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Currently viewing articles tagged with United States.
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Actually, it’s the system, President Obama
Global capitalism’s deterioration is fast outrunning the disorganized, uncoordinated patchwork of too-little-too-late government “programs.” Nothing illustrates this sorry spectacle better than the twists and turns of U.S. monetary policy to be executed by the Federal Reserve, and Congress’s just-passed “stimulus” program, about to be enacted by the Obama administration.
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Latino Mercenaries for Bush
n the faculty dining room at the California State University where I teach, a Mexican-American woman places the thin slice of turkey on the bread to make my sandwich. The stress lines that radiate down from her high cheekbones twitch as she tells me politely that she’s fine. One of her sons is in Afghanistan, she reports. The other will leave tomorrow for Iraq. “I pray every day,” she says, smearing the mayonnaise on the other slice of bread.
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Nuclear Warning
In your recent book, New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex, you state, “Never, in the almost three decades that I have been campaigning against the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power have I felt that the world is in so much danger.” What kind of risks are we currently facing?
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Academics in the Service of War
In Canada, we have guidelines that strictly regulate the use of human stem cells and assisted human reproduction. Both Bill C-6 and the Guidelines on Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Research came about through public consultations with scientists, faith groups, the Canadian public and scholars in bioethics, sociology and law, among others. These instruments established guidelines for ethical research into and use of technologies with potentially profound life-saving medical benefits. Furthermore, the Guiding Principles include the notion that “Research undertaken should have potential health benefits for Canadians” and that the research should “Respect individual and community notions of human dignity and physical, spiritual and cultural integrity.”
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America’s Other War
Throughout the Cold War, Colombia was one of the largest recipients of U.S. counter-insurgency military aid and training. Counter-insurgency—CI for short—was designed to reorient recipient militaries away from a posture of external defence, toward one of “internal defence” against allegedly Soviet-aligned guerrillas. States that received U.S. CI military aid were told to police their own populations to make sure that “subversion” did not grow. Interestingly, when we examine the manuals used by U.S. military trainers to find out what they mean by subversion, we find some interesting clues as to why so many civilians died at the hands of Latin American “internal security states.”
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“War on Terror” Has Latin America Indigenous People in its Sights
The “War on Terror,” identified in Amnesty International’s 2004 annual report as a new source of human-rights abuses, is threatening to expand to Latin America, targeting indigenous movements that are demanding autonomy and protesting free-market policies and “neoliberal” globalization.
In the United States, “there is a perception of indigenous activists as destabilizing elements and terrorists,” and their demands and activism have begun to be cast in a criminal light, said lawyer José Aylwin, of the Institute of Indigenous Studies at the University of the Border in Temuco (670 kilometres south of the Chilean capital).
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Wal-Mart’s Culture of Control
Last June, 16,000 cheering shareholders participated in Wal-Mart’s annual shareholder’s meeting. The event, which took place in the Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was one part business, one part pep rally and one part Billy Graham revival. The darkness of the stadium was punctured only by spotlights, video projections and several thousand blinking buttons that the company gave out to its employees. Rock-and-roll success anthems blared alongside spontaneous outbursts of cheering and chanting from the countless Wal-Mart “associates,” who flew into the area from the company’s operations in other countries.
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Whistle Blower’s Needed
“No one felt any obligation to anyone on the outside.”
American maverick journalist Lowell Bergman, speaking to Canadian counterparts in Toronto, was talking about the time CBS refused to air his now-famous expose of American tobacco companies and their relentless drive to hook smokers with new and improved forms of nicotine. He and whistle-blower/chemist Jeffrey Wigand later saw their unwelcome story offered to the public on the big screen in The Insider, featuring Al Pacino as Bergman and Russell Crowe as Wigand.
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Why A Canada-U.S. Customs Union is a Bad Idea
The potential shutdown of the Canada-U.S. border is a prospect that sends shivers down the spine of corporate Canada. These fears crystallized in the days after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Since that time, pressure has been mounting for a new deal between Canada and the United States to ensure that the border stays open in the future. A new wave of pro-integration literature has emerged with hypothetical proposals for a “strategic bargain” (in the words of the C.D. Howe Institute) with the U.S. across a number of policy areas, including border security, defence policy and immigration.
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CLC Policy
We agree with the Canadian Labour Congress’s controversial position paper that free trade has not been a total “economic disaster.” But we disagree that economic integration has gone so far that measures to reduce our dependency and challenge this right-wing direction cannot be contemplated. In this sense, the Canadian Labour Congress’s new industrial policy paper is a deep disappointment. Instead of insisting on new directions in economic policy, the CLC’s new paper lacks critical leadership, merely offering new concessions to free trade and the rule of the market.
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