France’s Global Warming Predicament - CounterPunch.org
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/12/frances-global-warming-predicament
With France convinced 4°C is in its future, it should be noted that there are plenty of credible scientists who believe 2°C above pre-industrial is simply intolerable, hmm.
The Insecure Superpower - CounterPunch.org
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/17/the-insecure-superpower
What’s scarier?
A) Hundreds of military bases, all bristling with advanced, offensive weapons, controlled by your avowed enemy, close to your heartland.
OR
B) Unfinished military bases on three tiny islands, stocked with defensive weapons, about 9,000 miles from your nation’s capital. Plus, a few balloons.
Answer: B, but only if you are the United States, the insecure superpower.
On Targeting an Arab Woman - CounterPunch.org
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/03/on-targeting-an-arab-woman
What the facts, in glaring clarity do support, is that, like others before me, StandWithUs exploited students’ political beliefs and targeted me because I am an Arab woman who is involved in scholarship and activism for #Palestine and Palestinians.
Fascism : Israeli Style - CounterPunch.org
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12/02/fascism-israeli-style
What does this mean? Well, at a minimum the new coalition government will try to legalize at least 70 illegal settlements or “outposts,” which are currently a violation of Israeli law and have at least 25,000 occupants. Palestinians in East Jerusalem will be policed in a more militant and violent fashion.
Law enforcement generally will be politicized, and fascists will be in greater control of the day-to-day workings of the government.
It can be expected that Area C of the West Bank, which represents more than 60% of the West Bank and is under some Palestinian control, will face de facto annexation.
There are more than 200,000 Palestinian residents in Area C; they will presumably face greater pressures to emigrate.
Israeli policy toward Gaza is worse, but rarely gets discussed in the international press. In addition to using overwhelming military force against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has limited their use of electricity; forces sewage to be dropped into the sea; makes sure that water remains undrinkable; and ensures fuel shortages that cause sanitation plants to be shut down.
Gaza is essentially an outdoor prison, and Netanyahu will continue the policies of enforced desperation among the innocent civilians who must try to live in these conditions. If there is another Intifada, Israel has only itself to blame.
America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century
How the MIC, OGAM and FIRE Sectors Conquered NATO
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/01/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century
March 1, 2022 | by Michael Hudson
(...)
It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives do not represent their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major political campaign contributors. A Venn diagram would show that in today’s post-Citizens United world, U.S. politicians represent their campaign contributors, not voters. And these contributors fall basically into three main blocs.
Three main oligarchic groups that have bought control of the Senate and Congress to put their own policy makers in the State Department and Defense Department. First is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) – arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, have broadly diversified their factories and employment in nearly every state, and especially in the Congressional districts where key Congressional committee heads are elected. Their economic base is monopoly rent, obtained above all from their arms sales to NATO, to Near Eastern oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus. Stocks for these companies soared immediately upon news of the Russian attack, leading a two-day stock-market surge as investors recognized that war in a world of cost-plus “Pentagon capitalism” (as Seymour Melman described it) will provide a guaranteed national-security umbrella for monopoly profits for war industries. Senators and Congressional representatives from California and Washington traditionally have represented the MIC, along with the solid pro-military South. The past week’s military escalation promises soaring arms sales to NATO and other U.S. allies, enriching the actual constituents of these politicians. Germany quickly agreed to raise is arms spending to over 2% of GDP.
The second major oligarchic bloc is the rent-extracting oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM), riding America’s special tax favoritism granted to companies emptying natural resources out of the ground and putting them mostly into the atmosphere, oceans and water supply. Like the banking and real estate sector seeking to maximize economic rent and maximizing capital gains for housing and other assets,, the aim of this OGAM sector is to maximize the price of its energy and raw materials so as to maximize its natural-resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major U.S. priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatened to link the Western European and Russian economies more tightly together. (...)
The third major oligarchic group is the symbiotic Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which is the modern finance-capitalist successor to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents. With most housing in today’s world having become owner-occupied (although with sharply rising rates of absentee landlordship since the post-2008 wave of Obama Evictions), land rent is paid largely to the banking sector in the form of mortgage interest and debt amortization (on rising debt/equity ratios as bank lending inflates housing prices). About 80 percent of U.S. and British bank loans are to the real estate sector, inflating land prices to create capital gains – which are effectively tax-exempt for absentee owners.
This Wall Street-centered banking and real estate bloc is even more broadly based on a district-by-district basis than the MIC. Its New York senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, heads the Senate, long supported by Delaware’s former Senator from the credit-card industry Joe Biden, and Connecticut’s senators from the insurance sector centered in that state. Domestically, the aim of this sector is to maximize land rent and the “capital’ gains resulting from rising land rent. Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business. And Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (viz. the Rockefeller-dominated Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).
The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities
(...)
l’article en fr ici: ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/951634 (2022-03-03 | entelekheia.fr )
#Inde. Claque rouge pour le parti hindouiste au #Kerala | L’Humanité
▻https://www.humanite.fr/inde-claque-rouge-pour-le-parti-hindouiste-au-kerala-705748
Fait notable, le Parti du peuple indien (#BJP) ne disposera d’aucun élu dans la nouvelle assemblée.
La victoire confortable du #LDF [Front démocratique de gauche] est sans doute attribuable à la gestion exemplaire des inondations dévastatrices de 2018 et du #Covid-19, marquée par la distribution de kits alimentaires gratuits et le versement d’une allocation moyenne de 7 300 roupies
Why One State in India Is Showing Promising Signs of Democracy as the World Goes More Authoritarian - CounterPunch.org
▻https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/14/why-one-state-in-india-is-showing-promising-signs-of-democracy-as-the-
The right wing in Kerala has typically claimed that the Left is not equipped to build the state’s infrastructure. But this time, the right wing had no grounds to make its typical complaints. Since 2016, the state government has not only improved the basic transportation infrastructure but has also built up other kinds of infrastructure needed by the working class and the peasantry.
There is a conventional attitude that suggests infrastructure is built to promote the interests of business alone. But this is not the case in the way Kerala’s LDF government built its public infrastructure, including public housing—the government built 250,000 homes for the poor. There was a major focus on public education and public health care, both of which were enhanced, and a stronger public health care system in the state helped it to stave off the catastrophe that COVID-19 has wrought in the rest of India. For the first time in 25 years, students left private schools to return to the improved public education system. Improvements in facilities in public schools included providing sanitary pads for girls to encourage better attendance in school.
Roads, bridges, power lines, and a massive public sector internet project(Kerala Fiber Optic Network, or K-FON) to provide internet as a basic right to citizens have been a few of the key elements of the government’s infrastructure work.