Jango Jukebox

Haven’t had time to mess with this blog for some months. You know, “..And life goes on / And you know it ain’t easy“, as a glam group of my teenage days sang in one of their most popular hits back in early seventies. (Few of you know of that song and those days I guess )

Anyway… I just wanted to add this Jango Jukebox to my blog but I don’t know how to make it permanent at the top (or better, at the sidebar.) Hope I’ll find a way and hope I’ll have time to update this blog with fresh entries very soon – we have just entered to a very critical time period and the world began to change dramatically, can you feel it?

www.Jango.com – Internet Radio

 

My Third “Clippiversary”

Yes guys, time runs really fast. Three years ago today, I joined Clipmarks and my online experience has never been the same since the very first day I started clipping. No other web site, online service or community could give me so much valuable things that Clipmarks and the “clippiverse” generously offered. I enjoyed every single day very much and I learned so many things here, following your clips or reading your comments. More important than this, I have many good friends now all around the world – some of them have already become “old pals” for me.

So, thank you again EricG, Adam, EricSkiff, Derek and EricW: I owe all these to you. Hope to celebrate my 4th, 5th, 6th ….. clippiversaries here together!

And dear clippers, my friends, thank you for sharing your knowledge, feelings, recommendations and friendship.

clipped from clipmarks.com Edit Profile invictus Real Name: add yours Location: Turkey Joined: 11-10-2005 488 Followers� | �185 Guides

 

Welcome back, “Blue America”

I just noticed how much I longed for seeing this picture… Especially after an eight-year-long nightmare that ruined the entire world.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive. Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

 

Obama’s historic win

The U.S. presidential elections 2008 has already been a milestone in world history, with Barack Obama’s exciting win. While I’m writing this post (about 10:30 PM EST) it has become clear that the democrat senator easily gets all the electoral votes he needs to become the first African-American president of the United States. Congratulations go to my American friends for now; comments and analysis will come later.

Tagline – added at 00:01 AM:

“Remember, remember / The 5th of November!”

clipped from www.reuters.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Barack Obama moved to the brink of becoming the first black U.S. president on Tuesday with a breakthrough win in Ohio, leaving Republican John McCain fighting for his political life. Obama captured Ohio, the state that narrowly gave Republican President George W. Bush the presidency in 2004, and dashed McCain’s hopes in Pennsylvania as McCain’s path to victory in the presidential race began to disappear. “At this point we need a miracle,” a McCain aide was quoted as saying on the CBS News web site. A win by Obama, 47, son of a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas, would mark a milestone in U.S. history 45 years after the height of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.

 

Smells like a landslide victory for Obama

If everything goes “normal”, we’ll be hearing about Obama’s clear win around midnight. But the democrat voters look strangely worried – possibly because their memory recall for the last two elections that were hijacked at the last minute. My guess is at least a 6 points lead for Obama; some people I trust in the media began talking about a 56-40 at percentages. We have just a few hours left, so, let’s wait and see.

Update 11:50 PM EST: Yes, that’s it! With almost 350 electoral votes, this IS a landslide victory!

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com Obama Wins Dixville Notch, NH, The First Place To Vote DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. — Democrat Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch, N.H., where the nation’s first Election Day votes were cast and counted early Tuesday. Obama defeated John McCain 15-6. Independent Ralph Nader was also on the ballot, but received no votes. The first voter, following tradition established in 1948, was picked ahead of the midnight voting and the rest of the town’s 21 registered voters followed suit in Tuesday’s first minutes. Town Clerk Rick Erwin says the northern New Hampshire town is proud of its tradition, but says the most important thing is that the turnout represents a 100 percent vote. President Bush won the vote in Dixville Notch in 2004 on the way to his re-election.

 

What could lie behind Syria raid?

The title above is BBC’s original… And without doubt, it’s a very good question now. I am curiously waiting for the consequences. Just read the clip below and begin speculating about the possibilities of a scary conspiracy.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Syria has said American troops carried out a raid inside Syria along the Iraqi border, killing eight people – if the claims are true then this will be the first military incursion by the US into Syrian territory from Iraq. But its timing is curious, coming right at the end of the Bush administration’s period of office and at a moment when many of America’s European allies – like Britain and France – are trying to broaden their ties with Damascus. Whatever the local military factors involved in this US operation, it would be unthinkable to imagine that an incursion into Syria would not require a policy decision at a high-level. With the Bush administration on the way out, this US military incursion may represent something of a parting shot against the Syrians. It’s clear that if Senator Barrack Obama were to win the White House, his key advisers are among the strongest advocates of engaging with the Damascus across a broad spectrum of issues.

 

The free flow of catastrophe

John Bellamy Foster writes about the current economic crisis on MRZine:

Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion.  However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented.

Actually, I believe this is not a totally “uncharted territory” if we recall all the milestones in the history of capitalism; since the catastrophic possibilities, or at least, the unchangeable nature of the “engine” that the system has developed over centuries was more  or less defined almost one hundred years ago by important thinkers. In the circumstances of the late eighteenth century, Marx could only imagine the rapid transformation of capital into something totally different at the next stage: A new form which is completely independent from the industrial production but having the ability to affect and even dominate it. Rudolf Hilferding clearly recognized the characteristics and tendency of this new structural change in the early twentieth century and named it simply the finance-capital – banking capital in money form, which was actually being transformed into industrial capital. A few years later, Lenin stated that “the supremacy of finance-capital over all other forms of capital meant the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy.”

 

High levels of inequality could lead widespread major unrest

While the mainstream media is too busy dealing with the detailed coverage of the huge earthquake at Wall Street and other international markets, a group of researchers from the United Nations completed a study on 120 major cities around the world which presents some disturbing conclusions. The picture is not very bright, the report suggests, with the growing inequality and wealth gap in the biggest urban areas of the world. John Vidal, environment editor of The Guardian, tries to draw our attention to the consequences of this situation, in his latest article.

High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilizing effect on societies,” said the report. “[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity.”

According to the annual State of the World’s cities report from UN-Habitat, race is one of the most important factors determining levels of inequality in the US and Canada.

This picture has nothing to do with the present economical collapse of the international finance-capital. Even if the things went completely alright for the financial lords without any serious fluctuation at the “credits market”, the majority of the people who live in the most urbanized parts of the world would feel the harsh impacts of the globally dominant economic system which was built upon inequality.

The report found that India was becoming more unequal as a direct result of economic liberalization and globalization, and that the most unequal cities were in South Africa and Namibia and Latin America. “The cumulative effect of unequal distribution [of wealth] has been a deep and lasting division between rich and poor. Trade liberalization did not bring about the expected benefits.”

Social unrest has always been the direct result of the deep economical inequalities at sharing the wealth, which brought the end of feudal monarchies some two hundred years ago. Beginning with the end of this decade, we can expect a widespread unrest, social and political clashes, or even civil wars around the world – perhaps at the heart of the global finance-capital, like America and West Europe.

 

Analyzing the inevitable collapse of the Global Finance-Capital

The Neoliberalism ship badly stranded and the “wise guys” of the global financial elite are in a helpless manic-depressive situation. This picture was more or less foreseen by the thinkers of our age almost a century ago but the smart-ass “experts” of the post-war era were so over-confident that they thought they could keep the veins in hand even under the worst circumstances, by injecting the rules of a “financial religion” they called the “global capitalism.” The greed and the bigotry of the international finance-capital finally led the world economy to a total collapse – and alas, the worst is not over yet.

Walden Bello, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, analyzes the present situation thoroughly in a Q & A style. (I recommend the original article at the source site.)

We’re seeing the intensification of one of the central crises or contradictions of global capitalism: the crisis of overproduction, also known as overaccumulation or overcapacity.

In other words, capitalism has a tendency to build up tremendous productive capacity that outruns the population’s capacity to consume owing to social inequalities that limit popular purchasing power, thus eroding profitability.

clipped from www.fpif.org Did greed cause the collapse of global capitalism’s nerve center? Good old-fashioned greed certainly played a part. This is what Klaus Schwab, the organizer of the World Economic Forum, the yearly global elite jamboree in the Swiss Alps, meant when he said in an interview earlier this year: “We have to pay for the sins of the past.” Was this a case of Wall Street outsmarting itself? Definitely. Financial speculators outsmarted themselves by creating more and more complex financial contracts like derivatives that would securitize and make money from all forms of risk — including such exotic futures instruments as “credit default swaps” that enable investors to bet on the odds that the banks’ own corporate borrowers would not be able to pay their debts Was it lack of regulation? Yes. Everyone acknowledges by now that Wall Street’s capacity to innovate and turn out more and more sophisticated financial instruments had run far ahead of government’s regulatory capability

 

The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Just the Banks

A worth-to-read-these-days article from MRZine, based on a lecture which Rick Kuhn, Reader in Political Science at the ANU, will deliver in London on 7 November. Kuhn presents a solid panoramic view of the recurrent crisis of capitalism and analyzes the “chaotic essence” of the dominant economic system which is “destined” to collapse totally in this century and transform into a new, “hybrid thing”. The below clip includes the few paragraphes that I picked but the entire article is highly recommended. A good read indeed.

clipped from mrzine.monthlyreview.org Don’t panic! That’s the panicked cry of governments and central bankers around the world. Meanwhile their behaviour shows that they expect a very, very deep recession. More ‘transparency’ and better regulation of banking won’t deal with the underlying issue which is low average rates of profit across the global economy. Capitalism has a tendency to break down that is expressed in deep crises like the current one. Grossman argued that capitalist production is characterized by insoluble conflicts. Irremediable systemic convulsions necessarily arise . . . from the immanent contradiction between value and use value, between profitability and productivity, between limited possibilities for valorisation and the unlimited development of the productive forces. The fact that production is organised not to satisfy human needs but to make profits for the capitalist class is the ultimate cause of the system’s recurrent crises.