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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 |
CommonDreams: "Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York set a trial date of February 9, 2009 for a human rights and racketeering case against the Royal Dutch Shell company (Shell) and the head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson. The case was first filed in 1996. The judge rejected Shell's attempt to file additional legal motions to postpone a trial date.
'We are looking forward to finally bringing Shell into court, where we will prove their role in the torture and murder of our clients and their pattern of human rights abuses,' said CCR attorney Jennie Green. 'It's time for our clients and their families to see justice.'"
11:00:27 AM 
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The following article shows how our secret services are slowly getting out of democratic control and going private.
TheAge: "Former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has joined Kevin Rudd's infrastructure chief, businessman Sir Rod Eddington, in advising a secretive British firm that sells intelligence on government policy intentions - including those in Australia - to big business.
The firm, Hakluyt & Co, was founded by former officers of British spy agency M16. Hakluyt has been embroiled in several corporate spying scandals and was caught in 2001 paying a former German intelligence agent to infiltrate green groups in Europe on behalf of the oil companies Shell and BP.
Hakluyt employs many former British intelligence officers and provides companies with high-level business and political intelligence on investment opportunities.
Mr Downer, the UN special envoy to Cyprus, was appointed to Hakluyt's advisory board in May. As foreign minister, he oversaw the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and had top-level access to information from Australia's spy agencies.
Sir Rod has served on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2005, but is not paid for his services.
In February, he was appointed chairman of Infrastructure Australia, a Rudd Government body charged with modernising the nation's water, transport, communications and energy assets through the $20billion Building Australia fund.
The former British Airways chief now faces conflict of interest allegations due to his roles with Hakluyt and Infrastructure Australia.
A former high level Australian security official told The Age that Hakluyt was one of the more 'aggressive and invasive'' corporate intelligence firms and that it was a clear conflict of interest for Sir Rod to be advising both the company and the Australian Government.
In August, Hakluyt approached a freelance Australian health journalist to join its network of 'discreet' agents to provide information on Australian Government health policy.
Although it goes to great lengths to keep its clients secret, Hakluyt has worked for European defence and aerospace company EADS and offered its services to disgraced US energy company Enron executives by saying it provided 'an unparalleled private intelligence network at the personal disposal of senior commercial figures'."
Britain has a network of those private security and spying companies. They are a danger to democracies everywhere and erode the working of democracy in Britain. They are in fact illegal, terrorist organisations, which are perfectly capable of destabilising the economies of foreign nations and which actively cooperate with the most criminal corporations. New Labour supports these private pirates. The aims of MI6 are the same as those of these private companies.
10:56:44 AM
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CSMonitor: "The economic image of the United States as a high-rolling tycoon at a Vegas casino, willing to gamble and reap rewards, has always stood in stark contrast to that of the European bean counter.
Now here in Europe, long a bastion of distrust toward unfettered capitalism, there's a question running underneath the financial crisis: Is the era of 'anything goes' free markets over?
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is refuting the infallibility of free markets. Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti is touting his best-selling book, a treatise against globalization. His German counterpart, Peer Steinbrück, points a sharp finger of blame at the United States, telling parliament recently that it is 'the source' and 'the focus' of the crisis.
'Some in Europe see the financial crisis as a win on points for the Continental financial system against the Anglo-American one,' conservative commentator Friedhelm Hengsbach recently wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a German daily.
But they underscore the fundamentally different philosophies of the US and EU toward market economics, and suggest that a deep-rooted disdain for US financial policy is peaking here. They also go some way to explaining how both sides of the Atlantic are responding to the crisis and which direction capitalism might take when financial systems finally recover and rebuild.
The US - and to an extent, Britain - have traditionally favored a hands-off approach to economic policy punctuated by risk-taking, a basic trust in financial institutions, and a preference to react to markets rather than influence them. Continental Europe is more cautious, favoring national regulation and oversight and choosing, philosophically, to side with social welfare and job security over corporate culture.
The difference can be seen in how each is responding to the financial crisis. The US passed a $700 billion bailout fund. European countries have acted to save their own banks, but on an EU level there is little agreement on a similar fund, and debate has centered on the extent to which the bloc should guarantee private bank deposits - with several countries deciding to back them 100 percent.
'The EU approach mostly has been directed at rescuing the small saver first and worrying about the big financial institutions later,' says Peter Ireland, an economics professor at Boston College. 'There's a sense that the United States did it the opposite way, where, from the beginning, it was all about the institutions and only after did they think about small savers.'
The financial crisis has exposed the need for greater government regulation of financial systems, a position Europe has a track record of supporting, says Gerhard Illing, research director at the Institute for Economic Studies in Munich.
That includes greater oversight of international banks with locations in more than one European country, which Brussels has already proposed. Also in the offing: an overhaul of European accounting rules and potential limits on bank lending practices.
Public opinion in Europe is supporting more financial overhaul, and the crisis is serving to fuel Europeans' latent distrust of corporations.
A financial crisis, Mr. Fricke says, 'always gets people swinging to the socialist side'."
Marxist: "Millions of US families are being threatened with eviction from their homes, some because they cannot pay their mortgages and others because their landlords cannot pay theirs. Now a County Sheriff in Illinois, has refused to carry out any more evictions."
10:45:07 AM
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One Hundred Poems:
The Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, 百人一首、 is a collection of 100 poems by 100 different poets. About 750 years ago, the poet Fujiwara no Sadaie (also known as Teika) selected them. They are fairly chronologically ordered from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries. The poems are all 'waka' (now called 'tanka'). Waka are five-line poems of 31 syllables, arranged as 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. The simplicity and beauty of the poems is still very much appreciated in Japan and abroad.
Hokusai made a series of woodblock prints for the poems, which are shown on my website on each poem's page. They represent his own interpretation of the texts, which is focused on the daily life of the Japanese. Unfortunately not all were finished. But other artists followed suit. The poems are very popular even today, and are published, sung, and available as card games in many editions.
The Hyakunin Isshu card game set has 200 cards, 100 of which contain the complete poem in kanji, and the other 100 contain the two last lines in hiragana. The game consists in finding the matching cards. One player reads from the complete card while the others try to find the matching card first. The relevant card from an ancient set is depicted on each poem's page on the website.
The site is still under construction. New poems will be added regularly.
9:30:23 AM
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