Links 3 - Paul Boizot

CHANGING THE WORLD Politics, society, ecology, economics, history, etc.....How can individuals be fully healthy without social and economic change? How can this happen without some political organising? And without people knowing what is really going on? "Holistic" means more than an individual, their therapist, and the remedies they can purchase. The drug-and-surgery model of medicine, for example, is partly sustained by powerful multinational drug companies who work the capitalist system and know how to lobby governments. This is only an "easy" example...See also my NEWS & VIEWS page, page on Adult Education course "CHANGING OURSELVES, CHANGING OUR WORLD", and COURSES page for "Talking Politics" course.

- NEWS, COMMENT, MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES -
ORGANISATIONS AND CAMPAIGNS - POLITICAL HISTORY - VARIOUS

NEWS, COMMENT, MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES

Bottled Water; Pouring Resources Down the Drain "The global consumption of bottled water reached 154 billion liters...in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion liters consumed five years earlier. Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline." Article by Emily Arnold and Janet Larsen.

Bush, China, Two Deficits, and the Ongoing Decline of U.S. Hegemony July 2005 article by Paul Street, analysing the economic ties and tensions between the USA and China, the decline of the US economy, and its relationship to the invasion of Iraq.

Common Dreams "Breaking news and views for the progressive community" - US based.

Deep Black Lies "In-depth reporting of crime and corruption in high places". Control of current USA nuclear weapons programme, what happened to all the gold the Nazis and Japanese looted in WW2, CIA and drug trafficking, new weapons, Operation Gladio, US POW's captured in Vietnam, Bilderberg group and other influential "think-tanks", Remote Behavioral Influence Technology (mind control experiments), Rhodes scholars.

The Emperor's New Clothes Thought-provoking, though annoyingly nit-picking at times. Lots on Israel and former Yugoslavia, including U.S. sponsorship of terror in the latter.

EnergyBulletin News and articles on every aspect.

From The Wilderness Mike Ruppert's excellent site. What's wrong with official story on Sept. 11 2001, US plans for war in Colombia, CIA, USA politicians and the drugs trade, peak oil, history of the Bush family....Mirror site at http://www.copvcia.com

Globalinfo.org "Daily news service of the developing world" - news on site, also offers free news feed to your website.

Indymedia UK "network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues".

John Pilger Journalist, usually has the deep background to world events. John Pilger Reveals the American Plan tells how the US government manipulated the attacks of September 11 2001 to further pre-existing aims including attacking Iraq. See also my News page.

Lobster UK-based journal of parapolitics, intelligence and State Research - excellent.

Meditations On Collapse review by Richard Heinberg of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jane Jacob's Dark Age Ahead, and William Engdahl's A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

Narco-Dollars for Beginners How the Money Works in the Illicit Drug Trade. 2001 must-read article by Catherine Austin Fitts. What happens to the huge amounts of money paid for illegal drugs? How much is "laundered" by being passed through legitimate businesses, and how much does this skew the economy? What effect does it have on "democratic" politics. We probably can't have a serious understanding of the current political realities without understanding some of this. The article is posted on the website of the excellent Narco News Bulletin - "reporting on the drug war and democracy from Latin America".

Peak Oil and the Transformation of Finance A talk delivered by Chris Sanders at the Pio Manzú Centre International Conference, Rimini – October 28-30, 2005. Looks at the financial implications of declining oil production. Includes overview of how the USA has benefitted financially since WWII, and how badly it is placed now as regards its debt and balance of payments. Concludes that "some globalists argue that we have an opportunity, that it is a sensible thing to make things 12,000 miles away in China for sale in the United States ......This in fact does not prove anything of the sort, and is akin to arguing that to solve a problem we must create a bigger one. Higher fuel prices in fact argue for moving production closer to consumption, for shifting agriculture away from an industrial model of primary utility to the chemical and agribusiness industries.....These arguments are frequently couched in terms of free markets and free trade, but in fact they are based on quite the opposite. Free markets have been abandoned for all intents and purposes in favour of managed trade based on massive and historically unprecedented manipulation of exchange rates, which is what has allowed the United States to build such a huge foreign debt in the first place. This is at bottom a political matter, not an economic or scientific one. The present attempt to prop up the status quo by war is doomed to fail to achieve anything but to expose the real weakness of the states at the centre of the system, as the military failure of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan is proving daily."

Peakoil.com is "published and maintained by private US citizens in an effort to educate and promote awareness of global hydrocarbon depletion" - i.e. the fact that we are running out of oil.

Rense.com Jeff Rense has a US radio show. Lots of good stuff here, e.g. on Henry Kissinger, 9/11/2001, war in Iraq.

Seven steps to green your office

Why Britain Is Going To War Well-researched article by John Smith (on separate page on this site) written in March 2003. Essential reading for background - UK involvement in Iraq since the 1920's including bombing Kurdish villages, CIA involvement in the 1963 coup and with Saddam Hussein, the economic interests involved, the forging of the UK-USA "special relationship" ....Disclaimer; I do not share John's Marxist perspective on some matters of interpretation. You can also download the article in pdf format.

ZNet "A community for people committed to social change". Includes articles by Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Robert Fisk and many more.

ORGANISATIONS AND CAMPAIGNS

Amnesty International

Baku Ceyhan Campaign BP wants taxpayer's money to finance a huge new oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, to the Mediterranean. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline would cause serious human rights abuses, and would rob local people of their land and livelihoods.

Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society The BVFS works to raise awareness and funds for the Vietnamese people, especially those suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. If a non-Western country had done what the US did with Agent Orange it would be called chemical warfare, and the perpetrators would be called war criminals - have I read that there are certain countries that Henry Kissinger cannot visit for fear of arrest?

Corporate Watch "is a small independent not-for-profit research and publishing group which undertakes research on the social and environmental impact of large corporations, particularly multinationals. We aim to expose the mechanisms by which corporations function and the detrimental effects they have on society and the environment as an inevitable result of their current legal structure". Their articles are in more user-friendly language than that blurb! Tesco, London Olympic Games bid, Iraq war profiteering, the European Directive on Services, Microsoft....

Friends Of The Earth England, Wales, N.Ireland

Green Party (England and Wales) Homepage

Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.

Sheffield Friends Of The Earth

Sheffield Green Party which also organises the Sheffield Green Fair.

Trade Justice Movement

POLITICAL HISTORY For less obviously "political" links, see HISTORY

The First New Dealer Review by Murray N. Rothbard of "Herbert Hoover: A Public Life", by David Burner, first published in 1979. Shows Hoover as precursor of the corporate state established under Roosevelt and leading to the "military-industrial complex" which has run America since World War 2.

The Great War Retold review by Ralph Raico of "The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War" by Hunt Tooley. Looks at the roots of World War I, the interaction between the war on the ground and domestic policies, the growth of state power which remained after the war, and more.

The Hampton Roads Peace Conference During the War Between the States Argues that there is clear evidence that what we in the UK normally call the American Civil War, was in no way fought in order to free the slaves, but rather to protect the economic interest of the North. Quotes Robert E. Lee re the "consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home." I.e. this was an important stage in the growth of the dominating US government, and, eventually, the American Empire.

How Did Iraq and the United States Become Enemies? History News Network article by Prof. Buzzanco.

The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History review by Chalmers Johnson of "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile, about the US funding and arming of Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan - approved by President Carter on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion.

The negative return economy: a discourse on America’s black budget "The United States government has operated a secret budgeting and spending program for decades outside the framework of the American Constitution... The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries saw the consolidation of American industry and banking under the control of a restrictive cartel that for all practical purposes assumed control of the economy. The great magnates of American industry and finance in the late nineteenth century were superb practitioners of covert operations. Witness to this fact are the institutions set up during the twentieth century through which their descendants maintain control. This paper is a summary of the structure of the American political economy which fits the facts better than the official model...." Article at Sanders Research Associates.

Not So Fast, Sen. Lott Eric Margolis' 1998 article advises against action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and lists many previous US interventions - Nasser, Saddam, Sadat and even Ghaddafi were all helped to power by the CIA, though some of them then had the cheek not to act in US interests.

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power, 1963 "the CIA not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured."

A Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight review by George C. Leef of book by Jeanette Keith, showing that there was deep opposition among the Amercian pulbic to US involvement in World War 1. In response, the Wilson administration passed the Sedition Act to make it illegal for people to denounce the war.

Victorian Political History: An Overview

When Democracy Failed; The Warnings Of History Excellent article by Thom Hartmann (on separate page on this site) on chilling parallels - e.g. terrorism as a justification for war and draconian national security legislation - between now and 70 years ago.

VARIOUS

911Truth.org is "a campaign to educate the public about the Sept. 11th coverup and inspire popular pressure to overturn the "incompetence theory" and expose the truth surrounding the events of 9/11 before the November 2004 election; namely, that elements within the U.S. government must have been complicit, or worse, for the attacks to happen the way they did".

Anomalous evidence .....Building 7 of the WTC, rubbled without even being hit ....A pattern of secrecy, denial, and retribution for those in the FBI, CIA, and administration who warned about the pending attacks....Unusual patterns of debris, making it appear that Flight 93 was shot down, despite official government reports....Insider stock trades made millions off selling American and United short, trade and were not fully investigated...Advance warnings to key politicians and business leaders not to fly that day...The quick exit of the extended Bin Laden family from the country with full governmental protection.....the Pakistan ISI wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, one of the orchestrators, around the time ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud met American political leaders days before the attack......

Anti-Apathy "Because waking up is hard to do".

Bibliography: Military Use of Depleted Uranium

The Corporation website for the film of the same name, which I highly recommend. - graphic examples of businesses ruining the environment, paying low wages to workers in poor countries who make goods which then sell for much more in rich countries, suppressing unfavourable news, etc. Also some bits on how people fight back. Website includes details of where the film is showing, and a good links page to other relevant activist sites.

EcoCities.Net Index of over a thousand eco-friendly web sites plus resources.

Global Rich List How rich are you? Enter your annual income into the box and hit ‘show me the money’. "We gauge how rich we are by looking upwards at those who have more than us. This makes us feel poor". This site helps help people understand, in real terms, where they stand globally, and realise that most of us (who can use the net) are in the privileged minority."

Iraq Body Count Counts civilian deaths. There was a similar project for the war in Afghanistan - no doubt you read about it in your daily newspaper.....

Jihadica Documenting the global jihad. "A clearinghouse for materials related to militant, transnational Sunni Islamism, commonly known as Jihadism." NEW 13.01.10

The Political Compass Take the test and find where you are - not just on the inadequate left-right spectrum, which puts Stalin and Gandhi in the same bracket, but on a more comprehensive scale.

HISTORY For more "political" history links see POLITICAL HISTORY

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). Use incredible modern technology to read letters and documents over 4000 years old! Based at Oxford University. Over 350 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the late third and early second millennia BCE. Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition.

Stalinism, The Folk Revival And Bob Dylan

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

Do-It-Yourself Deity The Philosopher's Magazine has assembled put together a computer-modelling virtual environment in which to test the plausibility of different conceptions of God. You are invited to select from a list the attributes which you believe God must have. Metaphysical engineers will then model this conception of God to check out its plausibility.

Flame Out mainly concerned with combatting religious homophobia, but also quite a lot on the other dangers of militant fundamentalist Islam, pages on fraudulent, hypocritical or abusing gurus, and a "good guru guide". Unfortunately descends to tabloid name-calling and abuse in its "Enemies of the People" section.

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