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Sunday, June 19, 2005 |
It seems everyone today was either on the water or at the waterside. Click the picture for a larger view over the IJmeer from Muiden.
I made a bike-tour along the river Gaasp, crossed the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal and followed the river Vecht to Muiden with its castle.
6:13:01 PM 
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Asia Times: "Barely five years into the 21st century, with a globalized neo-liberal trade regime firmly in place in a world where market economy has become the norm, trade protectionism appears to be fast re-emerging and developing into a new global trade war of complex dimensions. The irony is that this new trade war is being launched not by the poor economies that have been receiving the short end of the trade stick, but by the US, which has been winning more than it has been losing on all counts from globalized neo-liberal trade, with the European Union following suit in lockstep. Japan, of course, has never let up on protectionism and never taken competition policy seriously. The rich nations need to recognize that their efforts to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of already unfair trade will only plunge the world into deep depression. History has shown that while the poor suffer more in economic depressions, the rich, even as they are financially cushioned by their wealth, are hurt by political repercussions in the form of either war or revolution, or both.
During the Cold War, there was no international free trade. The economies of the two contending ideology blocs were completely disconnected. Within each bloc, economies interacted through foreign aid and memorandum trade from their respective superpowers. The competition was not for profit but for the hearts and minds of the people in the two opposing blocs, as well as those in the non-aligned nations in the Third World. The competition between the two superpowers was to give rather than to take from their separate fraternal economies.
Today, income and wealth disparity is rationalized as a necessity for capital formation. The New York Times reports that from 1980 to 2002, the total income earned by the top 0.1% of earners in the United States more than doubled, while the share earned by everyone else in the top 10% rose far less and the share of the bottom 90% declined.
For all its ill effects, the Cold War achieved two formidable ends: it prevented nuclear war and it introduced development as a moral imperative into superpower geopolitical competition with rising economic equality within each bloc. In the years since the end of the Cold War, nuclear terrorism has emerged as a serious threat and domestic development is preempted by global trade, even in the rich economies, while income and wealth disparity has widened everywhere.
Free trade has turned out not to be the win-win game promised by neo-liberals. It is very much a win-lose game, with heads, the rich economies win, and tails, the poor economies lose. Domestic development has been marginalized as a hapless victim of foreign trade, dependent on trade surplus for capital. Foreign trade and foreign investment have become the prerequisite engines for domestic development. This trade model condemns those economies with trade deficits to perpetual underdevelopment. Because of dollar hegemony, all foreign investment goes only to the export sector where US dollars can be earned. Even the economies with trade surpluses cannot use their dollar trade earnings for domestic development, as they are forced to hold huge dollar reserves to support the exchange rate of their currencies."
Read the complete article (see link above), it is a must.
CS Monitor: "The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.
Is that a liberal's talking point? Sure. But it's also a line from the recent public testimony of a champion of the free market: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan."
So, in short, the present capitalist system is bound to end up in disaster and revolution. It is a lawless, greedy Mafia.
11:50:53 AM
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LATimes: "The public war on the Iraqi insurgency has led to an atmosphere of hidden brutalities, including abuse and torture, carried out against detainees by the nation's special security forces, according to defense lawyers, international organizations and Iraq's Ministry of Human Rights.
The units have used tactics reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's secret intelligence squads, according to the ministry and independent human rights groups and lawyers, who have cataloged abuses."
George W. Bush can now call himself Saddam Hussein II.
Reuters: "A Halliburton Co. unit will build a new $30 million detention facility and security fence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects, the Defense Department announced on Thursday."
HalliburtonWatch: "Protecting the troops is secondary to protecting the oil fields."
And the worst thing is, the bastards who have created this mess are already thinking of the next war.
TruthOut: "While some Americans are exposing the deception for the latest war, others steadily lay the groundwork for the next one.
Focus plenty of news reports on alienated youth in Iran, spotlighting despair that borders on nihilism. Meanwhile, give scant media attention to the growth of civil society, with many thousands of Iranian young people and their elders striving to create a diffuse yet coherent social movement for democracy and human rights."
Of course, George cannot allow any form of democracy to develop without him messing it all up. So, he is already looking for another pretext, now to attack Iran.
Gulfnews: "Tensions between Iran and Iraq have escalated in recent weeks to the extent that threats of military action have been made, a senior member of Iraq's security forces said."
11:30:42 AM
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