Remembering Winter Soldiers

March 13-16, 2008:

US Vets, Active-Duty Soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan Testify About the Horrors of War

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans gathered in Maryland to testify at Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held during the Vietnam War.

Although Winter Soldier was held just outside the nation’s capital, it was almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media. A search on the Lexis database found that no major television network or cable news network even mentioned Winter Soldier over the weekend, neither did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or most other major newspapers in the country. The editors of the Washington Post chose to cover Winter Soldier but placed the article in the local section.

Democracy Now!‘s coverage of Winter Soldier includes a live broadcast from the proceedings, as well as extensive excerpts of soldiers’ testimony: Here

Jon Michael Turner is a former Marine who fought with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. This video testimony aired Monday March 17, 2008 on Democracy Now:

More Information About WINTER SOLDIER: Here

Toxic Alberta: Oilsands Most Destructive Project on Earth

Canada’s Tar Sands: "The Most Destructive Project on Earth"





Source: TarSandsNews

Tar Sands' Toxic Leakage: Tar Sands operations in Alberta leak more than 4 billion litres of contaminated tailings water every year. New Tar Sands projects could expand the leakage to more than 25 billion litres within a decade. Those are the key findings from Environmental Defence’s latest Tar Sands report: 11 Million Litres a Day: The Tar Sands’ Leaking Legacy.

Tailings ponds are known to contain dozens of toxic contaminants like heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and naphthenic acids. Naphthenic acids in particular break down very slowly and therefore pose a long-term threat to the groundwater of the region.

Surplus

Here is a trailer for an independent video called Surplus, by people i do not know. Random, no doubt, to some but interesting enough to watch.



More: Here

Cultures at the Edge of the World

In this TED Talk anthropologist Wade Davis suggests that vanishing cultures are a loss of variety of possible ways of being, thinking and orienting ourselves to the planet and each other. He calls the overall cultural, imaginal and linguistic actualities of our species the 'ethnosphere', and makes a passionate and informative plea for an increased sensitivity to the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity.

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DeLanda and the Geology of Morals

The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation

by Manuel DeLanda

The distinction between institutions which emerge from centralized and decentralized decision-making by its human components has come to occupy center-stage in several different contemporary philosophies. Economist and Artificial Intelligence guru Herbert Simon, for example, views bureaucracies and markets as the human institutions which best embody these two conceptions of control.

Hierarchical institutions are the easiest ones to analyze, since much of what happens within a bureaucracy in planned by someone of higher rank, and the hierarchy as a whole has goals and behaves in ways that are more or less consistent with those goals. Markets, on the other hand, are tricky. Indeed, the term "market" needs to be used with care because it has been greatly abused over the last century by theorists on the left and the right. As Simon remarks, the term does not refer to the world of corporations, whether monopolies or oligopolies, since in these commercial institutions decision-making is highly centralized, and prices are set by command.

I would indeed limit the sense of the term even more to refer exclusively to those weakly gatherings of people at a predefined place in town, and not to a dispersed set of consumers catered by a system of middleman (as when one speaks of the "market" for personal computers). The reason is that, as historian Fernand Braudel has made it clear, it is only in markets in the first sense that we have any idea of what the dynamics of price formation are. In other words, it is only in peasant and small town markets that decentralized decision-making leads to prices setting themselves up in a way that we can understand. In any other type of market economists simply assume that supply and demand connect to each other in a functional way, but they do not give us any specific dynamics through which this connection is effected.

Moreover, unlike the idealized version of markets guided by an "invisible hand" to achieve an optimal allocation of resources, real markets are not in any sense optimal. Indeed, like most decentralized, self-organized structures, they are only viable, and since they are not hierarchical they have no goals, and grow and develop mostly by drift.

Read More: Here

David Harvey on Reading Marx's 'Das Kapital'

Below is David Harvey's introduction to his open lecture series on Karl Marx and Marx's seminal book Das Kapital - Volume 1:

Corporate Ethics and Criminal Crackdown in the Amazon

From WorldChanging Team:

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.

The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.

Nanotechnology and Water-purification

Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it -- inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. With cutting-edge nanotech, Michael Pritchard's Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe. Full bio and more links

Below is his amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009:

Ward Churchill: Indigenous Rights and Resistance

The following is part 1 of a lecture by Ward Churchill on indegenous rights and the politics and history of Native America resistance.



Ward Churchill (b.1947) is an American writer and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States. His work features controversial and provocative claims, written in a direct – often confrontational – style.

In January 2005, Churchill's work attracted publicity, with the widespread circulation of a 2001 essay, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In the essay, he claimed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were provoked by U.S. policy, and referred to the "technocratic corps" working in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns".

In March 2005 the University of Colorado began investigating allegations that Churchill had engaged in research misconduct; it reported in June 2006 that he had done so. Churchill was fired on July 24, 2007, leading to a claim from some scholars that he was fired over the ideas he expressed. Churchill filed a lawsuit against the University of Colorado for unlawful termination of employment.

In April 2009 a Denver jury found that Churchill was wrongly fired, awarding him $1 in damages, but this verdict was vacated by a District Court judge in July 2009.

Slavoj Žižek on Revolutionary Discourse

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek answering the question, "What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?", at the Marxism 2009 conference, London, July 2009.

MORE: On Violence and Ideology / Reading Lacan through Zizek

U.S Ends War on Terrorism

Today a senior Obama aide declared an end to U.S 'War on Terrorism'. New approach to focus on root economic and social causes.

From The Washington Independent:

John Brennan, former senior CIA official. (Photo: AP)

John Brennan picked a deeply symbolic day to end the "war on terrorism."

On August 6, 2001, Brennan, then a senior CIA official and now President Obama's assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, "read warnings that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S., but our government was unable to prevent the worst terrorist attack in American history," he recalled to an audience Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. It was a reference to a CIA analysis, called a President's Daily Brief, that the 9/11 Commission uncovered as a key warning that an attack by al-Qaeda was likely.

Eight years later, in his first speech since joining the Obama administration, Brennan annulled several key aspects of the so-called war on terrorism - starting with both the name and the idea that the U.S. was involved in any sort of "global war." Brennan said Obama will subordinate counterterrorism to "its right and proper place" as a "vital part" of the administration's national security and foreign policies, but not the lion's share of them. Saying he was careful not to elevate al-Qaeda to a greater position of importance than it deserved, Brennan linked the rise in support for extremists to problems of global governance, economic crisis and social stratification and said the administration would make a concerted effort to address what he considers those extremist root causes.

READ MORE: HERE

Crisis Now

Below David Harvey (b.1935) talks about crisis, capitalism, opportunity and Marx's theory of change. Harvey was presenting at the Marxism 2009 Conference, London, July 5, 2009.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), a leading social theorist of international standing, and earned a PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961.

His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.

In times of crisis we tend to look for opportunities to modify our reality. Intellectuals inevitably revisit past theories of social change.

Marx's proto-evolutionary dialectic theory attempted to map out the possibilities of the social and natural forces in the 19th century. Marx's opus Das Kapital was a sophisticated and incomplete analysis of humans relations within capital-based conditions. In it, Marx details his thoughts on "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history".

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

- Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Emma Goldman was an activist, anarchist and public figure in the U.S during the first 35 years of the 19th century.

Born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Jewish family, Goldman suffered from a violent relationship with her father. Although she attended schools in Königsberg, her father refused to allow her further education when the family moved to Saint Petersburg. Still, she read voraciously and educated herself on politics and the social theory of her time.

Goldman emigrated to the United States with her sister Helena and settled in Rochester, New York, at the age of sixteen. Married briefly in 1887, Goldman divorced her husband and moved to New York City.

Initially attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman was inspired and encouraged toward public speaking by Johann Most and eventually became a renowned lecturer, attracting crowds of thousands.

The writer and anarchist Alexander Berkman became her lover, lifelong intimate friend, and comrade. Together they planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Though Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman herself was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control.

Emma has generally been heralded as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution by her critics. Goldman was respected by many people within the various radical and social movements existing in the U.S at that time. Her speeches, political engagements and writing focused on the rights of women, corrupt elites and revolution.

In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

Below is a brief clip from the documentary Anarchism in America showing a mature Goldman talking about her first return to the U.S after exile:

ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR

(Excerpts from Anarchism & Other Essays, 1911)

by Emma Goldman

ANARCHISM is the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

"Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.

Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,--the dominion of human conduct.

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only....

Learn More: Here

And in the Videos Below:

Venezuelan Media and State Politics

Activists with the Venezuelan People's Union (UPV) - a Venezuelan party that supports Hugo Chavez, the country's president - fired tear gas on August 04, 2009 as they raided the head office of Globovision, a television station critical of the Chavez government .

Chavez's government has officially condemned the UPV attack. Venezuelan interior minister spoke on government T.V today:

"In the name of the Bolivarian government we firstly want to condemn this attack energetically and reject this type of violent action against Globovision. We don't accept that violence be the instrument to solve our differences. "

Al Jazeera's Dima Khatib, reporting from Caracas, said the attack comes at a very critical time in Venezuela - with lots of debate over media ethics and the government's measures against private media. "Globovision is more than just a television channel here; it mobilizes opposition and almost acts like a political party," she said.

Globovision was also fined $2m last month for back taxes and officials have twice raided Globovision, alleging that owners have illegally engaged in black market capitalism. The Venezuelan government has said that it is monitoring Globovision, and may impose punitive measures against the channel.

The Venezuelan government has in recent weeks launched a series of measures against private media companies. Thirty-four radio stations were shut down over the weekend on the Chavez administration's orders and 120 more are under examination for alleged irregularities.

Critics say Chavez is trying to muzzle criticism of his rule.

Whatever the government's intentions, suppressing independent media should be a last resort and never policy. Chavez probably wouldn't even be able to evaluate how much such actions undermine his party's legitimacy. Perhaps he is content to disintegrate the very party he claims to lead?

Media provides information flow to people. Information flow can energize a population enough to increase participation the very reforms social projects seek to enact. Projects which may help evolve important institutions.

But media can also cut off a population's ability to perceive empirical events - and passify them into a complacent slumber of social uninvolvment. The tempo of the Venezuelan media and its dominating discourses will eventually implode and either shift towards violence, corporatism or some deeper cultural impetus. And new elites will rush in to manage or dominate what remains.

UPDATE: 8/4/09:

The BBC is reporting that Lina Ron (below), a pro-government activist in Venezuela has handed herself over to the authorities a day after a violent attack on Globovision TV station.

President Hugo Chavez said the left-wing militant has been one of his most ardent supporters, but would now face the full weight of the law. He deplored the attack, and said it would help his opponents attempts to undermine his legitimacy. Chavez has said that the attack "gives the enemy weapons to attack me even more as a tyrant".

Globovision still faces official investigations that could take it off air indefinitely.