Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa: "The availability of arms to both government and insurgent groups has “democratized” the access to the means of violence in the struggle for political power."

Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa: "The strategic interests of the United States certainly include not only access to cheap and reliable low-sulphur oil imports, but also keeping the Chinese (for example in Sudan) and South Koreans (for example in Nigeria)—aggressive new actors in the African oil business—and Islamic terror at bay. Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror."

Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa: "The policy failed miserably (U.S. dependency upon imported oil in the late 1960s was 20 percent and is expected to be about 66 percent by 2025) and Nixon resorted to maximizing domestic supply and turning to reliable foreign suppliers at minimal cost—just as George Bush intends to do."

International Socialist Review: "over the past half century “every pro-U.S. repressive dictatorship in the world has received some kind of overt or covert Israeli aid,” including apartheid South Africa, every murderous military regime in Latin America, and the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia during its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Washington “funnels weapons and aid through Israel when it wants to evade congressional bans on aid to repressive regimes.”"

Editorial from Challenge No. 99: The First Post-Zionist War: "It is a matter of long-term economic occupation and the effects thereof. The per capita GDP in Israel today is $24,600. In the West Bank it is $1000, in Gaza $600.

In Egypt it is $3900, in Jordan $4700. These countries are nominally at peace with Israel, but their populations have become increasingly hostile to it and the West. "

Foreign Affairs - The Globally Integrated Enterprise - Samuel J. Palmisano: "The mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of what can be called the international corporation. An entrepreneurial joint-stock company, organized in simple hub-and-spoke networks, it established and controlled international trade routes, often relying on its home state's armed forces for protection. In some industries, corporations used these routes to import raw materials (diamonds, rubber, tea, and oil) and export finished products (chocolate, soap, margarine, and other manufactured consumer goods). The basic structure of home-country manufacture and international distribution applied across almost every industry."

Foreign Affairs - The Globally Integrated Enterprise - Samuel J. Palmisano: "In its early forms, the corporation was a creature of the state. Governments chartered and sanctioned corporations to perform specific duties on behalf of the nation and its rulers. This changed somewhat during the nineteenth century, when the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries granted company owners limited liability, and corporations gained a more liberated status as independent 'legal persons.'"

Foreign Affairs - The Globally Integrated Enterprise - Samuel J. Palmisano: "But businesses are changing in fundamental ways -- structurally, operationally, culturally -- in response to the imperatives of globalization and new technology... thinking about the global corporation of the future and its implications for new approaches to regulation, education, trade, and commerce."

Foreign Affairs - The Globally Integrated Enterprise - Samuel J. Palmisano: "The multinational corporation (MNC), often seen as a primary agent of globalization, is taking on a new form, one that is promising for both business and society. From a business perspective, this new kind of enterprise is best understood as 'global' rather than 'multinational.'

The corporation has evolved constantly during its long history. The MNC of the late twentieth century had little in common with the international firms of a hundred years earlier, and those companies were very different from the great trading enterprises of the 1700s. The type of business organization that is now emerging -- the globally integrated enterprise -- marks just as big a leap."

"The different worldviews : and theological assumptions underlying Asian religions (e.g., Hindu, Shintoism) and Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) are as yet irreconcilable, and these irreconcilable differences threaten prospects for world peace in the years ahead. What they do have in common - a set of moral values (compassion, justice, etc.) - could help bridge the gap among the world's religions, thus offering a basis for peaceful co-existence. The author offers three scenarios for peace and justice in the global village by 2050: Exclusivism, Pluralism, and Inclusivism (integration)."

: "The different worldviews and theological assumptions underlying Asian religions (e.g., Hindu, Shintoism) and Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) are as yet irreconcilable, and these irreconcilable differences threaten prospects for world peace in the years ahead. What they do have in common - a set of moral values (compassion, justice, etc.) - could help bridge the gap among the world's religions, thus offering a basis for peaceful co-existence. The author offers three scenarios for peace and justice in the global village by 2050: Exclusivism, Pluralism, and Inclusivism (integration)."

War and disasters aside, 2005 brought world progress | csmonitor.com: "Income: Worldwide incomes are at their highest levels in history and are rising. Since 1960, more than 1 billion people have pulled themselves out of the direst poverty. This trend caused the World Bank to conclude that 'the past two decades have witnessed one of the most rapid reductions in poverty in human history.'"

War and disasters aside, 2005 brought world progress | csmonitor.com: "Judging from the headlines, 2005 was a gloomy year, indeed. Gulf Coast hurricanes, the devastating earthquake in Kashmir, ongoing war in Iraq, civil war in Sudan, renewed famine in central Africa, and the threat of a worldwide pandemic flu darkened the news. These headlines, however, obscure a far brighter underlying trend: On average, people across the planet are living longer, healthier lives, with greater opportunities for education and political freedom than ever before.

We unavoidably view our world through news articles that break up an otherwise overwhelming stream of information into digestible bites. As a result, we often 'lose the forest for the trees' by focusing on sensational short-term stories that impact relatively few people. It is difficult to place these singular events in context and it is all too easy to lose sight of more fundamental developments. If we step back from daily headlines and examine broader global trends in human progress, an encouraging picture for 2005 emerges."

Five meta-trends changing the world: global, overarching forces such as modernization and widespread interconnectivity are converging to reshape our lives. But human adaptability--itself a "meta-trend"--will help keep our future from spinning out of control, assures THE FUTURIST's lifestyles editor. from Goliath Industry and Business News: "As each of these indicators rises in a society, the birthrate in that society goes down. The principal measurable consequence of cultural modernization is declining fertility. As the world's developing nations have become better educated, more urbanized, and more institutionalized during the past 20 years, their birthrates have fallen dramatically. In 1988, the United Nations forecast that the world's population would double to 12 billion by 2100. In 1992, their estimate dropped to 10 billion, and they currently expect global population to peak at 9.1 billion in 2100. After that, demographers expect the world's population will begin to slowly decline, as has already begun to happen in Europe and Japan.
"

Five meta-trends changing the world: global, overarching forces such as modernization and widespread interconnectivity are converging to reshape our lives. But human adaptability--itself a "meta-trend"--will help keep our future from spinning out of control, assures THE FUTURIST's lifestyles editor. from Goliath Industry and Business News: "Demographers have identified several leading social indicators as key measures of the extent to which a nation's culture is modern. They cite the average level of education for men and for women, the percentage of the salaried workforce that is female, and the percentage of population that lives in urban areas. Other indicators include the percentage of the workforce that is salaried (as opposed to self-employed) and the percentage of GDP spent on institutionalized socioeconomic support services, including insurance, pensions, social security, civil law courts, worker's compensation, unemployment benefits, and welfare. "

Five meta-trends changing the world: global, overarching forces such as modernization and widespread interconnectivity are converging to reshape our lives. But human adaptability--itself a "meta-trend"--will help keep our future from spinning out of control, assures THE FUTURIST's lifestyles editor. from Goliath Industry and Business News: "Around the world over the past generation, the basic tenets of modern cultures--including equality, personal freedom, and self-fulfillment--have been eroding the domains of traditional cultures that value authority, filial obedience, and self-discipline. The children of traditional societies are growing up wearing Western clothes, eating Western food, listening to Western music, and (most importantly of all) thinking Western thoughts. Most Westerners--certainly most Americans--have been unaware of the personal intensities of this culture war because they are so far away from the 'battle lines.' Moreover, people in the West regard the basic institutions of modernization, including universal education, meritocracy, and civil law, as benchmarks of social progress, while the defenders of traditional cultures see them as threats to social order. "

Reason: Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore Actually no one paid me to be wrong about global warming. Or anything else.: "In hindsight I can only plead that there is no magic formula for deciding when enough evidence has accumulated that a fair-minded person must change his or her mind on a controversial scientific issue. With regard to global warming it finally did for me in the last year. "

Global Ecosystems Under More Stress | Worldwatch Institute: "In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA)—a comprehensive analysis produced by 1,360 scientists after four years of consultations and research—determined that the health of the world’s ecosystems was in significant decline. Ecosystems provide essential services to people. Yet of the 24 ecosystem services examined in the MA, the scientists found that 15 (62.5 percent) are being degraded or used unsustainably, a trend that “could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century.”"

Vital Signs Online | Worldwatch Institute: "With Vital Signs Online, Worldwatch presents our newest compilation of significant global trends in 10 categories—with written analysis, Excel charts & worksheets, and PowerPoint slides to illustrate each trend."

Aljazeera.Net - Ramin Jahanbegloo and openDemocracy: "The passions that democratic politics ushered in then were played out within nations. In the 21st century, the arena of democratic argument has become global. The last century should be a warning. If we want to avoid decades of what we can describe only as global civil war, we need to make international democracy work.

"

Global Diagrams - World Christian Trends / World Christian Encyclopedia: "Global diagrams
Global diagrams are one-page sheets providing detailed measurements of a specific theme. 10 of the 74 global diagrams from World Christian Trends are provided here in pdf format.
. World Christian Trends across 22 centuries."

Wired News: Human Family Tree: Shallow Roots: "Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers between groups, history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages, illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. Some historical times and places were especially active melting pots -- medieval Spain, ancient Rome and the Egypt of the pharaohs, for example."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "In the years ahead, urbanization could slow or even be reversed. In a world of land, water, and energy scarcity, the value of each resource may increase substantially, shifting the terms of trade between the countryside and cities. Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the terms of trade have favored cities because they control capital and technology, the scarce resources. But if land and water become the scarcest resources, then those in rural areas who control them may sometimes have the upper hand. With a new economy based on renewable energy, a disproportionate share of that energy, particularly wind energy and biofuels, will come from nearby rural areas."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "The oil that provides much of the energy to move resources into and out of cities itself often comes from distant oil fields. Rising oil prices will affect cities, but they will affect even more the suburbs that many cities have spawned."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "Food comes from even greater distances, as is illustrated by Tokyo. While Tokyo still depends for its rice on the highly productive farmers in Japan, with their land carefully protected by government policy, its wheat comes largely from the Great Plains of North America and from Australia. Its corn supply comes largely from the U.S. Midwest. Soybeans come from the U.S. Midwest and the Brazilian cerrado."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "Early cities relied on food and water from the surrounding countryside, but today cities often depend on distant sources even for such basic amenities. Los Angeles, for example, draws much of its water supply from the Colorado River, some 970 kilometers (600 miles) away. Mexico City’s burgeoning population, living at 3,000 meters, must now depend on the costly pumping of water from 150 kilometers away and must lift it a kilometer or more to augment its inadequate water supplies. Beijing is planning to draw water from the Yangtze River basin nearly 1,500 kilometers away."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "Cities require a concentration of food, water, energy, and materials that nature cannot provide. Concentrating these masses of materials and then dispersing them in the form of garbage, sewage, and as pollutants in air and water is challenging city managers everywhere.

Most of today’s cities are not healthy places to live. Urban air everywhere is polluted. Typically centered on the automobile and no longer bicycle- or pedestrian-friendly, cities deprive people of needed exercise, creating an imbalance between caloric intake and caloric expenditures. "

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "In 1900 there were only a handful of cities with a million people. Today 408 cities have at least that many inhabitants. And there are 20 megacities with 10 million or more residents. Tokyo’s population of 35 million exceeds that of Canada. Mexico City’s population of 19 million is nearly equal to that of Australia. New York, São Paulo, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Delhi, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and Shanghai follow close behind."

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - The Ecology of Cities: "Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species."

According to estimates from Wireless Intelligence, the total number of cellular connections in the world will reach 2.5 billion by the end of September, and is expected to reach 3 billion connections around the end of 2007.

People's Daily Online -- "Smart power" vital to war on terror: U.S. scholar: "The most important lesson from the 5 years after 9/11 is that terrorism cannot be defeated by military might alone, and the only way to win is to combine 'hard power' with 'soft power,' a prominent U.S. scholar told Xinhua in a recent interview.

'Winning the war on terror requires more use of the soft power of attraction rather than relying so heavily on hard military power, as the Bush administration has done,' said Joseph Nye, a leading professor in international relations at Harvard University who initiated the 'soft power' theory."

Foreign Policy: Think Again: 9/11: "The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. "

Foreign Policy: Think Again: 9/11: "“9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy
No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years-long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy."

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "An empire, then, will come into existence and endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples exceed the costs of doing so in the eyes of the imperialists; and so long as the benefits of accepting dominance by a foreign people exceed the costs of resistance in the eyes of the subjects. Such calculations implicitly take into account the potential costs of relinquishing power to another empire. "

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the American attention deficit. Past empires had little difficulty in sustaining public support for protracted conflicts. The United States, by contrast, has become markedly worse at this. It took less than 18 months for a majority of American voters to start telling pollsters at Gallup that they regarded the invasion of Iraq as a mistake. Comparable levels of disillusionment with the Vietnam War did not set in until August 1968, three years after U.S. forces had arrived en masse, by which time the total number of Americans killed in action was approaching 30,000. "

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "Empires do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to unite against them. The crucial question is whether or not today’s global powers behave in a different way than their imperial forebears. "

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "The empires created in the 20th century, by contrast, were comparatively short. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922–91) lasted less than 70 years, a meager record indeed, though one not yet equaled by the People’s Republic of China. Japan’s colonial empire, which can be dated from the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895, lasted barely 50 years. Most fleeting of all modern empires was Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by early 1945. Technically, the Third Reich lasted 12 years; as an empire in the true sense of the word, exerting power over foreign peoples, it lasted barely half that time. Only Benito Mussolini was a less effective imperialist than Hitler.

Why did the new empires of the 20th century prove so ephemeral? The answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control, and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
"

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "It is trickier to give precise dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, because these had multiple points of origin and duration. But the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires can all be said to have endured for roughly 300 years. The life span of the Portuguese empire was closer to 500.



"

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "We tend to assume that the life cycle of empires, great powers, and civilizations has a predictable regularity to it. Yet the most striking thing about past empires is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as geographic expanse of their dominion. Especially striking is the fact that the most modern empires have a far shorter life span than their ancient and early modern predecessors. "

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates: "Today’s world, in short, is as much a world of ex-empires and ex-colonies as it is a world of nation-states. Even those institutions that were supposed to reorder the world after 1945 have a distinctly imperial bent. For what else are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council if not a cozy club of past empires? And what is “humanitarian intervention,” if not a more politically correct-sounding version of the Western empires’ old “civilizing mission”? "

Johan Galtung, Professionalization in peace research: "We are moving away from the world as an inter-state system, toward an inter-regional, inter-local authorities, inter-human, inter-gender/generation/race/class world; all dependent on the environment. Merely blowing fresh air into the Westphalia system is suboptimal."

Johan Galtung, Professionalization in peace research: "REALISM as a doctrine is based on the 'ultima' above, force, not persuasion from basic principles, nor bargaining offering incentives, nor decision-making by authoritative bodies. A derivative of this thesis would be that the final word belongs to whoever has superior force, the big sticks of the big powers. In the present world Anglo- America; a peace proposal unacceptable to them is not 'realistic'.

The supreme goal of the realist will be security, meaning low probability of being hurt/harmed by the violence of any Other. The underlying philosophy is that Evil exists, ready to turn violent for violence's own sake, and that the only counter-measure is sufficient strength to deter and/or crush Evil; thereby producing security."

Richard Falk, World Order after theLebanon War: "In the face of experiences in Iraq and Lebanon, the frustrated states, addicted as they seem to be to military solutions for political problems, are likely to go back to their drawing boards, devising new weapons and tactics, but convinced that in the future it will be possible to restore the relevance of superior military power as measured by wealth and technological capacity. This will be a costly mistake. It overlooks the extent to which war is becoming dysfunctional in the 21st century, wasting incredible amounts of resources that could be put to much better uses in raising living standards and creating a more stable, cooperative world."

Richard Falk, World Order after theLebanon War: "Of course, both sides learn within their respective paradigms. Israel adapts future war plans to overcome failure in Lebanon, while Hezbollah tries to anticipate these adjustments in planning to mount an even more devastating resistance in the course of the next flair-up."

People's Daily Online -- U.S. attempts to gain initiative in Africa with preemptive attack theory: "As many African countries have long been in a state of abject poverty and war turmoil, according to the United States, the African continent has become an area with relatively active terrorist activities. To date, the American armed forces, nevertheless, has only a small-size, temporary military organ in Africa ¨C the Horn of Africa joint operation headquarters. This is far from being adequate to ensure the United States to acquire oil from Africa (It makes up 13.5 percent of the US oil import, and is expected to account for 25 percent by 2015) and other natural resources smoothly and to meet the urgent needs for battling terrorism in Africa."

People's Daily Online -- Top 500 Enterprises 2006 account for 78 percent of China's GDP: "China Top 500 Enterprises 2006 posted total operating revenue of 14.14 trillion yuan (1.77 trillion U.S. dollars), accounting for 77.6 percent of the gross domestic product."