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And, yes, I DO take it personally: 04/26/2009 - 05/03/2009
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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Citizens assemblies make slow progress in slowing down the mining industry's planned rape of Argentina

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the rest of the world really ought to sit up and pay attention to the plethora of popular movements in latin america... they may be struggling against the powerful, monied elites, but at least they're out there DOING something...
Gathering in the Province of San Juan, the heart of the Argentinean mining industry, representatives of the Union of Citizens Assemblies reaffirmed their commitment to fighting an economic model which is plundering natural resources and destroying livelihoods.

[...]

Defined loosely as Citizens Assemblies, these organizations emerged in Argentina during the 1990s in response to the rapid advance of an economic model focused on the extraction or cultivation of primary materials for exportation.

“The neoliberal model pursued in particular by President Menem and which continues to a large extent today is one which values business interests and profit over the environment and the well-being of the population,” says Ramon Gomez of the Citizen’s Assembly of San Juan. “This model was imposed on us–there was no consultation whatsoever despite the fact that the arrival of multinational companies and the plundering of our natural resources, has a massive impact on our lives. It would have been suicide for us not to react–we had to come out and defend our lives and the environment. And so we began to organize and to present alternatives.”

Citizens Assemblies have since become important alternative spaces for involving citizens in local and national politics.

“As these spaces do not exist within institutional politics which in Argentina continue to be anti-democratic, we had to create them ourselves, they have become the only way we can have our voices heard,” says Gomez.

Among the main actions taken by Citizens Assemblies to demand change and express their repudiation of the current economic model are: road blocks, including blocking transportation of machinery or materials to the plants of multinational companies, mass demonstrations, events to humiliate public figures known as “escraches”, and symbolic hunger strikes. They also carry out information and education campaigns and research on an ongoing basis.

According to Gomez, the assemblies evolved naturally, based on a conviction that people power is the only way to bring about change.

they've got a real uphill battle on their hands, now that argentina has been tagged as a very ripe, relatively unexploited mining area...
Hailed as the mining industry’s “rising star,” with 75 per cent of its mining potential still unexplored, companies from countries including the U.S., Canada and South Africa have all expressed an interest in working in Argentina. Eighteen large-scale projects are planned for 2015, including one which would straddle the Andean peaks between Argentina and Chile. Known as the Pascual Lama project, it is lead by the world's largest gold miner, Barrick Gold Corp, of which former president George Bush the senior is amongst its board of directors.

when i taught my course a couple of summers ago in elko, nevada, the students were primarily from the mining industry, not a few of them from barrick... i got to tour a barrick open pit gold mine and was fascinated by the giant machinery and the unbelievable amounts of rock that have to be pulverized in order to obtain the tiniest amount of gold... i was also quite frankly horrified at the use of cyanide... yes, i knew cyanide was used in the process, but to see it up close, dripping into huge vats of mineral slurry is quite another level of reality... the guy who showed me around stressed barrick's mitigation procedures and showed me the extensive protections around their holding ponds... i was just stunned with the scale of the whole thing... also, i was acutely aware that i was seeing an operation that was under u.s. and nevada environmental regulations... god forbid what the same kind of operation would be like here in argentina...

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Still terrified of the coming pandemic...? Get over it...

here's the pig but where's the lipstick...?

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meanwhile, back in the reality-based community...
Flu death toll 'less than feared'

Mexico has revised down the suspected death toll from swine flu from 176 to 101, indicating that the outbreak may not be as bad as was initially feared.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told the BBC that, based on samples tested, the mortality rate was comparable with that of seasonal flu.

comparable with that of seasonsal flu...? wait...! wait just a minute...! i thought i was supposed to be sequestered in some safe spot, isolated from the rest of humanity, wearing a mask, and trembling for fear of catching some deadly virus... now that i've swallowed the hype, hook, line and sinker, you tell me it's 'less than feared'...? have i summoned up all this paranoia for NOTHING...? hmmmmph...

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Is there any GOOD news out there...?

anywhere...? please share...

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(actually, it's a magnificent, sunny, warm, brilliantly clear, autumn day here in buenos aires... some of the trees are in their fall colors and leaves are collecting on the sidewalks... it's the may 1 holiday and, as in most places around the world - except the u.s. - people are off work, schools are closed, and the signature smell of argentina, meat grilling over a parilla, is wafting through the air... i guess that's good enough news to tide me over for another day, eh...?)

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Thursday, April 30, 2009

The banks own Congress and, by extension, all of us...?? Once again, d'oh...

but glenn greenwald 'splains it all very well...

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Chrysler goes under

ya suppose they'll get a third whack at bankruptcy somewhere down the road (see below*)...?
Chrysler to Proceed with Bankruptcy

Chrysler, one of the three pillars of the American auto industry, will file for bankruptcy today after last-minute negotiations between the government and the automaker’s creditors broke down last night, an Obama administration official said. U.S. officials had offered Chrysler’s secured lenders $2.25 billion in cash if they would agree to writedown the $6.9 in secured debt that the company owed. But a small group of hedge funds refused the 11th-hour deal, forcing an imminent bankruptcy.

* remember...?
On September 7, 1979, The Chrysler Corporation petitioned the United States government for US$1.5 billion in loan guarantees to avoid bankruptcy.

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Swine flu hysteria, up close and personal

it's one thing to be in kabul or dubai and read about the absolute paranoiac idiocy accompanying the latest distraction for the masses, but it's another thing to see the hysteria up close and personal...

i spent monday and tuesday nights in dubai prior to flying back here to argentina... in the dubai airport yesterday, i didn't see one person wearing a mask... when i got to the sao paulo airport last night to connect with the flight to buenos aires, i saw a few folks wearing them, notable because i hadn't seen any one wearing them up to that point... the woman sitting across the aisle from me on the flight was wearing one but, lord almighty, the entire airport staff at the buenos aires airport were wearing them... even the taxi driver who took me home was wearing one... when i asked him about it, he mumbled something about being advised to do it on the news, but then, after a few minutes, probably feeling self-conscious, he took it off...

honest to pete... our controllers won't be satisfied until everyone on the planet are turned into quivering rabbits...

p.s. there are a lot of folks who wear masks or scarves over their faces in kabul (not counting the women) but it ain't about the flu... it's protection against the health-destroying pollution...

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Arlen trades up

well, well, well... whaddaya know...
Specter Will Run as a Democrat in 2010

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said on Tuesday that he
would switch to the Democratic party, potentially presenting
Democrats with a possible 60th vote and the power to break
Senate filibusters.

given his history of flip-flopping, i'm not so sure the dems are getting a good deal...

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In Dubai

i'm currently sitting in my hotel room in dubai, looking out over deira creek... it's a relatively pretty and sane part of town, dhows plying up and down, and no view of the totally over-the-top excess of some of the other parts of the city...

unfortunately, i can't be here anymore without thinking of the ugliness behind the scenes... ugliness like this...


Sadistic torture over thinking you've been cheated

nice guys around here, dontcha think...?

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Sunday, April 26, 2009

The fear-mongers are at it again

what a wonderful time to try to introduce global panic... the sheeple are getting restless and maybe even a tad bit upset over being lied to and ripped off for the umpteenth thousand time so it's time to trot out a flu pandemic... get the folks focused on something else, worried about a silent killer that could creep unseen into their homes without warning... time to give up yet a little more of our freedoms to our benmalevolent governments, oh, and, btw, pay no attention to those war criminals over there in the corner, the ones who have lied, butchered, tortured, and robbed their way across the planet in a decades-long bloody rampage...

atrios gets it right...

WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!

Whenever there's a potential emergency looming, I really get the feeling that many internet dwellers get a bit too excited to the point of cheering for it.

here's someone else's thoughts, thoughts which precisely parallel my own...
The newest strategy - the ordering of laboratory-designed, created and released swine flu virus - is, as before, abetted by the controlled media's part of the plan, to declare PANDEMIC! It is puzzling to us that these dark ones did not learn from their abject failures with SARS and then the avian flu, both of which were widely publicized with the same global pandemic prognosis; eventually the publicity was forced to cease because those diseases caused a few deaths, then totally fizzled out. This swine flu situation will have the same result.

[...]

Think about the timing of this latest disease publicity. In addition to authorizing the creation of a virus and its intended worldwide fear, the darkly-inclined individuals' aim is to distract the attention of the populace from their growing demands for peaceful negotiations; indicting responsible ones in the US government who authorized torture; the truth about the perpetrators of '9/11'; what caused the collapse of the global economy; ... and the 'black ops' behind terrorism ... .

accurate or not, i'm at the point in my own understanding of what's happening in this world to allow as to how it could well be 100% true... in any case, succumbing to fear is precisely what we SHOULDN'T do, any more than we should cower in the belief that there's a terrorist lurking behind every piece of shrubbery...

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