Thirty Years After the U.S. Invasion of Grenada, the First Neoliberal War

Zero Anthropology

October 28, 2013

by Maximilian Forte

On Corporate Power | On Environmental Foundations: An Interview with Cory Morningstar

Ceasefire | On Corporate Power

In his latest column Michael Barker interviews Canadian writer and climate change campaigner Cory Morningstar about the debilitating impact liberal philanthropy has had on the environmental movement.

December 17, 2012

By Michael Barker

 (Photo by: 350 Copenhagen)

Cory Morningstar is a Canadian writer and activist. She believes in direct action and initiated the grassroots group: Canadians for Action on Climate Change, a member of International Climate Justice Now! She also works with ClimateSOS activists. Prior to working on the People’s Agreement in Cochabamba, 2010, Ms. Morningstar, collaborated with Ms. Joan Russow, former Leader of the Canadian Green Party in writing the document Time to be Bold which was one of the documents referred to in the creation of the People’s Agreement.

Her most well known piece of writing was published after the Copenhagen disaster and is titled: EYES WIDE SHUT | TckTckTck exposé from activist insider. Oils Sand Truth named it “One of the most important articles Climate Campaigners will ever read…”

Michael Barker (MB):  Could you explain what you see as the main differences between hard and soft power?

Cory Morningstar (CM):  Simply put, hard power is coercing via force, whereas soft power is coercing via manipulation and seduction: like a slow, methodical, death dance. There are no organizations in a better position to employ soft power methods than those that comprise the non-profit industrial complex. →

FLASHBACK | The American Plan: How to Destroy an Agricultural Economy in Haiti

Back to the Future: Food Aid in Haiti

Open Salon Timothy Schwartz

June 3, 2011

Protesta Popular Triunfa contra Presión de EEUU en Paraguay y Destituyen a Gloria Rubin

Blogueros y Corresponsales de la Revolución

publicado por Luis Agüero Wagner

el agosto 12, 2013

Una fuerte protesta popular y de toda la sociedad paraguaya finalmente se impuso a las presiones de la embajada norteamericana, y el presidente electo Horacio Cartes decidió destituir a la polémica Ministra de la Mujer Gloria Rubin. →

Who is Shaking Up Brazil and Why

By Nil Nikandrov

The mass street protests in Brazil continue. Most of the protesters do not belong to any party and have no leaders with whom the authorities could negotiate about the demands being made. It all began with a flare-up of discontent among Brazilians from the middle class and residents of poor neighborhoods with a hike in public transportation fares. Fares were high to begin with, and the most recent fare hike was met with indignation from city dwellers who do not have their own cars. →

USAID: A Front for CIA Intelligence Gathering

Watch: Thomas Tighe Describing the Relationship between USAID and NGOs

President and CEO of Direct Relief International, Thomas Tighe, in a provocative piece of video describing the unsavory relationship between international NGO’s and the U.S. Government – specifically that of USAID (the US Agency for International Development). The organizations only get funding according the their acquiescence to the government’s terms and conditions. Therefore, the ‘beneficent’ relationship is inextricably linked to the criteria of Western imperialism.

In 1995, self-sufficient Eritrea, another target of US destabilization, also expelled USAID in order to protect and build Eritrean autonomy.

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Excerpt from the article written by Bill Keisling published on Sept 2, 2007 by the Yardbird Reader

“Is there a tie-in to foreign intelligence in all this? Public records show that USAID has long been a front for CIA intelligence gathering, as well as a conduit for CIA funding to foreign governments and agencies.

The USAID’s infamous Office of Public Safety, for example, received cover and funding from the USAID while directed by the CIA. More information on all this was released in July 2007 with the publication of the CIA’s long-suppressed “Family Jewels” set of documents. (Pages 607 to 613 of the Family Jewels papers describe this program as a “joint CIA/USA training program.”)

“According to a 1973 document revealed in the Family Jewels CIA documents, around 700 police officers were trained a year (by the Office of Public Safety), including in handling of explosives,” Wikipedia summarizes. “The United States has a long history of providing police aid to Latin American countries. In the 1960s the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Public Safety (OPS) provided Latin American police forces with millions of dollars worth of weapons and trained thousands of Latin American police officers. In the late 1960s, such programs came under media and congressional scrutiny because the U.S.-provided equipment and personnel were linked to cases of torture, murder and ‘disappearances’ in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

“In Washington, DC, the Office of Public Safety had remained immune to public embarrassment as it went about two of its chief functions: allowing the CIA to plant men with the local police in sensitive places around the world; and after careful observation on their home territory, bringing to the United States prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees. The OPS’s director in Washington, Byron Eagle, was close to the CIA.”

Former USAID Tobias was believed to have held a Top Secret security clearance, the result of what is known as a supposedly rigorous “Single Scope Background Investigation,” or SSBI.”

+++Read the article in its entirety here.

Also see CIA Spying Under USAID Cover, Fears NAB (Pakistan, April 29, 2011)

ISLAMABAD: The National Accountability Bureau has unofficially conveyed its apprehensions to some leading security agencies of the country that certain USAID officials, apparently monitoring and executing development work in the tribal areas and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, are spying for the CIA.

+++Read the article in its entirety here.

 

 

Capital-driven Civil Society

Originally published on State of Nature, May 19, 2008.

Republished by Michael Barker with additional links.

by Michael Barker

“It is the more subtle support that democracy manipulators provide to progressive activist organizations that are the most important yet least understood part of their activities.”

According to, the once progressive, now neo-conservative commentator, David Horowitz, Professor Stephen Zunes is a member of a select group of leftist activists that he refers to as The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006). Horowitz is infamous for co-founding the Center for the Study of Popular Culture – which has been ominously renamed as the David Horowitz Freedom Center. More recently though, in 2005, this Center launched DiscoverTheNetworks, an online project that has been accurately referred to as “Horowitz’s Smear Portal”. The relevance of this background is found in the fact that I have also assessed Zunes’ connections to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (where he chairs the board of academic advisors). While both I and Horowitz have criticised Zunes’ background and affiliations, needless to say Horowitz’s “Smear Portal” attacks Zunes for very different reasons than my own. [1] Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that DiscoverTheNetworks approach to investigating Zunes is very similar to my own, as it identifies the “individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it”. The crucial difference, between these two parallel analyses, however, is that I criticise the Left in an attempt to strengthen it by causing it to reflect on the elite manipulation and co-option of civil society, while DiscoverTheNetworks simply aims to undermine the Left. [2] →

Human Rights Watch Lies about Chavez and Venezuela

Answering the slanders

LiberationNews.org

March 21, 2013

MUST WATCH: Splitting the Sky Speaking on the Antiwar Left & “Progressives”

March 14, 2013:

It is with a heavy heart that Onkwehón:we Rising relates to you the news that John Dacajeweiah Hill, aka “Splitting the Sky”, rotiskenhrakete of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation has passed on from this world to be with Our ancestors. Dacajeweiah, which means “Splitting the Sky” in the colonizer’s tongue, like the overwhelming majority of colonial subjects, experienced great hardship and suffering under the boot of the North American settler-colonial capitalist system, especially in his youth. [Read full article.]

Published on Mar 17, 2013:

The New Propaganda is ‘Liberal’

By John Pilger

What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state.

In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; her Triumph of the Will cast Hitler’s spell. →