Bulletin N° 693
Subject: “Don’t Mourn –Organize
!” (Joe Hill, 1879-1915).
7 April 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of
CEIMSA,
The internationally renowned
activist collective known as ZNet has
launched an initiative to follow the Bernie Sanders campaign which is advancing
the idea of real democratic socialism to replace neoliberal capitalism
as the foundation of the US political economy (“people over private profits”).
This group of dedicated activists has long been active in educating the public
on important issues, since the US military defeat in Vietnam and the start of
the Reagan administration’s counter-revolution; they are again sponsoring
social dialogues among citizens around the world, with the aim of establishing strategies,
tactics and logistics for positive democratic change in the face
of corporate authoritarianism and neo-liberal hegemony. Like superstitious
peasants in the Holy Roman Empire, many of us are suffering the inequalities
and the capricious indignities inflicted on us by the super-rich owners of
corporate capital and their army of minions. Just as many of our ancestors
lived under the control of the medieval Church and aristocratic property
owners, so we today have been largely disarmed by an ideology of neo-liberalism
financed by owners of corporate capital who are pursuing their narrow self-interests
across continents more effectively than ever before by means of
high-technology in communication and transportation.
You are invited to sign up and join
the discussion about this new world-wide phenomenon.
Programmatic Call by 75 International
Activist/Scholars
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/possible-ideas-for-going-forward/
Hello
Francis,
We
are 9 of the 75 signers of the document included below that seeks to spur wide
and deep discussion of activist program with the purpose of trying to reach
shared positions.
The
document offers possible initial but in no sense final ideas for
discussion.
We
hope you will give serious visibility to the document, perhaps running it as a
multi author piece yourself, perhaps running an article or an editorial about
it, or running a criticism, an extension, a debate, or whatever suits
you.
If
one or more folks at your publication would like to add your names to the list
of signers, that is also excellent, of course, but please send those names to
us, too, so we can add them to the underlying document.
"Michael Albert" <sysop@zmag.org>
In any event, we
hope you will agree to display the document or otherwise relate to the effort.
Please let us know your decision. We intend for it to begin appearing on Thursday,
April 7, and more widely by Friday, hopefully. so please
publish either Thursday, or Friday, or thereafter.
Multi Author
Programmatic Initiative
Thank you,
Michael Albert, Z Communications
Noam Chomsky, Internationalist
Marjorie Cohn, Scholar/Activist
Bill Fletcher, Talk Show Host
Irene Gendzier,
Scholar/Activist
Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative
Nonviolence
Robert W.
McChesney, Univ Illinois
Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, Internationalist
Marina Sitrin,
Lawyer/Author
The
6 items below will bring to mind for many of us the urgent need to shake
off the effects of the dominant ideology of “corporate individualism” (i.e. the
subjection of alienated individuals to corporate interests) so that we might
find the loving and caring community that every member of our species needs to
survive and prosper. The genocidal interests of corporations must be defeated
--in theory and in practice.
Sincerely,
Francis
Feeley
Professor
of American Studies
University
of Grenoble-3
Director
of Research
University
of Paris-Nanterre
Center
for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The
University of California-San Diego
a.
The Occupation of the American Mind
===========
b.
The Empire Files: Abby Martin with
Dr. Jill Stein - A Sick Society
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16035
Abby Martin sits down with Dr. Stein to look at how her career in medicine
helped her diagnose America's "multi-organ failure," and why her
ideas pose such a threat to Empire.
===========
c.
Music
therapy for traumatised Palestinian children
===========
d.
“Charlie Hebdo
criticised for linking all Muslims to Brussels”
by
Harriet Sherwood
The
CH editorial in question (translated into English) can be found at :
https://charliehebdo.fr/en/edito/how-did-we-end-up-here/
and
The
response to it by Nigerian-American author, Teju
Cole, is worth reading :
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10153616146902199&id=200401352198
===========
e.
From: "Jim O'Brien" <jimobrien48@gmail.com>
To: haw-info@stopthewars.org
Sent: Thursday, 7 April, 2016
Subject: [haw-info] HAW Notes 4/7/16: Vietnam draft resistance film;
links to recent articles of interest
A note: The IndiGoGo fundraising campaign for
the film-in-progress The Boys Who Said No: Draft Resistance & the
Vietnam War has gotten off to a strong start. Information about the
project, with a link for contributing, is here.
Links
to Recent Articles of Interest
"Are Sanders' Criticisms of
Israeli Occupation Policies Unprecedented in a Presidential Campaign?"
By
Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog, posted April 7
The
author teaches history at the University of Michigan.
"Orwell (and the President) Come
to Hiroshima"
By
Joseph Gerson, CommonDreams.org, posted April
6
By
Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch.com, posted April
5
The
author is a professor emeritus of history and International Relations at Boston
University.
Two more by
Prof. Bacevich:
"Matters of Choice,"
an
interview by Stephen Kinzer, Boston Review, posted
April 4
&
"Ted Cruz Embodies the
Degeneration of Foreign Policy Conservatism," The Nation, posted March 30
"Islamic Extremism Is a Product
of Western Imperialism"
By
Gary Leech, CounterPunch.com, posted March 30
"Donald Trump: Foreign Policy's Useful Idiot?"
By
John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, posted March
30
"Neoconservatism in a
Nutshell"
By
Jim Lobe, LobeLog, posted March 24
"With the Middle East Peace
Process 'Dead,' Now What?"
By
Douglas Kerr and Ted Steinberg, Cleveland.com, posted March 23
Ted
Steinberg teaches history at Case Western Reserve University.
"A Force unto Itself: A Military Leviathan Has Emerged
as America's 51st and Most Powerful State"
By
William J. Astore, TomDispatch.com, posted March
20
The
author is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and formerly taught at the US
Air Force Academy.
Thanks
for Mim Jackson and an anonymous reader for
suggesting articles included in the above list. Suggestions for these
occasional lists can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
===========
f.
THE PANAMA PAPERS
If you are wondering why there is very little in the Panama Project that is
focused on US politicians, business leaders or corporations, it is important to
note that this project was funded by a USAID and USAID funds lots of
"journalism" all over the world. I put journalism in quotation marks
because the agency is very involved in US regime change operations so their
reporting may have that purpose, which is why Putin was the headline of the
first stories, I suspect (even though his name is not in any of the
documents).
The Organized Crime and Corruption
Reporting Project (OCCR) got at least $3 million from
USAID -- they are also funded by Open Society Institute and United Nations
Democracy Fund (UNDEF). Their annual report looks like an anti-Putin/Russia
project.
***
From USA Today, April 7, 2016
:
Whistleblowing group WikiLeaks
criticized the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists'
decision not to allow open access to documents that show how
wealthy people have links to offshore financial services.
"If you censor more than 99% of
the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition," WikiLeaks said in a tweet Wednesday.
The ICIJ and its media partners
have chosen not to release hacked Panama law firm Mossack
Fonseca's files online.
When Wikileaks
leaked classified diplomatic cables in 2010 that contained sensitive and
embarrassing information and analysis about countries and world leaders it
published the entire database on the Internet in a searchable format.
The group wants ICIJ to take a
similar approach to its data.
"(The documents) should be
available to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the
group of journalists working on the data, can search it, "WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson told Russian broadcaster RT.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that first shared the leaked files
with the ICIJ, said Thursday the full dossier of 11.5 million documents
would not be made available to the public or law enforcement
agencies because it contains private information about companies and
individuals that have no public interest.
Separately, Gerard Ryle,
ICIJ's director, told Wired magazine: "We're
not WikiLeaks. We're trying to show that journalism
can be done responsibly."
See :