By now it is old news that there is a coup afoot in Brazil and that the right-wing is using extraordinary political measures to overthrow of Dilma Rousseff. What is little discussed amid all the talk of impeachment and corruption in Brazil is the larger context: how international finance capital is working with Hillary Clinton and other U.S. political elites …
David Korten – Time to Grow Up Into a Living Earth Economy
The current political chaos in the United States is a product of the failure of our economic system to fulfill the promise of the American dream: That each new generation will enjoy abundance beyond that of their parents. What most people experience instead is increasing insecurity and declining opportunity. People know something is badly wrong. Uncertain as to what or …
KATIE KLABUSICH – The Feminist Movement Has A Capitalism Problem
I’m uncomfortable using capitalism as a means to attaining gender equality. We can never be equals in a system where the size of your stack is used as leverage to demand human rights. While I understand how feminists came to see the right to have a bank account and a credit card independent of a man as foundational, it’s time …
Alternative Visions – Panama Papers’ Revelations & What’s Happening in Europe (French protests, Dutch voters, Brexit-Grexit, German Economy) – 04.08.16
Jack discusses this past week’s revelations out of Panama of the massive tax sheltering, avoidance and fraud by the US and global economic elites. The economic tax ‘wikileaks’ revelations show global politicians deeply implicated, including Iceland, UK, Argentina prime ministers. Jack refers listeners back to his 2006 ‘War at Home’ book and the ‘Great American Tax Shift’ and writings ever since on this topic, available at his blog, jackrasmus.com and website, www.kyklosproductions.com/articles/html. Where the US, Euro, Russian, China 1% hide their money in 27 global ‘jurisdictions’, estimated conservatively at $11 trillion today. Phone Congress ‘repatriation’ tax proposals of 2005 and 2016 are explained, recent inversion deals, and how and why US corporations hold more than $2T offshore today. In the second half of the show, Jack reviews growing events in Europe, with French workers and students staging massive protests against ‘labor law reforms’, Dutch voters rejecting inclusion of Ukraine into the EU, why odds favor a UK (Brexit) from the Eurozone this June, why a Greek ‘Grexit’ may follow as the IMF threatens to renege on last August’s Greek bailout, and new evidence of a Germany economic slowdown. (For further analysis of Europe, see except of Jack’s chapter 6, ‘Europe’s Chronic Stagnation’, from his 2016 book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’, posted on his kyklosproductions website above).
Sarah Lazare – Here’s What Happens When a U.S. Senator Calls for Israel to Be Held Accountable for Atrocities
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy has piqued the temper of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and faces a rebuke from within his own party after demanding for an investigation into “gross violations of human rights” by Israel and Egypt, the top recipients of American military aid. Released just days after an Israeli soldier was recorded [3] extra-judicially assassinating a wounded Palestinian man in the …
Alternative Visions – The Right Wing Offensive in South America: An Eyewitness Report – 04.01.16
Jack Rasmus welcomes Pablo Vivanco, political commentator in Quito, Ecuador to provide a latest update on the right wing economic and political forces in ascendance in South America, focusing on the latest developments in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. As the economic crisis deepens throughout the region due to forces beyond the control of progressive governments in the region—i.e. falling oil and commodity prices, collapsing currencies, capital flight, slowing global economy—right wing forces (with assistance of US government and elite) have launched in the past year an intense attack throughout South America to reverse the tide of progressive governments that came to power since 2000. Vivanco describes the strategies and tactics, economic and political, currently being employed by the nascent Right Wing Offensive, including efforts to depose recently duly elected governments in Venezuela and Brazil and the launching of intense austerity measures, shutting down of independent media, mass layoffs, while rewarding of global bankers and investors by the new right wing government of billionaire, Mauricio Macri, in Argentina. New popular movements of resistance are described by Vivanco, as are efforts of the new right wing forces and governments to stifle independent journalists and media outlets throughout the region.
Pablo Vivanco is currently Director of the English Division of Telesur Media in Latin America, a consortium of progressive Latin American countries. A former radio host of ‘Voces Latinas’, he is a long time activist in movements for progressive change in Latin America, living and working in Quito. For timely reports in English on daily Latin American political events, go to: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
Jonathan Marshall – Deadly Blowback from Neo-Imperial Wars
In what may be the most dramatic blowback yet from Western military intervention in the Middle East, terrorism and the mass influx of foreign migrants are now putting the very existence of the European Union at risk. Foreign wars fanned by European and American interventionists in the name of democracy and humanitarianism now threaten those same values in Europe as never before …
Leid Stories – Obama’s Hemispheric Fix-It Tour – 03.24.16
And now, Argentina. President Obama yesterday added Argentina to his foreign-policy foray into the region, having first spending three days in Cuba to seal his commitment to normalize relations with the Communist state after 57 years of hostilities that reached the brink of war.
Listeners continue with their assessment of the significance of Obama’s Cuba visit and direct appeal to its government and people and, with Argentina added to his itinerary, what they make of the president’s hemispheric foreign-policy-fix-it tour.
Kathleen McKeoghain – Atlantic Salmon Is Basically Extinct: You’re Eating a Genetically Eroded Version
Atlantic salmon, the native salmon that used to inhabit the northern Atlantic Ocean, rivers and seas, is a species now represented by an impostor: farmed salmon. Also known as cultured salmon, farmed salmon comes from hatchery genetic stock and unlike its native ancestors, lacks wild genetic variation. The wild fish our ancestors ate is gone. What appears on our dinner …
Economic Update – Seeds of Fascism? – 03.06.16
Updates on injustice of Argentina’s default settlement, on Pope Francis’s rejection of “exploiters,” and on stagnating real median incomes in US. Major discussions of (1) what Sanders’s support proves about Occupy Wall Street, and (2) economics of fascism.