Zoeken in deze blog 🔎🔎

zaterdag 26 april 2014

National Endowment for Democracy?

The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela
By Eva Golinger(aquí en español)

April 25, 2014 "ICH" - Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopezand Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.
 
These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years. 
 
At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.
 
The NED, a “foundation” created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA’s work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED’s 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure,  $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another$590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition.  More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro’s government politically. 
 
One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (http://www.forma.org.ve), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others. 
 
Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests. 
 
In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to “share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia...and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries”.  Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: “To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts.  The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries.” 
 
IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI’s president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI’s role in a pressrelease claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”
 
Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures  and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela’s democracy.

Eva Golinger, winner of the International Award for Journalism in Mexico (2009), named “La Novia de Venezuela” by President Hugo Chávez, is an Attorney and Writer from New York, living in Caracas, Venezuela since 2005 and author of the best-selling books, “The Chávez Code:http://www.chavezcode.com/

See also -

Ecuador ejects US military group: Ecuador has given a group of 20 US Defense Department employees until the end of the month to quit the country. President Rafael Correa had previously said the presence of the US military in Ecuador was “scandalous” and they had “infiltrated all sectors.”


at Geen opmerkingen:

Liberal Media Want War

The Liberal Media: US Imperialism's Biggest Cheerleaders 

By Ian Sinclair

April 26, 2014 "ICH" -  In his essential book on UK foreign policy, Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, historian Mark Curtis notes "the ideological system promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence." Criticism of foreign policies is possible "but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". I would only add one caveat to Curtis's enduring maxim - the ideological system in the UK also promotes the basic benevolence of the United States, our closest ally. And arguably it is the UK's liberal media who are the biggest cheerleaders and apologists of the US as an active and aggressive world power.
Writing about President Obama's State of the Union address in January Simon Tisdall, the Guardian's foreign affairs commentator, explained the speech "was evidence of unabashed retreat from attachment to the imperious might, the responsibilities and the ideals that once made America an unrivalled and deserving superpower" (my emphasis added). Writing two months later, the BBC's North America Editor Mark Mardell argued this retreat was so significant the White House now "thinks military power is a relic from a past age." Mardell seems to be unaware the Obama Administration has launched drone attacks on seven nations since coming to office.
What about Channel 4 News? They always provide an alternative, critical voice to the mainstream, don't they? In February Paul Mason, Channel 4 News's Culture and Digital Editor, wrote a blog titled'How the west slipped into powerlessness' looking at the crises in Ukraine, Syria and Egypt. This is what Mason said about Syria:
When the USA decided, last summer, it could not sell military intervention in Syria - either to its parliaments, its people or its military - it sent a signal to every dictator, torturer and autocrat in the world that only diplomats, at the time, truly understood. The British diplomat in charge of Syria, Reza Afshar, tweeted a one-word summary of the UK parliamentary vote on Syria: 'Disaster!' Only now are we beginning to understand how widely that judgement applied.
Mason, then, is clearly endorsing Afshar's view on the subject. Elsewhere the deeply deluded Mason seems to assume the continuing government crackdown in Egypt is down to the West not intervening enough in the country. Mason, wilfully blind to the 30+ years of support the US has given to the Egyptian military, even has the audacity to argue "Russian diplomatic influence has bolstered the position of General Sisi".
Over at the Independent Yasmin Alibhai Brown has been agonising over the "foreign policy paralysis in Western nations." Explaining why she initially supported the likely illegal US-UK invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 she makes some truly bizarre leaps of logic:
Twenty years ago, no nation or international body stepped in to stop the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, and left a stain on history, as did the Holocaust, Pol Pot's killing fields, Sri Lanka's war and other such horrors. So there were good reasons to want us to go into Afghanistan.
Kosovo is also trotted out as evidence to support US-UK intervention abroad, with Alibhai Brown making the extraordinary argument that "citizens would still be killing each other" in Kosovo without Western involvement in 1999 - 15 years ago.
What is most remarkable about the articles from Tisdall, Mardell, Mason and Alibhai Brown is their timing - so soon after the devastating US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and aerial attacks on Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines. In contrast, a recentWin/Gallup International survey of 66,000 people across 65 countries around the world found the country seen as representing the greatest threat to world peace was the US. Or consider the results of a Gallup poll taken in Baghdad in 2003. Fully 1 per cent of respondents believed the US invaded "to establish democracy". The most popular answer (43 per cent) given for the reason behind the US-UK invasion was "to rob Iraq's oil". It seems, then, that those on the receiving end of US foreign policies have a better understanding of US imperialism than the so-called informed, independent, questioning, liberal journalists who are supposed to educate the British public about the world they live in.
Ian Sinclair Is Author of 'The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003'

at Geen opmerkingen:

Obama Plays With Fire

Obama Plays with Fire in Ukraine

By Sheldon Richman

April 25, 2014 "ICH" - "FFF" - “The U.S. is sending about 600 ground troops to Eastern Europe … to ‘reassure’ allies there as Washington resumes its campaign of pressure on Russia over the Ukraine standoff.” — POLITICO
How many American parents would proudly send their sons and daughters off to kill or be killed in Slovyansk or Donetsk?  How many young men and women aspire to be the first American to fall in Kramatorsk?
Those towns are in eastern Ukraine. President Obama says the “military option” — war, that is — is not on the table in his effort to oppose Russia in the Ukraine crisis, but can we trust him? As pressure mounts on him from America’s war hawks, what will he do when sanctions fail to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to acquiesce? Will the military option then find its way onto that infamous table?
Obama has dispatched 600 soldiers to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The U.S. Navy has ships present in the Black Sea, an understandably sensitive matter for Russia, which long has had a naval base in Crimea. That may not sound like a large force, but it takes only one soldier to be a tripwire for greater U.S. involvement in this volatile region. Americans should be uneasy with this recklessness on Obama’s part.
Those four former members of the defunct Soviet bloc are now members of NATO, the very active alliance established after World War II ostensibly to keep the Red Army out of Western Europe. One might have expected NATO to disappear along with the Soviet Union, but something happened on the way to the post-Cold War world. The so-called defensive alliance not only remained in existence; it moved aggressively eastward toward Russia by inducting former Soviet allies and republics as members.
This expansion broke a promise that President George H.W. Bush made to former Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev, who was willing to live with NATO in Western Europe even with newly unified Germany as a member. But that state of affairs wasn’t good enough for America’s rulers, who, like most American rulers going back to the 18th century, believed the United States is destined to rule the world. There was no chance that an alliance as useful as NATO was going to go away just because its apparent reason for being had ceased to exist.
The New York Times reports that Obama “and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.” This is bad reporting because, as noted, the U.S. leadership never ended the Cold War and never saw containment as an obsolete strategy. It would brook no rival of any kind, however friendly or regional.
Since Ukraine is not (yet) a member of NATO, the U.S. government would not have the same formal obligation to intervene should a shooting war break out between Ukraine and Russia. But what if something happens between Russia and Poland or one of the Baltic states? Under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, an attack on one member is regarded as an attack on all. But it also says,
If such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence … will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. [Emphasis added.]
That amounts to wiggle room, but Americans should not be comforted. Could Obama withstand the immense pressure he would face to intervene directly if open hostilities broke out? How would he handle what David Brooks of the New York Times calls Obama’s “manhood problem”? (Apparently, one is manly to the extent one is willing to risk a senseless war.)
The U.S. government’s and news media’s demonization of Putin (who’s no saint) should not be allowed to overshadow the fact that America’s rulers have needlessly provoked the Russians, the coup in Kiev being just the latest example. In 1998, the architect of the postwar containment policy,George Kennan, warned that humiliating Russia by expanding NATO “is a tragic mistake.”
Must we learn this the hard way?

Sheldon Richman is vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of FFF's monthly journal, Future of Freedom. For 15 years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York

 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38333.htm
at Geen opmerkingen:

Putin and Obama

Exclusive: Putin Halts All Talks With White House

By Josh Rogin
April 26, 2014 "ICH" - "Daily Beast" - As new U.S. sanctions against Russia loom, the Kremlin has shut down—at least for now—intensive high level communications between top U.S. and Russian officials.

Since the "invasion of Crimea", President Vladimir Putin and President Barack Obama have had regular phone calls in an often half-hearted attempt to deescalate the ongoing crisis inside Ukraine. But as the U.S. and EU prepare to unveil new sanctions against Russia, Putin has decided the interactions should stop. The Kremlin has ended high-level contact with the Obama administration, according to diplomatic officials and sources close to the Russian leadership. The move signals an end to the diplomacy, for now.

“Putin will not talk to Obama under pressure,” said Igor Yurgens, Chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Development, a prominent Moscow think tank, and a close associate of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “It does not mean forever.”

Obama and Putin last spoke over the phone on April 14, a call that the White House said was initiated at Moscow’s request. Obama urged Putin in the call to end Kremlin support for armed, pro-Russian activists creating unrest in eastern Ukraine. Obama also warned that the U.S. would impose more “costs” on Russia if Putin continued his current course. According to the Kremlin’s readout of the call, Putin denied Russian interference in eastern Ukraine and said “that such speculations are based on inaccurate information.”

Obama and Putin have spoken to each other about Ukraine regularly over the past weeks, including calls on March 28, March 16, and March 6. But that these calls are now on hold for the indefinite future, due to their lack of progress and frustration on both sides.

On Friday, Kerry warned that new round of American financial assaults on Russia were on the way. “We are putting in more sanctions, they will probably come Monday at the latest,” he said in a private meeting in Washington, according to an attendee. Russian businesses and individuals close to Putin would be on the sanctions list, he added.

Diplomatic sources close to the process confirmed that Putin is not interested in speaking with Obama again in the current environment. The two leaders might talk again in the future but neither side is reaching out for direct interaction, as they had been doing since the Ukraine crisis began. The failure of the agreement struck last week in Geneva between the contact group of the U.S., EU, Russia, and Ukraine has made further direct Washington-Moscow interactions moot.
Other top U.S. officials are also now out of direct contact with their Russian interlocutors. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is also getting the cold shoulder from his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu. Pentagon officials have reached out to Russia on Mr. Hagel’s behalf within the past 24 hours but have not gotten any response, according to Pentagon Spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren.
That leaves the channel between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as the only semi-functioning high-level diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow. But even that often-frosty relationship has further chilled as the two sides hurled insults and accusations this week.
After speaking over the phone Monday and then again Tuesday about the now defunct Geneva agreement on Ukraine, Kerry and Lavrov are now conducting diplomacy through the press—and leveling harsh and undiplomatic charges against one another.
Kerry appeared at the State Department press room Thursday afternoon to declare publicly that Russia was not keeping its word.
“For seven days, Russia has refused to take a single concrete step in the right direction,” Kerry scolded. “Not a single Russian official, not one, has publicly gone on television in Ukraine and called on the separatists to support the Geneva agreement, to support the stand-down, to give up their weapons, and get out of the Ukrainian buildings. They have not called on them to engage in that activity. “
Kerry also lashed out at Russia Today, the Kremlin-sponsored television network, which Kerry said spends all its time “to propagandize and to distort what is happening or not happening in Ukraine.” 
“Instead, in plain sight, Russia continues to fund, coordinate, and fuel a heavily armed separatist movement in Donetsk,” Kerry accused.
Lavrov publicly responded, “The U.S. is trying to pervert everything that is going on in Ukraine.”
On Friday, Kerry summed up his recent interactions with his Russian counterpart,  “I’ve had 6 conversations with Lavrov in the last few weeks. The last one was Kafka-esque... It was bizarre.”
See also -
Pentagon: Hagel's Russian counterpart won't return his calls: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel cannot get his Russian counterpart to take his calls, the Pentagon said Friday -- amid a new report that the Kremlin has suspended high-level talks with U.S. officials.
What's your response? -  Scroll down to add / read comments 

at Geen opmerkingen:

vrijdag 25 april 2014

Palestine Link College Tour 2014


Invitation
Palestine Link College Tour 2014
“Palestinian Women and Israel's Settler Colonialism: The case of Occupied East Jerusalem”

dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Settler colonialism and its accompanying securitization veils exploitative relations in colonies, engages in overt use of force, and expedites hegemonic accumulation by dispossession. Examining the case of women in Occupied East Jerusalem dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian will borrow meanings from Palestinian women's voices and life experiences to reveal Israel's modes of “accumulation by dispossession”. In her presentations she argues that such accumulation promotes securitized forms of social, spatial, economic and political control and results in trapping women's bodies and lives, leading to severe human suffering. The political, economic and spatial logic behind accumulation by dispossession is a politically driven process that occurs simultaneously with the production of fear of the other. This logic works in a variety of ways, from subtle, visible, invisible and invisibilized modes, to apparent and hypervisible ones. It impacts and re-shapes different layers of society, including the legal, historical, geo-political and psychosocial. By identifying the various characteristics of accumulation, when juxtaposed with the colonial industry of fear, dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian shows how colonial accumulation by dispossession conceals exploitation against women and opens up new spaces for violence, oppressions, and dislocation.

Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a longtime anti-violence, native Palestinian feminist activist and scholar. She is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is also the director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. Her research focuses on femicide and other forms of gendered violence, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization, and trauma in militarized and colonized zones. Her most recent book is entitled: “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” published by Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian plays a prominent role in the local Palestinian community. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, she engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.

Programme:
Wednesday 7 May
Venue:                Amsterdam University College (AUC)
Address:              Science Park 113, 1098 XG Amsterdam
Starts 6.30 pm
Thursday 8 May
Venue:                                 International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
Address:              Kortenaerkade 12, 2518 AX The Hague
Starts: 6:00 pm
Friday 9 May
Venue:                 Faculty of Social Sciences Leiden University, room 5A41
Address:              Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Starts:  3:00 pm


at Geen opmerkingen:

Game of Thrones Culture

  CULTURE  
Salon / By Katie McDonough
comments_image 178 COMMENTS

Game of Thrones, Terry Richardson and the Silencing of Sexual Assault

Appallingly, cultural tastemakers are helping rebrand rape as pre-consensual sex.
178 COMMENTS178 COMMENTS
 
 
Photo Credit: Zoom Team/Shutterstock.com
April 22, 2014  |  
 
 
 
 
On “Game of Thrones” this week, Jaime Lannister raped his sister Cersei while she told him, “no,” “it’s not right,” “please no,” and “not here.” When asked by television writer Alan Sepinwall if he viewed the scene as rape, director Alex Graves said, “Well, it becomes consensual by the end.”
My first instinct upon reading this was to tweet something about a facepalm and move on. (My second instinct, which I indulged, was to rest my forehead on the cool glass of my desk for about a minute while contemplating why everything must be so terrible all of the time.) Graves has been catching a deserved amount of shit over what he said, but his comment has continued to stick with me because this idea that rape can “become consensual” is actually pretty common. In fact, this casual quote from a TV director unwittingly tells us quite a lot about what our culture thinks about rape.
Namely, that Americans think it barely exists. They don’t seem to see rape anywhere.
A model named Emma Appleton tweeted a message on Sunday that she claimed was from photographer Terry Richardson offering her a Vogue shoot in exchange for sex. This is a blatant act of sexual coercion, and only the most recent (in fact, seemingly tame by comparison) in a series of disclosures from other women who have previously worked with Richardson. In March, model Charlotte Waters wrote a painfully detailed account of her alleged assault at Richardson’s hands, and the response from the fashion industry was a collective shrug. In response to the most recent allegations against him, Vogue said that it had no plans to work with Richardson, but he remains one of the wealthiest and most successful photographers in the industry. (Hell, he even has his smiling likeness featured in a charity egg hunt going on around Manhattan right now. Children pose for pictures with the thing.)
The guy is utterly mainstream. And an alleged serial rapist. But Richardson keeps working because the editors, designers, and celebrities who he shoots just don’t view his actions as rape. And they don’t believe the women — overwhelmingly young models who lack the industry connections and clout that Richardson enjoys — who tell them otherwise.
Last week, artist David Choe boasted on a podcast that he forced a female masseuse to perform oral sex on him. In an attempt to defend the alleged assault, Choe said that his actions — while “rapey” — were not rape, because even though the woman said “no” to his advances, she didn’t tell him, “Fucking stop [or] I’m gonna go call security.” According to Choe, the woman said “yes with her eyes” and later confessed — according to his retelling — that she had a crush on him.
When the Internet called him on it, Choe remained insistent that what he did was not rape. To communicate just how unacceptable he found rape, he said that all rapists should be — wait for it — raped. Vice, one of his employers, is currently “reviewing” its relationship with him.
And it isn’t just wealthy artists who don’t believe in the existence of sexual assault — at least when it comes to their own behavior. Rape denialism is a universal pastime, enjoyed by young and old. On college campuses across the country, “rape” has been officially rebranded as “nonconsensual sex” in an attempt to defuse what some administrators consider a loaded word. Writers like Caitlin Flanagan argue on the pages of respected publications that most rape is just “regretted sex” on the part of “jilted coeds.” In the realm of politics, Virginia state Sen. Richard Black — currently running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives — doesn’t believe that spousal rape should be a crime because he’s pretty sure it doesn’t exist. Susanna Martinez wanted to require sexual assault survivors to “prove” that their rape was “forcible” if they wanted state-subsidized childcare for a child who was born as the result of sexual assault.
It’s a total shit show out there, and it’s exacting a pretty heavy toll on all of us. The impact of the cultural erasure of sexual assault on survivors became troublingly clear last week when a study revealed that young girls and women often view sexual violence as normal behavior. When asked to describe her encounters with sexual harassment to researchers at Marquette University, one interview subject said, “They grab you, touch your butt and try to, like, touch you in the front, and run away, but it’s okay, I mean … I never think it’s a big thing because they do it to everyone.” Many of the girls and women interviewed said that they did not report their experiences of sexual violence because they didn’t want to make a “big deal” out of them. They told researchers that they didn’t come forward about these incidents because they didn’t think anyone would believe them.
It’s easy enough to understand why.
at Geen opmerkingen:

The Fate of the American West

Home > Blog > Nation Books > The Fate of the American West
The Fate of the American West
On April 8th Nation Books released Judith Nies' latest book, Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West.
Journalist and historian Judith Nies tracks an epic struggle over land, water, and power that is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. Amid the backdrop of the breathtaking desert landscape, Unreal City shows five cultures colliding—Hopi, Navajo, global energy corporations, Mormons, and US government agencies—resulting in a battle over resources and the future of the West.
The story began almost forty years ago when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.
Nies shows how the struggle over Black Mesa lands is an example of a global phenomenon in which giant transnational corporations have the power to separate indigenous people from their energy-rich lands with the help of host governments. Unreal City explores how and why resources have been taken from native lands, what it means in an era of climate change, and why, in this city divorced from nature, the only thing more powerful than money is water.
Bill McKibben writes, "If you're headed to Las Vegas for vacation, pack this book along. In between visits to the giant pyramids and faux Manhattans, read it to get a real understanding of exactly how fragile this mirage is." 
Judith Nies is the award-winning author of three nonfiction books: The Girl I Left Behind, Nine Women, and Native American History, which won the Phi Alpha Theta prize in international history. Her journalism, book reviews, and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Orion, Harvard Review, Women's Review of Books, and American Voice. 
To purchase the book, click here. 
at Geen opmerkingen:
Abonneren op: Posts (Atom)

Kees van der Pijl. Zijn Nieuwe Boek