by Greg Palast AfricaSpeaks.com
There’s so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let’s begin with this: 77% of Venezuela’s farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the ‘hacendados.’

I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I’ve ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, “Chavez – dic-ta-dor!” The plantation owner griped about the “socialismo” of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.

That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the “socialist” manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela’s Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.

This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela’s dictator of the time agreed to hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property.

But Chavez won’t forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a “negro e indio” — a “Black and Indian” man, dark as a cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first time in Venezuela’s history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar. full article

by Julio Godoy antiwar.com
PARIS – France and the United States have begun a new race to compete for favors with undemocratic regimes in Africa. The competition is growing particularly in the oil-rich North and West Africa. full article

Ailing Shell braced for French bid
Guardian UK
Royal Dutch/Shell is bracing itself for a takeover bid, with Shell executives now conceding that it is vulnerable to a predator.

Insiders at the Anglo-Dutch oil giant fear Total, the French oil group, will launch a raid. Total, the world’s fourth-largest oil firm, is considered the only predator capable of gaining regulatory approval for what would be a spectacular merger…

…Analysts say that Total’s strong Middle Eastern presence would bolster that of Shell’s, while a single Shell/Total business would be the dominant player in Nigeria. Unlike Shell, Total has a strong presence in Angola. full article

by Douglas Belkin Boston Globe
The last time Boston’s homicide rate rose as it has this year, young men who had once ruled their streets through intimidation were left paralyzed, ashamed, and, in some cases, wishing they were dead. They are the hidden casualties of the worst stretch of violence in Boston’s history. “When you grow up the way I did,” one says, “you just figure a bullet is going to find you one day.” full article

Guardian UK
The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.

The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.

In the late 1970s, there were around 3,000 deaths a year from these conditions in England and Wales. By the late 1990s, there were 10,000. full article

by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw The Nation
…The zeal to get beyond race will hasten efforts to drive wedges between black politicians–a move already afoot in the effort to hold up Barack Obama as “the good black” and Sharpton, Jackson and others as the “bad blacks.” The New York Times published a review of the convention that declared, “Rather than positioning him within a black tradition, Mr. Obama’s speech evoked, through his and his family’s varied races, trades and professions, a diversity that aims at unity”–as though the failure to achieve unity on civil rights is the natural consequence of the black discursive tradition, “I Have a Dream” notwithstanding. Even the Republicans weighed in on the good black/bad black question–Bob Novak declared that “the kind of black [the Democrats] want out there representing the party is Senator Obama from Illinois and not Al Sharpton.” Perhaps that’s true, but any close reading of Obama’s own testament–his autobiography, boxes of which languished in his basement no doubt because he didn’t declare himself to be the raceless son of an African immigrant in a colorblind world–would reveal that the division that the media celebrate is far more a difference of style than of substance. full article

This is a classic:using ‘diversity’ to short-circuit the necessary historical conversation that needs to take place in this country: we are all one glorious rainbow of indeterminate color. Al Sharpton is accused of hijacking the Democratic convention for talking about race and history. Of all black spokespeople on the scene, Sharpton alone has been on-message for many years, whatever else one might think about him. See what happens to a black’s credibility and rep if he or she insists on keeping race issues front and center.

by Manning Marable zmag.org
In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, predicted that the “problem of the twentieth century” would be the “problem of the color line,” the unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker races of humankind. Although Du Bois was primarily focused on the racial contradiction of the United States, he was fully aware that the processes of what we call “racialization” today – the construction of racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by dominant and subordinate social relations between groups – was an international and global problem. Du Bois’s color line included not just the racially segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of South Africa; but also included British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean among indigenous populations.

Building on Du Bois’s insights, we can therefore say that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of global apartheid: the racialized division and stratification of resources, wealth, and power that separates Europe, North America, and Japan from the billions of mostly black, brown, indigenous, undocumented immigrant and poor people across the planet. The term apartheid, as most of you know, comes from the former white minority regime of South Africa. It is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness” or “separation.” Apartheid was based on the concept of “herrenvolk,” a “master race,” who was destined to rule non-Europeans. Under global apartheid today, the racist logic of herrenvolk, the master race, still exists, embedded in the patterns of unequal economic exchange that penalizes African, south Asian, Caribbean, and poor nations by predatory policies of structural adjustment and loan payments to multinational banks. full article

by Aseem Shrivastava zmag.org
Super-bully going to Iran?

“My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meanness, and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.”
– Mark Twain

“The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.”
– Cicero.

The coming months may eliminate the question mark from the title of this article. And American civilization may well end up where Twain wished in his despair that it should.

History returns to haunt in strange ways.

It was on August 19th, 51 years ago, that Britain and the US orchestrated a military coup in Iran, dislodged the democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and installed the exiled monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. full article

US to redeploy 100,000 troops and shut bases Guardian UK

by Steve Chapman commondreams.org
John Kerry is a man of great personal courage, which served him well as a naval officer in the Vietnam War. But the man who takes the inaugural oath in January won’t be asked to lead a bayonet charge. A more vital quality in a president is moral courage. And trying to detect evidence of that attribute in Mr. Kerry is like expecting Mikhail Baryshnikov to show up at the county fair.

The latest proof that Mr. Kerry’s backbone is made of goose down was his statement that even if he had known what he knows now about Iraq’s yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction and mythical partnership with al-Qaida, he still would have voted for the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war. “I believe it’s the right authority for a president to have,” he said.

The Iraq war is shaping up to be the greatest American foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. It has killed nearly 1,000 American soldiers and wounded more than 6,000, while tying down 140,000 troops who are cruelly undermanned. Its price tag has reached $150 billion, with more costs to come. The war and occupation have alienated our friends, inflamed anti-Americanism in the Arab world and diverted us from the war on al-Qaida. If those facts don’t convince Mr. Kerry that his vote was a mistake, it’s hard to imagine what would.

Actually, it’s not so hard to imagine what would cause Mr. Kerry to recant: political expedience. The Massachusetts senator firmly believes something he firmly believed when he voted for the war resolution, which is that he should take the politically safe course no matter what. So he’s happy to straddle the fence by criticizing Mr. Bush for taking us down the wrong road in Iraq while refusing to say Congress should have stopped him. And he figures he can stand by his vote because opponents of the war have nowhere else to turn. But they can always turn to Ralph Nader, or just stay home. When it comes to Iraq, after all, Mr. Kerry sounds an awful lot like the guy who got us into this mess. full article

This is not the John Kerry who spoke truth to power in 1971 as a VVAW. He learned his lesson after he voted against Iraq I in 1991.

by Mickey Z counterpunch.org
“Complain all you want; but do as you’re told.” –Frederick the Great of Prussia

In a matter of weeks, politicians, protesters, and police will converge on my beleaguered city…and that is precisely why I’m skipping town for a few days. The police state tactics and color-coded alerts are reason enough…but I’d also rather not witness firsthand the death throes of protest as we know it.

It’s bad enough that today’s breed of subversive didn’t deem the Democratic Convention worthy of his or her time (Where was the planned-for-months-in-advance outrage in Boston? The Hitler mustaches? The warnings about fascism? The cataloging of candidate crimes?); now we have hordes of anti-authority types submitting to New York’s demands for polite opposition restricted to a pre-determined venue. Sure, a lawsuit is being threatened but it has little to do with freedom of speech being limited to a city-sanctioned site far away from the conventional action. Nah, the progressives in question are in an uproar about the lack of shade near the West Side Highway.

No sunscreen…no justice.

Now, if you think the radical left playing nice in Boston and adhering to the rules in Manhattan has made supporters of Kerry (a.k.a. Yale-educated War Criminal #2) a happy bunch of corporate campers, you display precious little savvy about our two-party (sic) system.

An Associated Press item floating around this week quotes lots of Dems dissing demonstrators. The piece begins: “(Some Democrats) said disorder and clashes between protesters and police not only could drown out the Democrats’ carefully crafted message of ‘loyal opposition’ to the GOP but also could be linked to their party.”

New York Representative Jerrold Nadler explains: “If a problem develops, I think the political impact will not be good for Democrats. There are a lot of very fine patriotic demonstrators, and then there are some who are probably anarchists or crazies of one sort or another.” full article