The Shadow World: Corruption in the Arms Trade
Corruption is at the core of the arms trade.
Month: December 2011
Chomsky on The US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement
Source: Waging Non-Violence
[Editor’s. note: This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim.]
Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for the guidance and wisdom that you have consistently given through your teaching and speeches in many places. We want to start off with a question from Faiz.
The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
Source: Tom Dispatch
On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian demonstrators.
“We exist!” Think of it as a simple statement of fact, an implicit demand to be taken seriously (or else), and undoubtedly an expression of wonder, verging on a question: “We exist?”
The Lowlights of 2011’s ‘War on Women’
With a new Congress in office, battles over reproductive healthcare access came back with a vengeance.
McJournalism: The Unbearable Lightness of Thomas Friedman
A new book explains how Thomas Friedman's journalism is at the service of empire and capital.
Bill Allowing for Indefinite Military Detention of Americans Passes House, Senate
Source: Democracy Now!
House and Senate negotiators have agreed to a sweeping $662 billion military spending bill that would allow for indefinite detentions of Americans by the U.S. military. The bill has been widely criticized by several top Obama administration officials, human rights groups and many Tea Party Republicans. According to the Associated Press, the current legislation would deny some suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation’s borders, of the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention. President Obama had threatened to veto an earlier version of the bill which would have required all terrorism suspects be held and tried by the military. The military spending bill also imposes tough new sanctions on Iran.