Dear Colleagues for Human Rights and Environmental Justice,
The Wixárika (Huichol) people of Mexico are calling for international support to protect their sacred lands from a Canadian mining company. Please join Cultural Survival in sending urgent emails, faxes, or letters to Mexican government officials.
Seventy percent of First Majestic Silver Corporation's concessions at Real de Catorce (San Luis Potosí state) lie within the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserve. Recognized as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Wirikuta Reserve was created to protect the Wixárika people's most sacred sites and the rare, fragile ecosystem of the Real de Catorce desert, where the diversity of cactus species is the highest in the world. Mining would consume enormous amounts of water in this arid region, pollute the groundwater with heavy metals including cyanide, impact the tourism-based economy of the picturesque Real de Catorce town, affect endangered bird species and wildlife habitats, and pose a high risk to human health.
For more information, please see our action alert here and www.wixarika.org. The Wixárika traditional authorities' proclamation against mining in the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserves is posted here in English and here in Spanish.
Empathy slaps me silly sometimes, and the “joy of Christmas” can be elusive when you see any fraction of the real pain and suffering in the world. In Buddhism, “suffering” is a technical term that has meanings so deep that words don’t suffice, but the fact is that many people are disrupted and disappointed in ways that scale from trivial to tragic. In this solstice celebration with its Christian religious and spiritual resonance, we try to be festive, to celebrate the life of someone who would have been bemused if not horrified by the material orgy produced in his name, now so vital a part of our economic life that we couldn’t lose it, even if we wanted to.
My paternal grandmother died on Christmas Eve when my father was ten years old. He revealed this to me when I was around the same age, and I realized from then on that Christmas had a far different sense for him than it had for me. Each year at Christmas he was reminded of death, loss, sadness.
I’m aware of many trails of sadness through this year’s holiday season, disconnections and deaths, as well as ordinary frailties and broken promises. In fact the whole world seems to be trembling at the moment, and our future is a blur. Celebration, like nirvana, seems almost selfish at the moment; the bodhisattva path makes more sense. I will celebrate this year as ever, and appreciate those close to me, but I will also find time to mourn the many losses and disappointments, and the divisions that have emerged in my life and others.
I do hope you have a Merry Christmas, forget for a moment the difficult realities that confront us and surround us, take the day to focus on love and fellowship. Subvert the darkness.
O you, happy roots,
with whom works of miracles
and not works of crime,
for burning predestined you were planted.
And to you, thoughtful fiery voice,
becoming the whetstone,
subverting the darkness.
Rejoice in that which is on top.
Rejoice in him,
who the many did not see on earth,
although they ardently cried for.
Rejoice in that which is on top.
~ Hildegarde von Bingen, translation by Rupert Chappelle
So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young
Phi Beta Iota: Penguin is a new Contributing Editor who is still learning the system and also undecided about having a bio, even a relatively anonymous one.
In this time of economic strife, which nation stands to lose the most compared to its own expectations, projected path and historic experiences? The Richter Scale takes a closer look.
Get ready for more of the same failed “job creation” policies, enacted by an increasingly unified political eilte
by Jack Rasmus
The Bush tax cuts are now extended. What cost $3.4 trillion over the past decade, 80% of which accrued to the wealthiest households and U.S. corporations, will now cost another $802 billion over the next two years and a projected $4 trillion over the coming decade.
But the Bush tax cut extension just passed by a political elite increasingly united on economic policy—a ‘Repo-Demo’ Party dominated by corporate interests—is only the first of three phases in a new policy offensive designed to protect the incomes of the wealthy and corporate America for another decade, to be paid for directly by middle- and working-class America. Together, the three phases represent the emerging U.S. variant of a general austerity strategy, similar in objective but different in content to other austerity programs now emerging as well in the Eurozone, Japan and elsewhere.
Phase two: draconian spending cuts
Phase three: revising tax code to help the wealthy
Same wine in same bottles, with new label
The key question: Will any jobs be created?
Obama’s 2011 ‘Stimulus 2’ will thus prove no more effective than his 2009 ‘Stimulus 1.’ The past decade has produced repeated tax-cut heavy policies targeting the rich and corporations: Bush II and a Republican Congress 2001-06. Bush II and a Democratic Congress 2006-08. Obama and a Democratic Congress 2008-10. And now Obama and a de facto Republican Congress.
The recent Bush tax cut extensions show the corporate-dominated political elite of both parties are now closing ranks as the economic crisis continues with no resolution for all but the wealthy and corporations. The ‘Repo-Demo’ Party, newly aligned around the same old failed policies, has just begun to do its work. Get ready for more of the same.
Jack Rasmus is the author of Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression, published in May 2010 by Pluto Press, Palgrave-Macmillan.
Phi Beta Iota: In the 1990's Tim Hendrickson, at the time one of the best and the brightest at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) conceptualized GRAND VIEW, a program to look at each couintry in holistic terms to determine a) what direction their science & technology was going in; and b) what their economy could afford in the way of military spending. This was before NGIC was caught fabricating the threat to justify the purchase of weapons and mobility systems that were unaffordable and not needed. We wonder what GRAND VIEW would say about the USA's future, and we wonder if the restoration of integrity within US intelligence might not have an immediate positive effect on personnel, training, concepts & doctrine, and acquisition.
“There are diplomatic tensions because we are fighting a full-on undeclared war on the territory of a country with which we are an ally, using covert agents as the commanding officers”.
So what’s new? Didn’t we fight a full-on undeclared war on the territory of Laos from about 1961 to 1973? Wasn’t Laos an ally while trying to maintain the fig-leaf of neutrality? Wasn’t the United States government using ‘covert agents as commanding officers’?
IMPORTANT MONETARY NEWS ALERT: MAJOR, HISTORIC PROGRESS BEING MADE
On Friday December 17th Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D,Ohio, 10th District) took a crucial and heroic step to resolve our growing financial crisis and achieve a just and sustainable money system for our nation by introducing the National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2010, abbreviated NEED. The bill number is HR6550.
While the bill focuses on our unemployment crisis, the remedy proposed contains all the essential monetary measures being proposed by the American Monetary Institute in the American Monetary Act. These are what decades of research and centuries of experience have shown to be necessary to end the economic crisis in a just and sustainable way, and place the U.S. money system under our constitutional checks and balances. Yes it can be done!
We expect this bill will also be re-introduced next year in the 112th Congress. By putting it in now Congressman Kucinich accomplishes these important things:
* First, the seriousness of intent is underscored;
* Second, it gives our nation the opportunity to view, discuss and understand the necessary provisions, giving the chance to make improvements for re-introduction;
* Third it serves as a beacon to our beleaguered people, cutting through the error, vested interest and disinformation that has blocked monetary reform understanding and action in the past.
The American Monetary Institute has activated its blog to discuss and review any questions about this act. Just click on the blog link at our homepage.
To participate in this process, please sign up at the bottom of our home page at . Then, after reading the proposed legislation feel free to make comments or put questions on the blog, including thoughtful suggestions on how it might be improved.
