March 25-27, 2011 - Counterpunch Weekend Edition

Our institutions are failing us in anticipating the consequences of the various catastrophes we actually know are coming. At some level it is simply a failure of imagination. Our institutions have not been designed to create a response to something the world has never seen before...How does a political party "frame" the fact that our conventional preoccupation with economic growth is going to kill us?

On April 20th dozens of environmental, climate, and social justice groups will target government and corporate operations with aggressive protests and civil disobedience in an International Day of Direct Action Against Extraction being organized by Rising Tide North America.

By CONN HALLINAN - March 17, 2011

In ways big and small, Europeans from Greece to Portugal, from Britain to Bavaria are registering their growing anger with the relentless assault inflicted by government-imposed austerity programs...Wages, working conditions and pensions that unions successfully fought for over the past half century are threatened by the collapse of banking systems caught up in a decade-long orgy of speculation that the average European neither took part in, nor profited from.

Toban Black on the Media Co-op

This audio recording captures some of what members of an arts and storytelling group called the Beehive Design Collective had to say about their work, during one of their events in London, Ontario. Reactions and thoughts from a few locals who attended that Beehive workshop also are part of the recording.

This book deals with the dances between today’s nominally left-leaning South American governments and the dynamic movements that helped pave their way to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - Counterpunch

...[T]he Iraq war alone cost Americans one-fifth of the year's gross domestic product. Instead of investing the resources...the US government wasted the equivalent of 20% of the production of the economy in 2010 in blowing up infrastructure and people in foreign lands. The US government spent a huge sum of money committing war crimes, while millions of Americans were thrown out of their jobs and foreclosed out of their homes.

[Translated from GegenStandpunkt: Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift 1-94, Gegenstandpunkt Verlag, Munich]

This article was written in 1994 in the wake of the first free elections in South Africa. It consists of a correct analysis of the process of nation-building through the creation of a new national people, the handing over of power to the blacks with the guaranteed maintenance of the capitalist economy based on untouched private property.

By Laurence Shoup - Z Magazine

The U.S. Chamber [of Commerce] assumes that capitalism is an eternal order, not subject to challenge or change. It cares mainly about profit and little about human life, human development, higher culture, or ecological sanity. Believers in the divine right of capital to rule, Chamber leaders want to utilize the sphere of government as their own personal errand boy. The Chamber assumes that capital creates all value and the workers are only an expense.

March 1, 2011 - rabble.ca

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative's Trish Hennessy has long been a fan of Harper's Magazine one-page list of eye-popping statistics, Harper's Index. Instead of wishing for a Canadian version to magically appear, she's created her own index -- a monthly listing of numbers about Canada and its place in the world.

There is an article on Canada's boreal forests by Christopher Pala and an article on overfishing in West Africa in The Ecologist by Dawn Starin.

By Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers - February 12th, 2011

Only a year ago it was recognized that decades of neo-liberalism had crashed the U.S. and several European economies. Years of deregulation, speculation and lack of investment in the real economy had left them with rising inequality and little consumer demand, except for what was financed by running up debt. But the financial press and neo-liberal policymakers counter-attacked, using the “Baltic Tigers” (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) as an exemplary battering ram to counter Keynesian spending policies and the Social Europe model...

By Nomi Prins - February 06, 2011

The revolution in Egypt is as much a rebellion against the painful deterioration of economic conditions as it is about opposing a dictator...That's why President Hosni Mubarak's announcement that he intends to stick around until September was met with an outpouring of rage...When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy...waiting doesn't cut it.

America's unaddressed economic crisis.

Expect turbulence ahead.

Venezuelan banking is vastly different from Wall Street-controlled American banking.