Over 65 percent of the world’s nations keep their foreign exchange reserves in the US dollar, the dominant world currency. The creation of the BRICS Bank and other financial interventions will likely weaken the dollar’s dominance and contribute to the creation a new international economic order.
Source: TomDispatch.com
Juba, South Sudan — Is this country the first hot battlefield in a new cold war? Is the conflict tearing this new nation apart actually a proxy fight between the world’s two top economic and military powers? That’s the way South Sudan’s Information Minister, Michael Makuei Lueth, tells it. After “midwifing” South Sudan into existence with billions of dollars in assistance, aid, infrastructure projects, and military support, the U.S. has watched China emerge as the major beneficiary of South Sudan’s oil reserves. As a result, Makuei claims, the U.S. and other Western powers have backed former vice president Riek Machar and his rebel forces in an effort to overthrow the country’s president, Salva Kiir. China, for its part, has played a conspicuous double game. Beijing has lined up behind Kiir, even as it publicly pushes both sides to find a diplomatic solution to a simmering civil war. It is sending peacekeepers as part of the U.N. mission even as it also arms Kiir’s forces with tens of millions of dollars worth of new weapons.
Monsanto and friends, the biotech industry, its lobbyists and its paid media representation continue to push for monopoly control over the world’s food through its seed supply.
Now that the triumvirate of public intellectuals from Burlington has passed on – social ecology theorist Murray Bookchin, peace activist Will Miller and world citizen Garry Davis – who will replace them? It’s a hard act to follow. Nevertheless, one place to look is amongst the Vermonters who got themselves to the Left Forum this year.
A large-scale tourism project planned for the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache targets "the well-heeled tourist from traditional markets...creating a place of exquisite peace and well-being."
Source: Truthout/TomDispatch
For Americans, it was like the news from nowhere. Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country we invaded and blew a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq that our occupation drove into a never-ending sectarian nightmare. In 2011, the last US combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads “held high,” as President Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans.
So the headlines of recent weeks – Iraq army collapses! Iraq’s second largest city falls to insurgents! Terrorist caliphate established in Middle East! – couldn’t have seemed more shockingly out of the blue. Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neocons who had planned and supported the invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday, and Iraq was again the story of the moment as the post-post-mortems began to appear and commentators began asking: How in the world could this be happening?
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