By John Pilger - May, 10 2008

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community...A good place to look is a local post office...Some 2,500 post offices are expected to be shut in Britain by the end of 2009. This includes rural and remote areas, where the post office is quite literally the heart of a community...The whole wilful destruction is a new Labour classic and shows why, in a nutshell, even the ever faithful have turned on them.

[Translated from April 2, 2008 broadcast by Gegenstandpunkt Marburg]

Hunger riots in Haiti, protests in Egypt, flour and bread rationing in Pakistan, a corn shortage making tortillas exorbitant in Mexico, rice shortages in Thailand and the USA, etc....

by Kevin Doyle

[...I]ncompetence alone cannot account for the sheer scale and seriousness of [mismanagement]. Rather, to fully understand why it happens, we have to look at how organisations are set up and run. This is where the anarchist analysis of hierarchy comes into its own.

By TARIQ ALI - Counterpunch

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour’s agenda.

by Linda McQuaig - May 06, 2008

...[D]uring [the 1950's, '60's, and '70's] the share of income received by the richest 1 per cent actually declined...The rich didn't like this, and have been waging a kind of class war ever since, convincing governments to impose "neo-conservative" policies like lower minimum wages, tighter monetary policy, less social insurance protection, open markets and shifting the tax burden from capital to labour...The results have been grim for many Canadians, but spectacular for the rich, particularly the very rich.

by Norma Greenaway - The Ottawa Citizen

Feel like you're just treading water economically? Well, join the club. Most working Canadians are in the same boat, according to the latest Statistics Canada analysis of the 2006 census...The agency reported yesterday that despite a stretch of healthy economic times, there has been almost no growth in the after-inflation earnings of Canadian workers over the last quarter century. It also said the gap between the rich and the poor widened dramatically during that period and that the gap was only partially offset by the tax system.

The establishment of a World Food Authority to control the food supply of the world is a major goal of The Club of Rome's RIO report. This issue is intertwined with exaggerated fears of environmental collapse and the elite's obsession with population control.

Recently while traveling in Nebraska I stopped at the Shoemaker Truck Stop along I-80. It was a classic truck stop and it was obvious to see it’s been around for many moons. The trucker was still revered in this vintage haunt. The walls were covered with pictures depicting the golden age of trucking, farming, Ole Route 66, and other forgotten or ignored aspects of humble USA history. Curios of a wide variety filled the shelves, all depicting Americana from the early years to the present. From trucking to farming this place had history and memories for all to see.

Dock Workers' StrikeBy Fred Williams

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) carried out an eight-hour work stoppage at West Coast ports on May 1 to demand an end to the war in Iraq.

CBC

May join Vancouver in putting limits on billboard ads to restrict 'visual pollution'

Historic Quebec City hopes to take down a modern roadside decoration – the ubiquitous billboard.

Up to 800,000 Palestinians to be affected

Rory McCarthy in Gaza City | guardian.co.uk

John Ging, the director of operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which supports Palestinian refugees, said there had been a "totally inadequate" supply of fuel from Israel to Gaza for 10 months until it was finally halted two weeks ago. "The devastating humanitarian impact is entirely predictable," he said.

Today over 27 million children and adults are in slavery or bonded labor around the world—more than any other period in human history. As one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, slavery remains largely hidden from the public eye and thrives on the rising global demand for inexpensive, unskilled labor and commercial sex.

Reuters

CARACAS: Soaring food prices are a "massacre" of the world's poor and are creating a global nutritional crisis, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday, calling it a sign that capitalism is in decline.

by SchNEWS - Friday 18th April 2008

In the Quiche region of northern Guatemala...lies the isolated Ixcan Municipality. It is home to around 75,000 indigenous Mayans who are mostly subsistence farmers...[T]he area also contains many of Guatemala’s most coveted natural resources...One of these, the Chixoy River, is the controversial proposed location for what would be Guatemala’s largest hydroelectric development. If built, the dam is set to flood an area of 7.5km, displacing at least 3000 people and destroying the agricultural land and livelihoods of around 6-8000...Unsuprisingly, the plan is meeting huge resistance from the Ixcan population.

"The movement headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador is fomenting a coup d’etat aimed at dismantling the Mexican nation and provoking a bloody civil war." This highly charged accusation by the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), the equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce in the United States, was featured prominently in most of Mexico’s newspapers this morning.

For 10 days now, the Mexican Senate and National Assembly in Mexico City have been totally shut down [as opposition has] occupied the podiums of both legislative houses.