Obama in Hiroshima: A Case Study in Hypocrisy

Eric Draitser

 

President Obama heads to Japan this week for an historic visit to Hiroshima, site of the world’s first use of a nuclear weapon, and one of the United States’ most enduring shameful acts. The corporate media has hailed the visit as an important step in strengthening bilateral relations between the US and Japan. Indeed, it certainly is that as the US seeks to reassert its hegemony in an Asia-Pacific region increasingly being seen as the sphere of influence of China.

 

However, Obama’s arrival in Japan also highlights the deeply hypocritical and cynical attitudes of US policymakers, and President Obama himself, when it comes to the relevant issues. He is not expected to formally apologize for the needless slaughter of more than 200,000 Japanese citizens (mostly civilians), nor is he going to address the lingering policy-related effects of the war such as the highly unpopular US military occupation of Okinawa. In fact, it seems Obama is unlikely to touch on anything of substance. But there are indeed numerous subjects which merit close scrutiny.

 

Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/25/obama-in-hiroshima-a-case-study-in-hypocrisy/

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life

Dey

 

Las últimas lluvias torrenciales en Agartala (India) nos dejan fotos así de bonitas.

Naomi Klein criticises lack of global action on climate change after Sydney Peace prize win

Author and social activist says political action on climate change was lacking ‘and nowhere more so than Australia’

The Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein has criticised Australia’s climate change policies after winning the Sydney Peace prize for her work exposing the structural causes of the planet’s climate crisis.

 

Klein said political action on climate change was lacking “and nowhere more so than Australia”. She has previously described Tony Abbott as a climate change “villain”.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/15/naomi-klein-gives-australian-climate-policy-a-serve-after-sydney-peace-prize-win

Hermoso hasta el dolor: If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:



If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:



If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’



If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

 

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 

Rudyard  Kipling

Un Kowalski

Kirchner

Les Etats-Unis sont fatigués du monde

Le candidat républicain à l’élection présidentielle américaine de novembre 2016 sera vraisemblablement moins favorable aux interventions militaires que son adversaire démocrate — une situation inédite depuis la seconde guerre mondiale. Mais la tentation du repli, qui hante la politique étrangère de M. Barack Obama depuis 2009, concerne désormais les deux grands partis.

 

Faible », « confus », « indécis », « traître », « lâche », « naïf », « incohérent », « sans vision », « inexpérimenté »  : pendant huit ans, les républicains n’ont pas eu de mots assez durs pour qualifier M. Barack Obama et sa politique étrangère. Le président aurait sapé la grandeur et le crédit des Etats-Unis en refusant de recourir plus souvent à la force.

 

S’ils ne manquent jamais de souligner combien M. Obama aurait humilié les Etats-Unis, les deux principaux candidats en lice dans la primaire républicaine ont largement remisé ces discours jusqu’au-boutistes. En décembre 2015, M. Ted Cruz a critiqué les « néoconservateurs fous qui veulent envahir tous les pays de la planète et envoyer nos enfants mourir au Proche-Orient  ». Le même mois, lors d’un discours devant la très conservatrice Heritage Foundation, il a souligné le caractère néfaste des interventions américaines en s’appuyant sur l’exemple libyen, puis a ajouté : « Nous n’avons pas de camp à soutenir dans la guerre civile syrienne. » Des propos qui entraient quelque peu en résonance avec une phrase de M. Obama : le 10 septembre 2013, le président avait considéré que le conflit syrien était « la guerre civile de quelqu’un d’autre ».

Read more: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2016/05/BREVILLE/55468

300 economistas advierten de que los paraísos fiscales "carecen de un propósito económico útil"

Más de 300 destacados economistas de 30 países distintos han remitido una carta a los líderes mundiales advirtiéndoles de que no existe argumento económico que justifique la continuidad de los paraísos fiscales y urgiéndoles a acabar con la opacidad financiera que estos favorecen. La carta llega justo antes de la cumbre anticorrupción organizada por el Gobierno británico, que tendrá lugar el próximo jueves en Londres y en la que participarán políticos de 40 países, así como representantes del Banco Mundial y el FMI.

 

Entre las personas firmantes se incluyen Thomas Piketty, autor del superventas El capital en el Siglo XXI, Angus Deaton, actual premio Nobel de Economía, y Nora Lustig, profesora de Economía Latinoamericana de la Universidad Tulane, así como influyentes expertos y asesores políticos como Jeff Sachs, director del Earth Institute de la Universidad de Columbia y asesor del secretario general de las Naciones Unidas, Ban Ki-moon, y Olivier Blanchard, anterior economista jefe del FMI.

 

Leer más: https://www.oxfam.org/es/sala-de-prensa/notas-de-prensa/2016-05-09/300-economistas-advierten-de-que-los-paraisos-fiscales

La música de Bitácora: Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know

1. 
   

Delicado

 

 F.: Rafael Suárez

Godward

Hermoso hasta el dolor: El crescendo de Ravel por Dudamel

De un poema del norteamericano Mark Strand:

Someone was saying (...)
How shells were the coffins of wind.

Un autorretrato de Dix

Macke

Hiding the Indonesia Massacre Files

Exclusive: Perhaps nowhere does U.S. hypocrisy over human rights stand out more clearly than Indonesia’s “Year of Living Dangerously” slaughter of vast numbers of people in 1965, dirty secrets that Jonathan Marshall says finally deserve airing.

By Jonathan Marshall

Now that the Indonesian government has officially opened a probe into what the CIA called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20^th century,” it’s time for the U.S. government to come clean about its own involvement in the orchestrated killing of hundreds of thousands of Communists, ethnic Chinese, intellectuals, union activists and other victims during the mid-1960s.

 

Read more: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/29/hiding-the-indonesia-massacre-files/

Visto en la calle

F.: Rafael Suárez