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Transparency International report: Most Americans think political parties are corrupt. The Rights Clash by Danielle Marie Mackey. Mining in El Salvador exposes the contradiction between human rights and corporate rights under the international investment regime. Images by Danielle Marie Mackey “This is practically an urban country. We’re talking about putting a mine in the middle of a city,” exclaimed Fr. Jose Maria Tojeira from the stage. “Imagine mining in the middle of New York or Paris. Fr. Studies show that mining would exhaust the country’s already scarce water reserves, dump thousands of liters of toxic chemicals into the ground, and leave swaths of territory in the most densely populated country in Central America totally uninhabitable. Fr. In response, in 2009, the government placed a temporary moratorium on mining and denied permits to two North American companies. Human Rights Violations and Mining In December 2012, three young boys play swordfight with ragged sticks in the rural Salvadoran town of San Sebastian.

About 300 yards upstream of is the San Sebastian mine. The Rights Clash in El Salvador. Henry Farrell – On post-democracy. Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic Party, asked me to talk about politics and the internet at its summer school in Cortona. Political summer schools are usually pleasant — Cortona is a medieval Tuscan hill town with excellent restaurants — and unexciting. Academics and public intellectuals give talks organised loosely around a theme; in this case, the challenges of ‘communication and democracy’. Young party activists politely listen to our speeches while they wait to do the real business of politics, between sessions and at the evening meals.

This year was different. Worries about this threat spilt over into the summer school. When Bersani started talking, he gave a speech that came strikingly close to a counsel of despair The keynote speaker at the summer school, the Democratic Party leader and prospective prime minister Pier Luigi Bersani, was in a particularly awkward position. I was one of two speakers warming up the crowd for Bersani. 25 April 2013. The Republicans’ war on science and reason. The contempt with which the party views reason is staggering. Republicans have become proudly and unquestionably anti-science. (It is their litmus test, though they would probably reject the science behind litmus paper.) With the exception of Jon Huntsman, who polls about as well as Darwin would in a Republican primary, the Republican presidential candidates have either denied the existence of climate change, denied that it has been caused — and can be reversed — by man, or apologized for once holding a different view.

They have come to this conclusion not because the science is inconclusive, but because they believe, as a matter of principle, that scientific evidence is no evidence at all. It’s on that basis that Ron Paul can say of evolution, “I think it’s a theory and I don’t accept it as a theory.” Then there’s Michele Bachmann, who has embraced the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation, although not a single piece of medical evidence backs up her claim. Christopher Hitchens' on Bill Clinton - full show. One Experience That Really Shaped My Thinking. Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog, Years ago as a young intelligence officer, I served a stint in Saudi Arabia running a team of counter-terrorism analysts and agents.

We used to have regular “threat working groups,” a fancy way of saying we would get together at the US Embassy for meetings with the embassy staff, local NSA operators, and CIA operatives working in the country under official cover. The tone of the meetings was always the same – looking at various reports and figuring out which intelligence was credible. It seemed like every week we would hear about some terrorist with a suitcase-sized bomb, and the bureaucrats would dive into a lively debate about whether or not to evacuate the Americans.

One day, I remember, my friend who was the senior ranking non-commissioned officer interrupted and said, “What about the Swedes?” Silence. An embassy official looked at him, puzzled. “What about the Swedes? “What about the Saudis?” Silence again. I’ll never forget it. I don’t. Our American Pravda. Authored by Ron Unz, originally posted at The American Conservative , In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system , the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White , assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance.

White was also a Communist agent. Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed . Henry Farrell – On post-democracy. Wall Street Hiring More Ex-Government Prostitutes Officials to Assure it Gets its Way. The infamous James Carville quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” seems more applicable to official Washington than the much-maligned Paula Jones. Ben White at Politico (hat tip Paul Tioxon) provided an update on the revolving door, Wall Street edition. It’s so mind-numbingly common for a government figure to land a job with some Big Financial Firm You Heard Of that it’s hard to keep track. Most of us notice only the really high profile examples, such as former SEC chairman Mary Shapiro taking a board seat at financial-services heavyweight General Electric.

But White tells us that a shift is underway. Major banks have intensified their search for, um, talent, as in the Washington DC insider kind. As White reports: Two of the biggest blue-chip firms in the industry, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, will soon have top-level executives with the ear of the CEO who once occupied senior jobs in the White House and the U.S. Fox News wins in court. FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves.

December 1996, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, were hired by FOX as a part of the Fox “Investigators” team at WTVT in Tampa Bay, Florida.to investigat bovine growth hormone (BGH), a controversial substance manufactured by Monsanto Corporation. Fox executives and their attorneys wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the story that were in direct conflict with the facts. Fox editors then tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted story. Akre and Wilson refused and threatened to report Fox's actions to the FCC, they were both fired.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. The Yes Men Fix The World, P2P Edition FULL MOVIE (2009) (w/subtitles) Gun control: America's gun divide. Oligarchy Exists Inside Our Democracy. By Ed Walker, who writes regularly for Firedoglake as masaccio Suddenly it looks like we are seeing political victories for progressives, on LGBT rights, on issues important to Hispanics, even occasionally on issues important to women.

At the same time, we lose every single battle over economic issues. How is it that when polls show that a huge majority oppose cuts to Social Security, Democratic politicians like President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin are all for it, as are the Republicans? How is it that when Obama gets elected on a pledge to hike taxes on incomes above $250K, with a huge majority and control of the Senate, and a legislative situation where all he has to do is nothing and it happens, and then it doesn’t? How is it that the same bill continued a bunch of disgusting loopholes for the richest Americans and the corporations they control, like the NASCAR loophole that essentially only benefits one enormously wealthy family? 1.