— from Axis of Logic

In a broadcast interview with Daniel Mermet on French radio*, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that the current world food crisis is not due to nature, but to man.

Introduction to the interview from the web site of 'Là-bas si j'y suis'*:

"A return with Jean Ziegler to the causes for food riots that are appearing all over the world. Far from being a scourge like a drought or an invasion of locusts, there are people who are responsible for the famines that have struck thousands of men, women and children – the speculators and their logic of maximizing profit."

— from Axis of Logic

The world is standing on its head. Logic and reason are gone. Humpty Dumpty had a big fall and is sliding downhill faster than has ever been seen in the times of so-called civilized life on earth.

Humane priorities are ignored by the dirt-covered oligarchs who decide over the future of our all but condemned planet. The best people with a sound intellect and an intact sense of compassion can do nothing in this up-side down world but write and speak about what ought to be done to save the people, to save the planet. Nothing makes sense any more. Biotechnical corporations are poisoning the planet, the arms industry is supplying the means for the extermination of millions of harmless people every year. Money is directed to warfare and other lethal pursuits and the huge fortunes amassed by the oligarchs is sterile money that doesn't contribute in any way to the solution of the global problems that are destroying the planet.

— from Axis of Logic

How did we come to this state of the world where we don't know what we eat or drink, where there is nothing but secrecy as far as what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is plotting with the gigantic Monsanto corporation? Secrecy for the purpose of making Monsanto immune to legal suits, secrecy to make people unaware of what risks they are running when they drink rBGH milk, which is not labeled as coming from cows injected with the dangerous Bovine Growth Hormone. Yes, you read this right. U.S. dairy products are not even labeled as originating from rBGH milk. Incredible? Shocking? You bet.

— from Axis of Logic

There was a time when I had hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, believing that peace might actually be a realistic hope for the world. Ehud Barak as the Israeli Prime Minister gave us the impression that he honestly wanted peace. I read Ha'aretz more or less every day and I admired some of their excellent journalists immensely. They seemed to understand that sacrifices would have to be made if there was ever going to be peace in the Middle East.

Then Bill Clinton invited Barak and Yasser Arafat to the Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and we all couldn't breathe for hoping that the outcome would be a big step forward, even if it would possibly leave one or two problems unsolved – for the moment being. Big disappointment. When Barak and Arafat left Camp David, they weren't even close to an agreement.

— from Axis of Logic

The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years. The endless list of genetically modified seeds sold and controlled by Monsanto are putting at enormous risk age-old agricultural patterns under the presumptuous slogan of aiming at solving the huge problem of hunger in the world.

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, entitled 'The World According to Monsanto' (Le Monde selon Monsanto[1]). Starting from the Internet over a period of three years Robin has collected material for her documentary, going on to numerous interviews with people of very different backgrounds. She traveled widely, from Latin America, to Asia, through Europe and the United States, to personally interview farmers and people in influential positions.

— from Axis of Logic

A World Out of Joint

If there is not a restoration of some balance of power, the world will sink into a maelstrom of screwed-up governance, callous disregard for the people and a state of permanent war. The chief purpose of our neocon government is to give the Empire undisputed power and to make the giant corporations the multi-billionaire kings of this lopsided world.

Quality of life counts for nothing. The general wellbeing of the billions of people in the world, their health and education are of no importance. Job security and the fair treatment of workers are of no consequence. The good life as we know it will be gone forever, and very soon, if there is no change in the direction the present trend is leading us.

— from Axis of Logic

A net of lies has been spun over our heads and it's been glued over the earth like a heavy fog. It makes it impossible to see through it to the real world that is out there somewhere. We are blindly walking around in the mist breathing in the poison that is belching out of our loudspeakers, feeding us the steady diet of fear and hatred for the other, making us see what's around us in black and white, draining all things of the colors that make for beauty and compassion.

Far above our heads the vultures are circling, ready to pounce on their prey whenever they see someone weak and helpless. The vultures are devoid of any sort of feeling, in the same way the roaring noise around our heads is constantly centered on making us immune to the needs of the other, making us deaf to the cries of despair from the suffering people and blind to the destruction wrought upon the worthy goals and efforts that once filled their lives.

— from Axis of Logic

Hugo Chávez lost the referendum on constitutional reforms. But is he really the loser? Putin's party, United Russia, won the election. Sure. But at what price?

Chávez is blacklisted by the western mainstream media, in particular by the U.S., as being anti-democracy, a dictator who just wants power for himself. However, he graciously conceded defeat even before all the votes had been counted, when it became obvious that the U.S.-supported opposition had carried the day. But dictators don't lose elections, do they? So what is the reality behind all this vilifying of President Chávez?

— from Axis of Logic

Democracy has become an empty word that the world leaders kick around like an inflated balloon when it serves their interests. What is of importance to the Corporatocracy that is running the planet is very much the opposite of democracy. What the leaders are depending on for the continuation of the current misrule of the world is centralized power and dumbed-down, apathetic and poverty-stricken masses who pose no danger to the status quo.

Democracy doesn't promote the interests of the ruling plutocrats. Their goal is to concentrate all the money and power in the tiny elite that hold the strings of the dancing puppets who are politicians. Government and business are all one and the same. Or different parts of the same monster. Some hold the strings of power, others do the kicking and dancing.

— from Axis of Logic

The corporation is king

The world has been taken hostage in the most gigantic, megalomaniac and malevolent plot that has ever been conceived by man. Words like democracy and freedom no longer have any meaning. We are all pawns in a huge game of 'get-the-booty' and 'rule-the-world'. Individuals have strictly no value. People only exist so as to be used as slaves until they die from exhaustion or survive in utmost misery and total insecurity, until their children can take over in the same kind of miserable treadmill.

— from Axis of Logic

The idea that the United States is the freest and most democratic country on the planet has forever been force-fed into the minds of Americans. In fact, there are really no other countries in the world that can even closely approach the level of freedom and democracy enjoyed by the American people. Americans are unique.

The hidden truth

Where is the democracy in a country and in a world that is being run by transnational corporations? Where even the Congress is tied down by bonds of dependency to Corporate America, Republicans and Democrats alike. Where the rulers have not even been freely and honestly elected by the people? Where the ruling clique consists exclusively of men and women representing Big Money, business executives who have no understanding of what it is like to go sick and hungry? Who have no humility, no compassion, no understanding of how all the cogs in a machinery are important in the process of making the engine run. The voices of the poor have been silenced for so long that the power people have forgotten their sound.

— from Axis of Logic

Mankind is blindly marching straight towards the edge of the cliff. Our so-called leaders are busy filling their pockets with gold and making sure they are first in line, that they can yell louder and grab faster than all the rest of us and that they can reach farther into whatever we're heading for. The fact that it's a morass and that it's going to suck us all up, nobody seems to care about.

Every one of the big guys wants to be the first one to cross the line at the goal. What goal? Total destruction, but that is not yet clear to anybody. Or so it seems. Let the show go on. Let's kill more innocent people, let's buy up competing corporations, let's lead the pack of thieves in money speculation, let's bankrupt more small companies, let's suck up the retirement savings of the little people, let's fool the idiots who think we're here to govern the world. We are here to take care of ourselves and our bank accounts. Who cares about the world? Who cares about tomorrow?

— first posted at Axis of Logic

The scientific community now finally seems to agree on the fact that global warming is happening and that it's urgent to find remedies against the imminent hazards that threaten the planet. The big question that confronts the world community now is how do we go about countering this imminent global disaster.

During a short tour to a few cooperative countries in Latin America in March 2007 by our opportunist president, an ethanol alliance was proclaimed in Brazil (Sao Paolo March 8) between George W. Bush and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva. "[It was] hailed by apologists for both governments as an advance in the development of alternative sources of energy and a gain for both countries' economies." (WSWS - 'Brazil: Bush-Lula biofuel plans based on conditions worse than slavery')

The relative costs and benefits of ethanol biofuels, however, are very much subject to doubt and even to open criticism by much of the community that is fighting for alternative sources for fuel.

— first posted at Axis of Logic

In the sixties and seventies, a group of right-wingers in the United States formed a society of vindictive and power hungry men who thought they could reinvent reality. Initially they received little notice and operated inside the American Enterprise Institute; that think tank became the womb for these megalomaniacs and their monstrous ambition of remaking the world. Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were among them and the movement was to turn into a preposterous beast. The group called themselves Neoconservatives although they were hardly conservatives in the traditional sense and were very much out there on a new and tenuous limb.

Nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty*

But poverty is invisible to most affluent people. The high and mighty deliberately close their eyes and minds to the existence of poverty-stricken people in the United States, the land of plenty. It has become government policy to ignore the bottomless gulf that separates the poor from the super-affluent classes. The dominant theory in today's corporate-governed world is that the rich people make the world go round and that is all that matters. Keep the wheels turning, profit is progress, everything else is of little importance, if any.

Imperial arrogance – the road to chaos

The two mainstays of the neoconservative and neoliberal agenda can be reduced to the accumulation of more wealth for the tiny upper clique of the American population and to assuring the ever-lasting continuation of the U.S. empire. The rest of the world is simply of no consequence to the neocon way of thinking and that's where they make the huge mistake that is one day going to be their downfall. Willful shortsightedness has always been their hallmark and every day now it is looking ever more likely that their undoing is imminent. When the base caves in, the tower will come tumbling down.

U.S. imperial arrogance has had no bounds since they began to see themselves as an invincible power already in the 19th century. That's when they began to strike out in Latin America to consolidate their empire in the western hemisphere and the Philippines. The geopolitical situation in the world has recently led Washington to assume preposterous rights to single-handedly reshape the world to their liking and the long-term goal is clearly to become the rulers of the planet. But it now looks increasingly as if the roof is going to fall in on the whole pack of wolves and one day soon the now astronomically rich will find themselves left out in the cold with nothing but worthless paper in their portfolios.[1]

The very notion of a superpower is in tatters. People all over the world are seeing the enormous hypocrisy behind the power game Washington has been playing with increasing recklessness and incompetence for the past half century.

Along with the U.S. administration’s continuous descent into lawlessness and strategic confusion abroad and at home, we see more and more signs of other big powers ascending into the orb of global eminence, making the Washington arrogant power play increasingly seem like a madmen’s illusion.

The loss of American self-confidence

It is the end of an era of American supremacy, of U.S. striving for imperial control of the entire world, the era of American self-confidence, of American innocent trust in its leaders, the era when ‘we were the greatest’. The American people can no longer see themselves as morally superior to the people of all other nations; they cannot boast of having the best educational system, the best upward-moving possibilities, the least poverty, the best opportunities for all people, without consideration of race or social background.