer space, where living creatures and the earth's geochemical processes interact to sustain one another. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an indivisible organism. The continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and the geochemical processes are what ensure the survival of the planetary organism and life on earth. The issue of what kind of education students should be getting is particularly relevant today, as humanity attempts to cobble together a sustainable global society in time to avert potentially catastrophic climate change.

When we talk about revolutionizing the way our students learn, we must understand the larger context that sets the framework for fundamental changes in our notions about education. Ultimately, our ideas about education flow from our perceptions about reality and our concepts of nature—especially our assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey—which become institutionalized in our educational processes. What we really teach, at any given time, is the consciousness of an era.

For example, at the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state, Enlightenment philosophers—with some exceptions—saw people as rational, autonomous agents, driven by utilitarian desires and material interests. To bring out those qualities, educators established an educational system along the same lines.

Unfortunately, our system today is still largely mired in those outdated assumptions. The classroom is a microcosm of the factory system, market forces, and nation-state governance. Students have been taught to think of "knowledge as power" and to regard learning as an asset one acquires to advance one's material self-interest. The educational process emphasizes autonomous learning—sharing knowledge is considered cheating—and the mission is to produce efficient and productive workers for the market economy. While those Enlightenment assumptions have provided the intellectual motivation and justification for a vast expansion of wealth for many people, they have also left the earth's ecosystems in shambles, with ominous consequences for our species' future.

Of course, we know that the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment are not set in stone. Great changes in human consciousness occur when new, more-complex energy regimes arise, making possible more-interdependent and complex social arrangements. Coordinating those civilizations requires new, more sophisticated communications systems. When energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, human consciousness is altered.

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness. When each of us is responsible for harnessing the earth's renewable energy in the small swath of the biosphere where we dwell, but we also realize that our survival and well-being depend on sharing our energy across continental land masses, we come to see our inseparable ecological relationship to one another and our fellow species.

That new understanding coincides with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neurocognitive science, and child development that reveal that people are biologically predisposed to be empathic—that our core nature is not rational, detached, acquisitive, aggressive, and narcissistic, but affectionate, highly social, cooperative, and interdependent. Homo sapiens is giving way to Homo empathicus. Historians tell us that empathy is the social glue that allows increasingly individualized and diverse populations to forge bonds of solidarity across broader domains so that society can cohere as a whole. To empathize is to civilize.

Empathy has evolved over history. In forager-hunter societies, empathy rarely went beyond tribal blood ties. In the great agricultural age, empathy extended past blood ties to associational ties based on religious identification. Jews began to empathize with fellow Jews as if in an extended family, Christians began empathizing with fellow Christian, Muslims with Muslims, and so on. In the Industrial Age, with the emergence of the modern nation-state, empathy extended once again, this time to people of like-minded national identities. Americans began to empathize with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese. Today empathy is beginning to stretch beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We are coming to see the biosphere as our indivisible community, and our fellow creatures as our extended evolutionary family.

The realization that we are an empathic species, that empathy has evolved over history, and that we are as interconnected in the biosphere as we are in the blogosphere, has profound implications for rethinking the mission of education. New teaching models designed to transform education from a competitive contest to a collaborative and empathic learning experience are emerging as schools and colleges try to reach a generation that has grown up on the Internet and is used to interacting in open social networks where information is shared rather than hoarded. The traditional assumption that "knowledge is power," and is used for personal gain, is being subsumed by the notion that knowledge is an expression of the shared responsibilities for the collective well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole.

Classrooms could become laboratories for preparing young people for biosphere consciousness. Students are already becoming aware that the way they live leaves an ecological footprint, affecting the lives of every other human being, our fellow creatures, and the earth we inhabit together. They learn, for example, that the wasteful use of energy in the family automobile or home results in an increase of carbon-dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The rise in the earth's temperature that follows can lead to less rainfall and more droughts in other parts of the world, adversely affecting food production and putting more of the world's poor at risk of malnutrition and even starvation.

The new sense of biosphere interconnectivity and responsibility goes hand-in-hand with empathy workshops and courses that help students draw global emotional connections in the same way that environmental curricula help them draw global ecological connections. Empathy curricula now exist in 18 states. In many schools, empathy curricula start as early as first grade.

One interesting example is the Roots of Empathy project, begun by a Canadian educator, Mary Gordon, which has been introduced into first through eighth grades across Canada. A mother and her baby visit the classroom once a month for a school year. Students are asked to closely watch their interaction, especially how they communicate and respond to each other. Over the course of the year, the children experience the baby and her mother as unique people with needs and desires for affiliation and affection not unlike their own. They become attuned to reading the baby's feelings and develop an empathic relationship with the baby and the mother. Children come to learn about emotional literacy—which Gordon defines as "the ability to find our humanity in one another."

Putting students into direct emotional contact with the parent-child attachment process and empathic bond creates "citizens of the world—children who are developing empathic ethics and a sense of social responsibility that takes the position that we all share the same lifeboat," Gordon argues. "These are the children who will build a more caring, peaceful and civil society, child by child."

The newly emerging awareness of global ecological and emotional interconnectivity is accompanied by a revolution in the way students learn. The traditional top-down approach to teaching is giving way to a distributed and collaborative educational experience designed to instill a sense of the shared nature of knowledge. Intelligence, in the new way of thinking, is not something one inherits or a resource one accumulates, but, rather, an experience that is shared among people.

Such trends are taking education beyond the confines of the classroom to a global learning environment in cyberspace. The extension of the classroom's central nervous system to embrace the whole of civilization exposes students to their peers in widely different cultures, allowing empathic sensibility to expand and deepen. Education becomes a truly planetary experience.

The global extension of learning environments in cyberspace is being matched by the local extension of learning environments in school neighborhoods. The walls separating classrooms and communities are breaking down. In the past 20 years, American high schools and colleges have introduced service-learning programs into the curriculum—a deeply collaborative learning experience. The exposure to diverse people from various walks of life has spurred an empathic surge among the nation's young people. Studies indicate that many students experience a deep maturing of empathic sensibility by being thrust into unfamiliar environments where they are called upon to reach out and assist others. Such experiences are often life-changing, affecting students' sense of what gives their lives meaning.

Although not yet the norm, more classrooms at the college and secondary-school levels are also being transformed, at least for small periods of time, into distributed-learning environments. It's not uncommon for large class groups to be divided into work groups, which are then given collaborative work assignments. The students later reconvene in plenary sessions where they share their findings, generally in the form of group reports.

Distributed and collaborative education begins with the premise that the combined wisdom of the group, more often than not, is greater than the expertise of any given member, and that by learning together, the group advances its collective knowledge as well as that of each member. The value of distributed and collaborative education first came to light in the 1950s, in research conducted by M.L.J. Abercrombie at the University College London Hospitals. Dr. Abercrombie observed that when medical students worked together in small groups to diagnose patients, they were able to more quickly and accurately assess a patient's medical condition than when they diagnosed alone. The collaborative context allowed students the opportunity to challenge one another's assumptions, build on one another's ideas and insights, and come to a negotiated consensus regarding the patient's situation.

In distributed and collaborative learning environments, the process becomes as important as the product. The old hierarchical model of learning is replaced by network ways of organizing knowledge. Learning becomes less about pounding facts into individual students' brains and more about how to think collaboratively and critically. To be effective, collaborative learning requires mutual respect among all the players involved, a willingness to listen to others' perspectives, being open to criticism and a desire to share knowledge, and being responsible for and accountable to the group as a whole.

Distributed and collaborative learning favors interdisciplinary teaching and multicultural studies. The traditional reductionist approach to the study of phenomena is beginning to give way to the pursuit of "big picture" questions about the nature of reality and the meaning of existence—which require a more interdisciplinary perspective. Cross-disciplinary academic associations, journals, and curricula have proliferated in recent years, reflecting the burgeoning interest in the interconnectedness of knowledge. A younger generation of scholars is crossing traditional academic boundaries to create more-integrated fields of research. Several hundred interdisciplinary fields, like behavioral economics, eco-psychology, social history, eco-philosophy, biomedical ethics, and social entrepreneurship, are shaking up the academy and portending a paradigm shift in the educational process.

Meanwhile, the globalization of education has brought together people from diverse cultures, each with an anthropological point of reference. The result is a plethora of fresh ways of studying phenomena, each conditioned by a different cultural history and narrative. By approaching a study area from the perspectives of a number of academic disciplines and cultural perspectives, students learn to become open-minded and able to view phenomenon from more than one view.

Distributed and collaborative learning, with its emphasis on mindfulness, attunement to others, nonjudgmental interactions, acknowledgment of each person's unique contributions, and recognition of the importance of deep participation, can't help but foster critical thinking skills and greater empathic engagement. In that sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression, which, in turn, enriches the educational process.

If our primary nature is Homo empathicus, and the biosphere is the larger indivisible community where we and our fellow creatures dwell, then the mission of education ought to be dedicated, at least in part, to the task of bringing out our core being, so that we can optimize our full potential not only as productive workers in the marketplace but, more important, as empathic human beings in the biosphere. Our nation and our schools and universities should invest in distributed and collaborative learning experiences —curricula emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and geochemical processes in the biosphere, empathy courses that promote social behavior, cyberspace classes connecting students around the globe, service-learning programs in communities, sharing knowledge in peer groups, and interdisciplinary and multicultural studies—with the objective of nurturing students' empathic nature. While no one would disparage President Obama's effort to prepare our young people for the challenges they face in a global economy, the bigger task is to prepare students to live on a peaceful sustainable planet.


Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher-Penguin), and a senior lecturer at the Wharton School's executive-education program at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is adapted from his recent addresses to the annual meeting of the College Board and the British Royal Society for the Arts.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Om Liberalismen.

En af liberalismens grundtanker er individualismen, nærmere bestemt den fejlagtige idé, at individet er adskilt fra og hævet over naturen, som i den liberalistiske optik egentlig mestendels er at betragte som et stort ressourcelager, som individer kan udnytte så meget de måtte ønske det mhp. at vinde personlige materielle fordele og dermed skabe vækst i økonomien, en vækst man tilsyneladende mener bør fortsætte i det uendelige.

Denne kortslutning kunne ganske vist undskyldes i det 18. århundrede, men som ethvert intelligent menneske i dag kan regne ud, så kan der ikke eksistere uendelig økonomisk vækst på en endelig planet med et endeligt antal ressourcer, hvorfor tanken om individet som en størrelse der er adskilt fra naturen og hævet over den, i dag må siges at være en utilgivelig dumhed.

At denne liberalistiske grundtanke er ensbetydende med vold og tvang er ikke svær at se (i det mindste for folk som ikke er liberalister): Artsudryddelse, overfiskeri, afskovning, udpining, menneskeskabt global opvarmning og omfattende forurening er alle konsekvenser af denne bizarre logik og det siger sig selv, at følgevirkningerne af ovennævnte fænomener er omfattende lidelse og destruktion af habitater for både dyr og mennesker.

Liberalismen er det ideologiske grundlag for den industrialiserede kapitalistiske civilisation, som jo altså er global, hvorfor det ikke betyder det store om et givent land har en liberalistisk politisk tradition, så længe det økonomiske system er kapitalistisk. Idéen om uendelig vækst, individet der er hævet over naturen og biosfæren som et rent ressourcelager er alle liberalistiske i deres ophav, men i dag så indlejrede i den globaliserede kapitalistiske logik, at man kan have svært ved at se skoven for bare træer.

Liberalister er ganske rigtigt meget frihedsorienterede i deres egen selvforståelse, men denne er sjældent forenelig med hvad man rent faktisk støtter op om. Man ser tydeligt i eksempelvis Liberal Alliance, hvad det er for en frihed man mestendels ønsker sig, nemlig den økonomiske frihed til at akkumulere i det uendelige og simultant friheden fra at være bundet af nogen former for kollektiv ansvarlighed hvad ressourcefordeling angår. Man har altså ikke noget problem med at støtte op om regeringen og deres støtteparti, som i alle henseender har forsøgt at indskrænke den enkeltes frihed gennem snart ti år, så længe man kan få nogle politikker gennemført, som sørger for, at nogle af de rigeste mennesker der nogensinde har levet, får mulighed for at betale lidt mindre i skat. Det er nemlig den største uretfærdighed, at man ikke har friheden til at spise guldbelagt kaviar hver dag, mens mange tusinder dør dagligt af sult.

Liberalister har ikke noget problem med totalitære magtkonstruktioner, så længe disse udelukkende befinder sig i den økonomiske sfære. De fleste liberalister mener ikke der er nogen grund til at regulere multinationale selskaber, der jo skal være frie til at akkumulere i det uendelige, da dette skaber den økonomiske vækst som man mener er et ubetinget gode. Man støtter altså op om en verdensøkonomi der er fuldstændig domineret af multinationale selskaber som i deres organisationsstrukturer er bygget som totalitære stater. I disse selskaber går kommandolinjen kun en vej, nemlig oppefra og ned og ordrer fra toppen skal følges slavisk eller også finder man sig et andet sted at være. I den liberalistiske optik er dette okay da der ikke er tale om tvang, forstået på den måde, at virksomhederne ikke tvinger nogen til at arbejde for sig, hvorfor de arbejdende altså er gået frivilligt med til de forhold de nu engang er underlagt på deres arbejdsplads.

Den enes frihed er den andens ufrihed på en endelig planet bestående af endelige ressourcer. Opkøber de formuende landjorden i et fattigt land, hvilket sker lige nu mange steder i Afrika, vil det selvsagt begrænse andres muligheder for at komme til at blive jordbesiddende, da prisen uundgåeligt vil stige. Har nogle så mange penge, at de kan købe sig til indflydelse og få indført de politikker som er mest gavnlige for deres egoistiske interesser, vil det selvsagt yde strukturel vold på alle de som ikke samtidig kan få deres interesser repræsenteret. Når liberalister altså postulerer, at de er frihedens vogtere er det en sandhed med nogle ret alvorlige modifikationer, idet liberalismens ideologi når den indlejres i den økonomiske tænkning, alt for ofte er årsag til det komplet modsatte, nemlig tvang og vold.

Two new speeches by Noam Chomsky

Dokumentar: Fuel.

Dokumentar: END:CIV - Resist or Die.

Dokumentar: Dirt!

The Doha Debates: Should Arab Governments Let NATO Deal with Libya?

Dagens Citat: Martin Luther King jr.

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Mordet på Osama Bin Laden.

Angrebet på tvillingetårnene den 11. september 2001 var det man i amerikanske efterretningscirkler kalder 'blowback' dvs. en uintenderet konsekvens af den førte politik. Nærmere bestemt en konsekvens af træningen og bevæbningen af de hellige islamiske krigere (mujaheedin) som man flittigt anvendte i proxy-krigen mod Sovjetunionen i Afghanistan i 1980'erne. Det var nemlig i disse år, at Osama bin Laden modtog sin militære træning, sammen med titusinder af andre som blev trænet i de træningslejre som den pakistanske efterretningstjeneste ISI opførte i samarbejde med CIA, hvilket senere skulle komme til at skabe grundlaget for såvel Al Qaeda som Taliban.

Efter krigen i Afghanistan rejste Osama Bin Laden tilbage til Saudi-Arabien, hvor han med stor sandsynlighed blev påvirket af de tanker som skulle forme hans anti-vestlige sindelag. Bin Laden anså Israels besættelse af Jerusalem, islams tredjehelligste by, som et voldsomt zionistisk angreb på islam og han havde yderligere meget lidt tilovers for den vestlige levevis og ønskede derfor at bekæmpe alle former for vestliggørelse af den islamiske verden.

Da Saddam Hussein indtog Kuwait spurgte Bin Laden det saudi-arabiske kongehus om tilladelse til at bekæmpe Saddam Hussein med de hellige krigere han havde allieret sig med i Afghanistan. Det havde man hos landets ledelse svært ved at se den lysende idé i og da det Saudi-Arabiske styre valgte at støtte op om USA under den første golfkrig, forlod han landet i vrede og flyttede til Sudan hvor han begyndte sin terroristkarriere. Da den sudanesiske jord begyndte at brænde under ham flyttede han sine aktiviteter tilbage til Afghanistan hvor han genoptog kontakten til sine hellige krigervenner og blev ganske tæt tilknyttet til Talibans daværende leder Mullah Omar. Fast Forward til 9-11.

Det mest vellykkede terrorangreb i historien fremprovokerede en hurtig amerikansk respons, idet man som bekendt gik i krig med Afghanistan, hvilket var nøjagtig hvad terrornetværket ønskede allermest, idet Al Qaedas strategi var at lokke USA ud i en langvarig udmattelseskrig, i forhåbning om, at denne ultimativt skulle få samme konsekvenser for supermagten, som krigen i Afghanistan i 1980'erne fik for USSR, nemlig økonomisk kollaps, forårsaget af hvad der over tid ville blive ubetalelige krigsomkostninger. Hvad man imidlertid nok ikke havde forventet i den tidlige del af det nye årtusinde var, at USA blot to år senere invaderede endnu et muslimsk land, men endnu engang var den amerikanske udenrigspolitik vand på Al Qaedas mølle, for invasionen skabte grundlaget for en omfattende rekruttering i Irak, hvor unge irakiske mænd stod i kø for at bekæmpe invasionsmagterne med alle mulige midler.

Bin Laden, hans medsammensvorne og deres sympatisører har hele tiden været en marginal gruppering, som langt hovedparten af verdens muslimer har taget afstand fra, ikke desto mindre har man haft held med at sprede de bagvedliggende tanker og strategier i en række lande i Vesten, Mellemøsten og Asien. De mange oprør i mellemøstlige lande hvor regionens muslimer har krævet reformer, frihedsrettigheder og demokratisering indikerer dog, at Al Qaeda ikke har haft held med at sprede deres ideologi i et omfang der vil gå hen og få større betydning for regionens udvikling, i det mindste på kort sigt, tværtimod lader det til at kun meget få bakker op om Al Qaedas ultimative målsætning – genindførelsen af kalifatet.

Al Qaeda har aldrig været en centralt administreret organisation, men snarere et meget løst sammenhængende netværk af ligesindede som kan slutte sig til et sæt af idéer eller principper for voldelig religiøs og politisk oprørskamp mod USA og hegemonens tro støtter i den muslimske verden. Så selvom Al Qaeda har mistet mange af netværkets mest prominente medlemmer og - såvidt vides - alle deres træningslejre, er netværket langt fra afgået ved døden, idet limen der forbinder de involverede snarere er et sæt af idéer end netværkets forskellige personer og et sæt af idéer er ganske enkelt langt sværere at komme til livs end en gruppe af mennesker. Bin Laden var da heller aldrig arkitekten bag netværkets strategiske tænkning, men snarere en art åndelig leder. Den strategiske del - dvs. udformningen af principperne for oprørskampen - har Ayman al-Zawahiri stået for og han er stadig i live, såvidt vi ved.

Spørgsmålet om hvordan Osama Bin Laden har haft held med at gemme sig i en pakistansk by tæt på en militærbase, angiveligt i årevis, uden at den pakistanske stat har været vidende om det, er her ganske interessant, for var det virkelig tilfældet eller har den pakistanske regering i årevis været bekendt med hvor han befandt sig og således dækket over ham? Mange finder det forståeligt nok lidet plausibelt at den pakistanske regering har været så inkompetent. Den indiske forfatter Salman Rushdie går endda så langt som til at kalde Pakistan for en terroriststat og man kan da også let ledes til at frygte, at der i visse voldsforherligende kredse vil blive fremsat krav om yderligere interventioner i landet med udgangspunkt i lignende anklager.

Incitamentet til at bekrige en nation med en atomar våbenkapacitet med udgangspunkt i ovennævnte kritik er imidlertid nok ret begrænset og endvidere bliver det ganske svært at mobilisere støtte til noget sådant under den igangværende økonomiske krise, så det kommer næppe til at ske. Til gengæld har man nok god grund til at frygte, at der vil ske en yderligere optrapning af drone-angreb i Af-Pak regionen, samt yderligere krænkelser af Pakistans territoriale integritet med henvisninger til landets inkompetence (og manglende vilje) ift. til bekæmpelsen af terrorisme. Den opinionsmæssige grobund for yderligere statslige voldshandlinger er i hvert fald ganske god for tiden, for som den amerikanske forfatningsadvokat og systemkritiker Glenn Greenwald udtrykte det i en blogpost forleden: "Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed."

Bevar Fristaden!

De borgerlige har i årtier haft et horn i siden på Christiania.

Det, at man har formået at tage et i årtier ubrugt og forfaldent område i brug til kulturliv, beboelse og samfundsmæssige alternativer og hvad der vel er Danmarks største socialcenter, har alle dage været noget nær umuligt at sluge for de borgerlige.

Under påskud af at ville bekæmpe et ulovligt rusmiddel, som ingen fornuftige mennesker kan forstå hvorfor er illegalt, har man gennem ti år forsøgt sig med at indføre en miniature-udgave af en stærkt repressiv politistat på Christiania: Såkaldt præventive anholdelser og vilkårlige visitationer; mange hundrede uanmeldte politibesøg på Stadens restaurationer; ugentlige magtprojektioner i form af kampklædte betjente i dusinvis der intimiderende vandrer rundt.

Beskeden er svær at tage fejl af: Inordn jer under den statsligt dikterede korrekte levevis eller find jer i at magtens knusende jernnæve griber hele jeres tilværelse i sit kvælertag!

Demonstration i morgen klokken 11 fra Christianshavns Torv

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

The British newspaper The Independent yesterday:

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

Graphic: Iraq's burgeoning oil industry

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time".

BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf's existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world's leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take "big risks" to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day – seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington's main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil.

Mr Muttitt, whose book Fuel on the Fire is published next week, said: "Before the war, the Government went to great lengths to insist it had no interest in Iraq's oil. These documents provide the evidence that give the lie to those claims.

"We see that oil was in fact one of the Government's most important strategic considerations, and it secretly colluded with oil companies to give them access to that huge prize."

Lady Symons, 59, later took up an advisory post with a UK merchant bank that cashed in on post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts. Last month she severed links as an unpaid adviser to Libya's National Economic Development Board after Colonel Gaddafi started firing on protesters. Last night, BP and Shell declined to comment.

www.fuelonthefire.com

Source: The Independent.

Chris Hedges speech Union Square NYC - April 15th 2011