March 11, 2010 by Jay Taber.

The new colonialism in Africa sounds a lot like the old plantations of America.

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March 11, 2010 by Jay Taber.

First Nations in British Columbia set up blockades to protect their water resources from municipal and industrial extraction.

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March 10, 2010 by Jay Taber.

Learning to use communications technology, while valuable, should not be overemphasized at the expense of learning the principles of organizing. While computer-based research and education has expanded our access to information, learning to evaluate information for its applicability requires greater focus. Analysis of communications in conflict, otherwise known as psychological warfare, thus serves as a prerequisite to effective engagement in netwar.

Comprehending how activism functions in this context, helps to distinguish between consciousness-raising and capacity-building. While not mutually exclusive, they are also not synonymous.

As more young people become involved in politics, they will, like us, live and learn from their mistakes. What they need to know in the digital age, is that connecting with millions through mass communication means little if the interaction fails to redistribute the power needed to socialize wealth and democratize capital ownership.

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March 10, 2010 by Jay Taber.

Nationalia examines the history of Kashmir.

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March 9, 2010 by Renee Davis.

Be sure to check out WorldFocus‘ interview with Renee Davis and Tiffany Waters of CWIS about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the global indigenous movement. It’s part of their ongoing series on indigenous cultures. Read the interview below.

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March 9, 2010 by Jay Taber.

Northern Ireland Assembly votes to take over policing and justice from UK. Westminster to facilitate transfer by mid-April.

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March 8, 2010 by Jay Taber.

Latin America shuns Canada and the US. Establishes alternative organization to OAS.

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March 5, 2010 by Jay Taber.

When Michel Chossudovsky wrote his seminal book The Globalisation of Poverty, the dismembering of Yugoslavia was still underway. As a project of globalization, the orchestrated monetary attack on the socialist republic, that culminated in civil war, served to illustrate the fact that globalization is not just an economic model, but a plan of war. That war, which is by definition global, is quite simply the exercise of power by the financial sector in undermining the powers of the state to the benefit of the free market.

As states cede their social obligations in favor of transfers of public wealth to private accounts, all public needs suffer, and perhaps more importantly, become dependent on private rules, no matter how criminal, stingy or punitive. This, is in fact, the overriding principle of the majority of states: to succumb to the thievery of the market, and to supplant public prosperity with private poverty.

Indeed, it is the Obama Administration game plan.

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March 4, 2010 by Jay Taber.

A while back, I wrote about the fabric of identity, and if insufficiently authentic, how it can unravel. In our consumer society, identity is closely associated with possession, and as millions become dispossessed, their identity crumbles. Losing one’s possessions in a culture of imbeciles (a term used here to indicate political illiteracy) can make one vulnerable to recruitment by all sorts of ideologues, and this can lead to pathological behavior. And in a state where access to quality counseling often depends on a measure of possessions, the dispossessed are adrift.

We may indeed witness a return of active domestic terrorism in the form of Christian Patriot militias, but unlike the farm crisis of the 1980s and the millenarian mania of the 1990s, this time around, the social context of economic panic and religious hysteria is more widespread. Sociopathic conduct short of murder could become the norm.

Keeping calm amid hyperventilating media won’t be easy, but then, it never is.

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March 3, 2010 by Jay Taber.

Chas Freeman discusses Jewish collective denial and the responsibility of Jewish diaspora for apartheid in Israel, where the “aggressive amorality of the Israeli state is now the source of an accumulating threat to Jews everywhere”.

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