the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Part 5 - Nationalisation To achieve such an economy clearly requires mass nationalisation. Corbyn has boldly put this on the agenda, with pledges to nationalise the railways and the utilities. In his speech, Corbyn attacked the parasitic capitalists who use instruments like private equity to squeeze profits out of, for instance, the water industry and run them down, knowing they have no competition anyway. This pledge is extremely welcome after years of privatisation and the Thatcherite myth that ‘there is no alternative’, to which Blair et al. wholeheartedly subscribed. But Corbyn’s plans for nationalisation are too timid for their own realisation. Labour plans to let the licences granted to these utility companies expire, rather than to nationalise them straight away. This will give them all the time in the world to undermine any public ownership plans: to cut back all investment, to move assets abroad etc. And by the time the licence expires Labour may be out of

by Ramin Mazaheri Part 5 - Can we combine the Eurogroup with a parliament? Not in real life…. What is clear is that the Eurogroup operates with even more power than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan because there is absolutely zero citizen accountability. Right now, the Troika steers the 19 national budgets the way they want, with Germany their public Rottweiler. But now you say that you want Eurogroup citizen accountability? You mean, regarding the crucial questions of national budgets and are they in line with the rules/sound economic thinking? Ok then, a “leviathan” in Varoufakis’ words (or perhaps just a “Eurozone Finance Minister”), must be created to accept or reject the 19 national budgets. But you can’t just have an executive branch – you need a legislative branch as well. What is this, a state of emergency, where laws get made by decree and cops are the judges? Of course that’s unacceptable in the freedom-loving West, don’t be fatuous…. S

globinfo freexchange New evidence has been brought to light by the Corporate Europe Observatory about the unprecedented, beyond doubt, conflicts of interests inside the EU and the occupation of the European Institutions by the lobbyists. A new report proves that the ECB has been literally occupied by private financial institutions and actually impose ECB's destructive policies in the eurozone members. As described in the report, from 2008, the ECB started undertaking initiatives that went beyond its earlier remit, among them “ Participation in the Troika (along with the Commission and the International Monetary Fund) which saw the ECB co-responsible for severe austerity programmes in indebted Eurozone member states, as well as very forceful direct, political intervention in countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Greece. ” Recall that, early this year, the former Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis, revealed the way that the German Chancellor, A

New details have been disclosed about the CIA’s torture program at a black site prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, thanks to newly unsealed documents the spy agency and US Defense Department were forced to declassify over a lawsuit filed by victims of the torture program. The newly revealed papers expose in shocking detail how the agency integrated two contract psychologists to design brutal torture techniques to break detainees’ resistance and give torture the appearance of legality. Two surviving prisoners and the family of a detainee who died at the ‘Cobalt’ site in Afghanistan reached an out-of-court settlement with CIA psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in August after a lawsuit was filed for their role in the torture. The CIA and Pentagon were forced to declassify the documents related to the case in pretrial discovery. The memos also capture high-level agency discussions revealing a cover-up in action. The Cobalt site, which opened out

The UN has announced that it is on “full alert” for a mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims as reports show a sharp spike of them fleeing Myanmar. “ We’re back in a situation of full alert as far as influxes are concerned. It is a big increase to see 11,000, ” said the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Adrian Edwards, on Tuesday. Myanmar’s army renewed its bloody crackdown on the ethnic minority population in August, with numerous documented incidents of massacre and rape of Muslim men and women. Authorities in Myanmar, led by de facto leader Aug San Suu Kyi, have been tightly controlling access to Rakhine since August, when purported attacks by Rohingya fighters prompted a brutal military response that has forced over 515,000 Rohingya to flee for Bangladesh. The crackdown, backed by radical Buddhist monks, has left scores of Rohingya villages torched and completely destroyed. “ We have had big numbers coming across by the day ov