MEND Method

Global Guerrillas looks at a proposal for conflict resolution by rebels in the Niger Delta.

No Change

BAR looks at Bush 3, otherwise known as Obama 1.

Precarious Platforms

As Global Voices notes, the crackdown on independent media by the Peruvian government has been mirrored by hackers and swarmers attacking indigenous rights bloggers. A good lesson about backing up files, and not placing one’s trust in precarious corporate platforms like Google, Blogger or YouTube.

Obama Bush League

Obama/Brown Bush/Blair all over again. White House intelligence? Don’t make me laugh.

Greenwashing Big Oil

The Alberta Tar Sands is the largest and arguably dirtiest, carbon-generating industrial project in human history. So how do the oil companies go about defeating the First Nations and bona fide environmental networks opposed to the project? The answer according to Macdonald Stainsby and Dru Oja Jay, authors of Offsetting Resistance: the effects of foundation funding and corporate fronts, is to buy their own environmental group to negotiate with the government on their behalf.

That organization, Tar Sands Coalition (a Tides project), can then be counted on to help smother the grassroots environmental movement. As oil corporations like Tar Sands investor Sunoco look to defeat environmentalism and indigenous peoples from the Arctic to Patagonia, giant multi-billion dollar foundations like Pew Charitable Trusts are critical.

Using money-laundering operations like Tides to help them, Pew (same family that owns Sunoco), Rockefeller, Ford and Hewlett Foundations — all benefactors of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation — can then effectively greenwash corporate fronts masquerading as environmental organizations. When organizations like The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club can be bought off by big oil, the only thing to do is expose the colossal fraud. In their remarkable report, messrs. Stainsby and Jay have done just that.

Blow to Biofuel

World Bank suspends oil palm loans in face of evidence the biofuel plantations in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Colombia are an integral part of genocide against indigenous peoples.

Shopping in Baghdad

Now that half of the US troops in Iraq aren’t troops (they’re private mercenaries), supplying weapons has run into a snag. To get around the problem, private mercenary contractors are using US funds to shop for weaponry at open-air bazaars comprising the black market for weapons in Iraq. The obvious question, of course, is “Where are the black marketeers getting US weaponry to sell to US private mercenaries?”

Norton Finally Investigated

Gale Norton, former Secretary of the Interior, is finally being investigated for acts of corruption in office. Having built a career helping energy, mining, and timber corporations steal US assets, Norton now faces charges for parleying her finessing of contracts into a lucrative position with Shell. Of note to those following the development of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Movement, Norton was also the original defendant in Cobell v Norton, the mammoth lawsuit to recover royalties stolen by Interior and the companies they regulate on Indian Trust lands.

Free Ride

Anti-War activists in the US could learn from their friends in the UK, whose campaign against the arms trade is making headway in holding British companies accountable for profiting from crimes against humanity. As the leading purveyors of armaments for war crimes in the world, US corporations like Boeing and Raytheon have had a relatively free ride. With the Obama regime gearing up to commit more atrocities in Central Asia and South America, maybe it’s time these corrupters of democracy paid a price for mass murder.

Twins

Privatization is theft. Globalization is murder. The world leaders on these twin fronts are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.