As Spain's economic recession has continued to deepen, conditions for people within the country are expected to get worse following austerity measures that increasingly cut into everyday economic survival, Reutersreports Tuesday. However, as many economists grapple over numbers, and search for signs of hope for a free market revival, many people within Spain have increasingly started to turn to alternative currency systems, or parallel euro-free economies — giving up the ghost of a neoliberal recovery in exchange for a new way.. . . . . . . .
There are now more than 325 time banks and alternative currency systems in Spain involving tens of thousands of citizens. The projects represent one of the largest experiments in “social money” in modern times.
The drug war is far, far more than just simply criminals at work, says scholar Oliver Villar.
Note: The following interview helps us understand the drug war from a dramatically different perspective than the one the corporate media paints. Instead the traditional portrayal of the war on drugs as a fight between law enforcement and illicit drug dealers, scholar Oliver Villar explains that the illegal drug trade is a tool of empire a means of “social control” as much as profit. Villar, a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia's insight is well worth the read.
EXTRACT:
LS: Catherine Austin Fitts, a former investment banker from Wall Street, shared this observation once with me:
Essentially, I would say the governments run the drug trade, but they're not the ultimate power, they're just one part, if you will, of managing the operations. Nobody can run a drug business, unless
the banks will do their transactions and handle their money. If you want to understand who controls the drug trade in a place, you need to ask yourself who is it that has to accept to manage the transactions and to manage the capital, and that will lead you to the answer who's in control. [2]
What are your thoughts on this essential equation?
Mark Lombardi (March 23, 1951 – March 22, 2000) was an AmericanNeo-Conceptualist and an abstractartist who specialized in drawings attempting to document financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general “the uses and abuses of power.
Lombardi called his diagrams Narrative Structures.. They are structurally similar to sociograms – a type of graph drawing used in the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree by earlier artists like Hans Haacke. Other important influences on Lombardi were philosopher Herbert Marcuse,, and visualization expert Edward Tufte
In Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations, and his drawings document the purported financial and political frauds by power brokers. For instance, his 1999 drawing George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90 shows alleged connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world.
The Essence of Lombardi's Work
The small circles in his drawings identified the main players — individuals, corporations and governments — along a time line. The arcing lines showed personal and professional links, conflicts of interest, malfeasance and fraud.
Solid lines traced influence, dotted lines traced assets and wavy lines traced frozen assets. Final denouements like court judgment, bankruptcy and death were noted in red.
Reading several newspapers a day, he culled his information entirely from published sources, keeping track of the articles with a card file that eventually held over 12,000 cards.
Most of us take for granted that those rectangular green slips of paper we keep in our wallets are inviolable: the physical embodiment of value. But alternative forms of money have a long history and appear to be growing in popularity. It's not merely barter or primitive means of exchange like seashells or beads. Beneath the financial radar, in hip U.S. towns or South African townships, in shops, markets and even banks, people throughout the world are exchanging goods and services via thousands of currency types that look nothing like official tender. TIME Business
Phi Beta Iota: In a recent radio show on the East Coast, the single most urgent question was “what do we do if the US dollar collapses?” Alternative currencies are a huge part of the answer. Signals are mixed on whether the US will experience hyper-inflation and interruption of common supply chains (food, fuel, water). On balance we tend to believe that the USA will muddle through and crisis at the neighborhood level will be avoided.
OSTANINO, Russia — When a Chinese investor bought a farm outside this village a few years back, he was pleased enough to name it Golden Land. The soil was rich, the sunshine and rain bountiful.
The land, deep in rural Russia, was also largely devoid of people.
No more. Today, row upon row of greenhouses here teem with dozens of Chinese farmhands picking tomatoes. And in a season with a bumper crop of tomatoes, the foreman said he would happily have employed hundreds more.
The influx of Chinese farm labor in Russia reflects the growing trade and economic ties between the two countries, one rich in land and resources, the other in people.
For years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, both countries have struggled to convert these complementary strengths into real business opportunities. A few mining ventures are succeeding. And state companies have struck big oil, coal and timber deals that form the backbone of the economic relationship.
As top American officials and a Navy SEAL who was on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden grapple over whether the al Qaeda leader “resisted” before he was shot, the SEAL said in a recent interview that in the heat of battle, the men on the ground weren't going to take any chances with their target.
It wasn't until other members of the team entered the room and saw a man twitching on the ground that they realized he had been hit in the head. Then, after shooting the man in the chest a few more times until he stopped moving, they realized it was bin Laden, the book says. America's most wanted man was unarmed and though there was a rifle and a handgun in a room nearby, neither had a bullet loaded in the chamber.
“He hadn't even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting,” Owen writes.
