What you want to say… Open Thread, 19th September, 2012 September 19, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
Let’s hope there’s some solidarity and humanity shown by both sets of fans on Sunday. (I mean at Anfield, not Croke Park).
http://audioboo.fm/boos/962156-man-utd-fan-francis-made-some-very-heartfelt-comments-about-hillsborough-chanting-at-old-trafford
I see that Ireland’s leading icon of useless liberalism, Mary Robinson, is continuing to refuse to comment on the situation in Erris, a few miles down the road from her home town of Ballina. In this our very own “human rights crusader” has much in common with most of her Irish admirers.
In fairness, standing around beside Aung San Suu Kyi, listening to Bono waffle, would be an exhausting job for anyone.
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/102447
[...] “Our Brand Is Crisis” asks a more probing question: Whether Mr. Carville and company, in selling a pro-globalization, pro-American candidate, can export American-style campaigning and values to a country so fundamentally different from the United States.
“I wanted to make clear that this is a story that does not happen just in Bolivia but all over the world,” said Rachel Boynton, 32, who directed and wrote the film after becoming intrigued by the American role in foreign campaigns. “I’m much more interested about the consultants as a symbol for us, as a symbol for America and American assumptions. I chose the subjects because I wanted to explore America’s relationship with the rest of the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/movies/26fore.html?_r=2
Note that Shrum at least has worked for FF, as I recall.
This is rather good, as well:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-18/what-mitt-romney-doesn-t-get-about-responsibility.html
+1
BTW, if people want scary I suggest that they take a look at the comments under that article on bloomberg. A bit of racism, a whole lot of stupidity…
I predict Bartley’ll be a no-show on this thread.
Could be…
btw, I emailed you. If you got it email me back would you? Want to keep it off the radar so to speak.
No problem. I rarely check that account, but I’ll do so now, cheers.
Smithwick Tribunal circus still being led around by the nose by the RUC:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0919/smithwick-tribunal.html
A charity funded by a certain litigious tax avoiding media tycoon has a rather shameless ad campaign.
http://dublinopinion.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/havan.jpg
There’s another poster telling us that “Property Tax isn’t a worry” in Haiti. Truly, this is one of the most disgusting advertising campaigns I’ve ever seen waged.
It combines so many grotesque elements.
The people of Haiti would of course benefit much more if they heavily taxed the super-rich tax exile whose pet charity this is than they will from having one of his charitable operations import unskilled labour from Ireland. For that matter, the unmitigated cheek of an O’Brien charity lecturing people about tax is staggering.
Hardly surprising given the self-serving neoliberal ideology of charities like Haven of lauding the rich for philanthropy rather than making them pay their fucking taxes.
Supporters of Haven fundraising events like a golf classic, ‘ladies’ lunch’, rugby lunch and a mini-festival in the ‘sprawling’ private garden of some rich couple include Jim Glennon, Simon Coveney, George Hook, Claire Byrne and well-known friend of Haiti, Bill Clinton, who invaded the country back in 1994.
Besides tax dodging capitalist-in-chief Denis O’Brien and his partner Leslie Buckley, the board also includes a former President of IBEC and a former head of the IMO. http://www.havenpartnership.com/files/annualreport/main.html#page/28
Haven, like Frontline and Human Rights Watch, is a charity bv and for the rich that makes them feel better about their disgustingly disproportinate wealth and power, while simultaneously providing a vehicle for hegemonic propaganda and the added bonus of exciting poverty tourism holidays.
The Bill Clinton connection is something you simply couldn’t make up. Its like having George W Bush as a prominent supporter of a charity dedicated to housing Iraqis and Afghanis.
Come to think of it, I would actually make a donation to an Irish charity which promised to send useless Irish liberals and NGO types to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Haven’t those poor people suffered enough?
At the risk of sounding like the guy in the Alexei
Sayle sketch who went through “the Proper Channels”,
maybe it would be worth complaining to the ASI about
this?
Using Haitian poverty to make a dig at the property
tax hardly passes under the label “decent”.
http://asai.ie/index.asp
After the Haitian earthquake, John O’Shea had an opinion piece in the Irish Times demanding that Bill Clinton be appointed dictator of Haiti, with the same powers as Eisenhower had enjoyed in Germany under Allied occupation (I do not exaggerate or caricature his argument one iota, this is exactly what he said, he mentioned Eisenhower and Germany explicitly). Nobody seemed to think this was an odd thing to say.
What is it about Haiti that draws the charitable wing of NATO to prey on its unfortunate people? Obviously the fact that the population is black must help (O’Shea’s solution to any given problem is to take power out of the hands of people with dark skin and give it to people with white skin). Is there something else, too?
O’Shea would be first on my list of Irish NGO industrial complex arseholes for deportation to Afghanistan.
Ed, given Haiti’s historical achievement as the first slave society to throw off the yoke of European imperialism, an event that scared the bejesus out of the US slaveholding states, would it be the case that there is a lingering, subconscious, desire within the US to keep punishing Haiti over and over against for Haitians ancestors ‘crime’ of showing that white imperalism and racism could be militarily defeated by blacks. Totally speculative thought, probably way off beam.
Erm…not sure about that. Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 after much dithering to put Aristide back in power, which seems to me to have been one of the better things he did, given that Aristide had been overthrown by a right-wing military coup.
It was Bush and Chirac who then supported Aristide’s second ouster ten years later.
I take it you’re with George Bush Senior on this who wanted to leave the original junta in power. Admittedly, Clinton put pressure on Aristide to toe the neo-liberal line but the comparison with Dubya and Iraq seems unwarranted.
On the subject of Haiti, I stumbled across this recently: http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_29_8/1_29_8.html I don’t know the provenance of the article, but it states: “Where Yannick Jean washes her clothes probably speaks more to Haiti’s current reality and the contradictions of the current United Nation’s mission than any expert on development possibly could. Rising above her and creating shadows over her dirty laundry is a huge edifice of new construction that bears the mark GB. It is a new building that covers several acres and is home to the business of Haiti’s wealthiest man, Gilbert Bigio.
While the surrounding residents of Cite Soleil are forced to literally eat dirt to stave off hunger, Bigio is a billionaire whose family supported the first coup against Aristide and reportedly helped to back the movement that forced his second ouster in 2004.
One need not look very far to see where Gilbert Bigio’s interests lie in relation to Cite Soleil. According to his own company’s web site his family maintains controlling interests in sixteen of Haiti’s largest companies. They are also the largest Haitian partner in the wireless communications giant Digicel, a mammoth company based in Ireland that has nearly cornered the cellular market in the Caribbean. Bigio’s family is not merely wealthy amidst a sea of poverty stricken residents in Haiti, his family represents the uber-wealthy who have benefited most since Aristide’s second ouster in 2004.” This was in 2008, before the disaster…
Also on the subject of Haiti, Monthly Review has an article in the latest issue about the paramilitary basis of power of the ruling elite and the transnational corporations:
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/09/01/paramilitaries-in-haiti
The people wqho made the excellent documentary Debtocracy have now made another one called Catastroika. I haven’t watched it all yet but the part I have seen is excellent. It provides a history of wholesale privatisations and the Chicago Boys from Pinochet’s Chile to Post-Soviet Russia and asks if this is the grim future for countries such as Greece. It’s online in full (in Greek with English subtitiles) at
Tracks from Damien Dempseys forthcoming album are up on the Irish Times Site
http://www.irishtimes.com/theticket/damien-dempsey/
Wanted to see a consultant about a medical issue. For the public waiting list, it would take 7 months. For private, 1 month.
Somewhere, Mary Harney is laughing.
….all the way to the bank!