Mahler's Prodigal Son

After simply ignoring it, the American media has, at last, cottoned on that there is a movement called "Occupy Wall Street".     It is resonating around the US.   Naomi Klein on the "movement" .... "Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.” But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away complet...

Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War - not that there has been anything to celebrate, notwithstanding some of the spin and hype coming from some Western politicians attempting to highlight some sort of positives in and out of all of the carnage. Malalai Joya is a onetime member of the Afghan parliament.    She is articulate and direct in her message published on CommonDreams . "I would like to thank all supporters and anti-war movements around the world who are marking the dark day of occupation of U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan. Respected friends - 10 years ago the U.S. and NATO invaded my country under the fake banners of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror has only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights, and women’s rights violations, which has doubled the miseries ...

The Nobel Committee has just announced the winners of this year's Peace Prize. The New York Times reports:   "The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 was awarded on Friday to three campaigning women from Africa and the Arab world in acknowledgment of their nonviolent role in promoting peace, democracy and gender equality. The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa’s first elected female president — her compatriot, peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner."

It is hard to believe that NATO and its allies have been engaged in the war in Afghanistan for 10 years.  In fact, today marks the 10th anniversary. One could well ask, with justification, what is there to show for all the mayhem, human and otherwise.       As BBC News says .... "Afghanistan has undergone momentous change in the decade which followed the US-led operation to remove the Taliban from power in October 2001. Billions of dollars in foreign assistance have poured into the country, most of it spent on military operations. While some aspects of life have improved for some people, the death toll from a decade of violence is high." Go here to see some vivid graphs (prepared by BBC News ) of how the lives of Afghanis has changed over the 10 years.   It's pleasing to see that it's not all bad. Meanwhile, in the larger picture, the analysis of those in the know is that the war has not been successful - certainly in achi...

For 35 years, the US and Israel have been rejecting a political settlement that is supported virtually by the entire world. A couple of months ago, there was a meeting of the oligarchs — people who pretty much run the economy [of Israel], and they warned the government that it better accept something like this resolution, because otherwise, Israel will be, as they put it, South Africanized: even more isolated, with boycotts, refusal to load ships, and their economy will collapse. Noam Chomsky covers the field in this interview, here , with RT .

That we are in the midst of an economic crisis and times are turbulent and unsettling.    Across Europe there are upheavals and in America we see unrest in certain critical ways such as the ground-swell "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Joseph Stiglitz is a professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011. Writing in " Getting to the roots of the global crisis " in the SMH Stiglitz seeks to analyse the current crisis. "The problem is analogous to what arose at the beginning of the 20th century, when rapid productivity growth in agriculture forced labour to move from rural areas to urban manufacturing centres. With a decline in farm income in excess of 50 per cent from 1929 to 1932, one might have anticipated massive migration. But workers were ''trapped'' in the rural sector: they didn't...