nous les 99%

Published on The Bullet, Socialist Project’s e-bulletin no. 1029, by Leo Panitch, Aug 31, 2014.

International attention has been diverted away from this year’s G20 meetings in Australia by the declaration from the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, at their meeting in Fortaleza Brazil this July, that they would launch a new “BRICS bank.”

Created by the U.S. Treasury in the wake of the Asian financial crisis at the end of the 1990s, the G20 was designed to get the major “emerging market” states to take responsibility alongside the G7 for the “new international financial architecture.” This was seen as providing legitimacy for the continuing central role of the U.S. in superintending a greatly expanded but increasingly volatile global capitalism … // Continuer la lecture de « The U.S. Still Decides the Future of Capitalism, Not the G20, and Not the BRICS Nations »

Published on Zmagazine, by Eli Cook, Aug 24, 2014.

Gabriel Kolko, historian and socialist, died last month in his home in Amsterdam. He was 81.

When Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism appeared on the scene in 1963, it was not only a book of history but heresy. This was the era in which American liberalism reigned supreme, and social commentators such as Daniel Bell confidently assured the public that the formula for sustained economic prosperity and political freedom had been uncovered in the form of a capitalist system kept in check by a powerful and centralized regulatory government.   Continuer la lecture de « Gabriel Kolko’s Unfinished Revolution »

Published on The Economist, Aug 30, 2014 … and more on Google News-search (my comment: … and the whole blackmailed or otherwise dump elite is unable to stop this mess, as money, power and influences are more important than peoples – Heidi).

… All this came after Mr Poroshenko met Vladimir Putin, for the first time since June, in the margins of a summit in Minsk. The meeting began icily and achieved little. Russia’s interests—keeping Ukraine out of NATO—have not changed. Even if many Russians are ready to buy claims of soldiers “accidentally” crossing the border, the rest of the world is not. Yet Mr Putin still maintains that the war is a “domestic matter”, and calls for negotiations to include representatives of eastern regions. The Kremlin will prop up its rebel proxies to ensure they are not defeated, but has no desire for a full-scale invasion. “Military activities are an instrument for strengthening their political position ahead of negotiations,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a journal … // Continuer la lecture de « Ukraine and Russia: War, not Peace »

Published on Tech Republic, by Lyndsey Gilpin, Aug 27, 2014.

Peer-to-peer collaboration is gaining ground and changing the economics of the future, but there are questions to answer and obstacles to overcome … //

… States of sharing:

• The sharing economy is here to stay. It is a small but rapidly expanding market that is transforming social, economic, and environmental practices.   Continuer la lecture de « We-commerce: The sharing economy's uncertain path to changing the world »

Published on Russia Today RT, by Lucy Nicholson, Aug 27, 2014.

Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found …;

According to the media outlet Fusion, its independent investigation into the Pentagon’s “1033 program,” which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turned up an alarming trend: Not only did many law enforcement agencies fail to comply with the program’s guidelines, they routinely lost dangerous weaponry.   Continuer la lecture de « Dozens of police departments suspended for losing US military-grade weaponry »