Category Archives: Neoliberal Globalization

Colbert: Anonymous Crushes HBGary

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You may remember a few months back when Aaron Barr, CEO of computer security firm HBGary, tried to finger some of the key members of hacker collective Anonymous and got burned. Colbert lays out the context for that little drama as being part of a coverup by Bank of America involving the Justice Department and Wikileaks while at the same time lampooning everyone like a ninja. Check out the video and see for yourself.

[UPDATE]

On a related note, members of Anonymous have just claimed responsibility for taking down more than 40 underground childpr0n websites and releasing over 1500 user names to the public. Is Anonymous branching out in their mission or its it just a few members deciding to take the Robin Hood act to the next level?

Lockheed Looks Beyond Weapons

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Lockheed Martin Corp.’s history is built on making jets, missiles and other weapons of war. But lately, its growth plans also call for securing more U.S. government contracts for an array of behind-the-scenes services throughout the world—everything from managing military bases and embassies to helping write constitutions for developing nations.

Lockheed is making its move through Pacific Architects & Engineers Inc., a little-known Los Angeles company it acquired last year. For more than five decades, PAE quietly worked on Army bases and provided facilities-management services to the State Department. That meant such work as maintaining fresh paint at the U.S. embassy in Moscow to providing logistics for African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, Sudan. Half of the company’s revenue comes from the State Department.

Lockheed, of Bethesda, Md., sees PAE as a vehicle to provide more crucial—and lucrative—services to governments and other entities. PAE has developed expertise in areas such as disaster relief, peacekeeping missions and election monitoring. Such work has historically been the State Department’s turf.

As the Defense Department’s budget begins to plateau and U.S. forces are stretched thin, Lockheed needs to find ways to grow beyond big weapons systems. To capitalize on the changing nature of military activity around the globe, the company is seeking a role in everything from the occupation of Iraq to disaster response to antiterror efforts.

“We believe that the definition of global security is changing. Expanding, actually,” Lockheed Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Stevens said.

CorpWatch

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Iraqi Gov’t Takes A Stand Against US Contracted Mercenaries

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The Iraqi government said Monday that it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad.

The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting. It was latest accusation against the U.S.-contracted firms that operate with little or no supervision and are widely disliked by Iraqis who resent their speeding motorcades and forceful behavior.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and 13 were wounded when security contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad.

“We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities,” Khalaf said.

Yahoo!
Word up to MBG at MostlySemantics for this one.

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World Biggest Problem: Organized Crime

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cocain cartel
Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the world combined, according to the “2007 State of the Future” report, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon.

The report called organized crime one of the most pressing global issues that needs to be addressed in the next 10 years, along with global warming, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, and income disparities.

But the report noted success in tackling other issues, saying the world has made progress on ending poverty, improving access to education and settling conflicts. It also says the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off.

KurzweilAI

Vast Forests With Trees Each Worth £4,000 Sold For a Few Bags of Sugar

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lamokoLamoko, 150 miles down the Maringa river, sits on the edge of a massive stretch of virgin rainforest in central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). On February 8 2005, representatives of a major timber firm arrived to negotiate a contract with the traditional landowners.

Few in the village realised that the talks would transform all their lives, but in just a few hours, the chief, who had received no legal advice and did not realise that just one tree might be worth more than £4,000 in Europe, had signed away his community’s rights in the forest for 25 years.

In return for his signed permission to log thousands of hectares for exotic woods such as Afromosia (African teak) and sapele, the company promised to build Lamoko and other communities in the area three simple village schools and pharmacies. In addition, the firm said it would give the chief 20 sacks of sugar, 200 bags of salt, some machetes and a few hoes. In all, it was estimated that the gifts would cost the company £10,000.

It was the kind of “social responsibility” agreement that is encouraged by the World Bank, but when the villagers found out that their forest had been “sold” so cheaply, they were furious.

guardian uk

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Stop Shopping, For Earth’s Sake!

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‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.

‘Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’

According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough. We must shop less.

From pictures of Coleen McLoughlin weighed down with designer bags to branding endorsements by the likes of David Beckham, the image of consumerism as a universal aspiration is ubiquitous. Last week 3,000 people stormed Primark’s new flagship store on London’s Oxford Street before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and earning the description by BBC2’s Newsnight of ‘a plague of locusts’. There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the so-called ‘Froogles’, individuals who use the internet to seek a simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people to kick the retail habit.

Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in climate change.

Guardian UK

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Post)modernism

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by Neil p Corkeran

THE TERM ‘POSTMODERNISM,’ variously defined by different `representatives,’ has garnered the quality of a catch-all term describing new directions in architecture, art, literature, social science theory, critical philosophy and other disciplines that all seem to be cross-fertilizing, with often revolutionary effects. It is used to describe a socio-cultural condition of postmodernity growing out of the forces of late-Modernism, which is in turn inextricable intertwined with the expressed desires of late-Capitalism, as well as the interpretation and critique of that constructed condition.

With a (de)focus to ‘pluralism’ and a multitude of individual and community ‘voices,’ postmodernist thought can be seen as reacting to, and growing out of positivist aims and the universalist structural tendencies of Modernism. The ‘agenda’ of postmodernism (if only expressed unconsciously through the individual actions and contributions of its participants) can be seen ``to challenge monolithic elitism, to bridge…one discourse and interpretive community [with] another…so that different cultures acknowledge each other’s legitimacy. The motives are equally political and aesthetic.’’ The ``essential goal: [is] to further pluralism, to overcome the elitism inherent in the previous paradigm’’ (Jencks 12-13).

michigan state university

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New Statute Set For File Sharing In Sweden

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A 29-year old Swede, who was the first to be convicted under last year’s new file-sharing laws, has been cleared on appeal. The court of appeal did not consider the screen dumps provided by the Antipiracy Bureau enough evidence to be able to convict the man. Since the crime does not carry a high enough punishment under Swedish law to allow for a search of the defendant’s house, this means it will be virtually impossible to prove file-sharing crimes in the future.

the local

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Will The Next Election Be Hacked?

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The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s election systems – with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America’s 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election – and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised “sleepovers” before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio – where, as I recently reported in “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency – a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

Rolling Stone

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Ted Turner Tells WTO of the Benefits of Biofuel

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Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, has a secret ingredient for rescuing the suspended global trade talks – the renewable energy sources known as biofuels.


Turner told a public forum Monday at the World Trade Organization that biofuels – liquid fuels made from plants and trees, including biodiesel for trucks and generators and ethanol for cars and cooking – could do more than fight problems like pollution and global warming.

They can also solve the bitter dispute that scuttled the trade liberalization talks two months ago, he said, by providing wealthy countries a means of keeping their farmers in business, instead of subsidizing products that can be grown more cheaply in poor countries, products like cotton, sugar beets, sugar cane and rice.

“If agriculture were always going to be the same, then the question of subsidies would be a problem without a solution,” Turner said at the WTO’s headquarters here. “But agriculture is changing.”

International Herald Tribune

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The Comforts of Madness: Novelist J G Ballard Explains Why Consumerism is a New Fascism

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J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children’s encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. “Selling is like wooing a girl,” says Ballard. Ballard “believed in” The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, ”’Go and read The Eight Volumes.’ That was her name for them,” he chuckles. “It was the nearest thing to television.”

Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.

indy uk

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US threatens trade sanctions against Sweden because of thepiratebay

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According to this well done Swedish news piece, the USA has threatened Sweden with trade sanctions through the US dominated WTO if Sweden refuses to close down the file-sharing website “thepiratebay.org”. ThePirateBay has been considered legal under Sweden’s fair use laws, and many Swedish support their right to freely distribute media such as music and movies; similar to their laws which allow them to pick mushrooms and lingamberries on other peoples land. Bowing to international pressure, on May 31st more than 50 Swedish police raided 10 locations and confiscated all the servers which supported the torrent-tracker. Persecution is pending, the site is running at some level, and there is a huge political stink escalating in Sweden over this issue right now. Check out this news report and decide for yourself what’s up…

news report from youtube

“New American Century” Project Ends With A Whimper

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Is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which did so much to promote the invasion of Iraq and an Israel-centred “global war on terror”, closing down?

In the absence of an official announcement and the failure since late last year of a live person to answer its telephone number, a Washington Post obituary would seem to be definitive. And, sure enough, the Post quoted one unidentified source presumably linked to PNAC that the group was “heading toward closing” with the feeling of “goal accomplished”.

In fact, the nine-year-old group, whose 27 founders included Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, among at least half a dozen of the most powerful hawks in the George W. Bush administration’s first term, has been inactive since January 2005, when it issued the last of its “statements”, an appeal to significantly increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to cope with the growing demands of the kind of “Pax Americana” it had done so much to promote.

As a platform for the three-part coalition that was most enthusiastic about war in Iraq—aggressive nationalists like Cheney, Christian Zionists of the religious Right, and Israel-centred neo-conservatives—PNAC actually began breaking down shortly after the Iraq invasion.

It was then that the group’s predominantly neo-conservative leadership—Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, PNAC director Gary Schmitt, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Robert Kagan—began attacking Rumsfeld, in particular, for failing to deploy enough troops to pacify the country and launch a true nation-building exercise, as in post-World War II Germany and Japan.

common dreams

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