General News & Analysis

By TODD GORDON and JEFFREY R. WEBBER - February 5-7, 2010

The new Lobo regime and the golpista press are presenting the transfer of power as a return to democracy and thus an end to the coup. Lobo, they claim, marks a new beginning for a democratic Honduras under a new government of national reconciliation. Unsurprisingly, this position is being echoed by U.S. and Canadian imperialism. These same powers supported the coup, their claims to the contrary nothwithstanding.

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Author:  John Jackson

I hope very much that those MPs now facing the prospect of prosecution for the way in which they ‘managed’ their parliamentary expenses do claim immunity because, as MPs, they are ‘privileged’. This is not because I think that any such outrageous claim should succeed but for two other reasons.

Firstly it would provide an opportunity to establish finally whether our courts have the jurisdiction to be the final arbiters of the existence and extent of those privileges of the House of Commons and its members which are not enshrined in statute. This is ‘unfinished business’ which, on the rare occasions it has been discussed, has generated much constitutional heat.

Secondly and, for me, more importantly, it would force us all – and the media – to confront what we have allowed the House of Commons to become and what has been stolen from us. We think we are a sovereign people: we are not. Sovereignty does not reside in and is not enjoyed by ‘we the people’.

The history of this tells it all. From its early beginnings Parliament, not just the Commons, was deemed to represent the whole community in its dealings with the hereditary and sovereign monarch. But in the exercise of that deemed representation, the lords, the bishops and the members of the commons used their own judgements and were never, in any sense, delegates of those who ‘appointed’ them. As the sovereignty of the’ monarch in consultation with Parliament’ shifted to the ‘monarch as part of Parliament’ i.e. to Parliament as such, the difference between deemed representation and delegation (and the notion of ‘reporting back’) became a very hot political potato. It went to the very roots of who had, or should have, power. That is why:

• Oliver Cromwell, with all his doubts about how far the right of Parliament to have the last word should go, opposed strongly the Levellers who proposed that the powers of Parliament should be expressly limited by an ‘Agreement of the People’ which would serve as a fundamental law embodying the will of the nation.
• Those who fashioned the Glorious Revolution of 1689 concocted a Bill of Rights which gave Parliament effective control of the monarchy and gave precious little by way of rights to the people.
• Those who argued, in the early years following that revolution, that members of the Commons were delegates bound to act according to the wishes of their constituents were defeated by a consensus between the leaders of the emerging political parties. By 1734 Robert Walpole, our ‘first’ prime minister, could say with complete political confidence ‘we are to guard against running too much into that form of government which is properly called democratical’.

His views were echoed by Edmund Burke thirty years later when he condemned ‘sovereignty of the people’ as ‘the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine that could ever be preached’. 

Thomas Paine, who supported the rebelling American colonists in the 1790s and believed that a genuine constitution was something adopted by a people for the regulation and control of its government, got into serious trouble for proposing a democratically elected national convention to establish a constitution on behalf of the people of England and asserting that the existing system of government was ‘despotic’ because those who are elected ‘possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers’.

The electoral reforms of the nineteenth century and thereafter were presented largely as ‘gifts’ from a political establishment determined to hold on to the power that went with their definition of parliamentary sovereignty to a people expected to give thanks and show proper deference to those ‘who know better’.

That is how we got to where we now are and why our supposedly representative democracy has gone rotten. It is not where we should be. The position of those who represent us is a fundamental point. And it should not be decided by those presently at the apex of political power. We, the people, must find a way to assert our sovereignty and take the power to determine what kind of community we want to be into our own hands.  It will be for the first time in our very strange history. 

oD-wide classification Country:  UK Section style:  OurKingdom Sections to display in:  OurKingdom

Five years of savage torture has destroyed her humanity.

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By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - February 8, 2010

The wanton slaughter of wildlife for the fun of killing creates hostility toward firearms among the general public...Many Americans have an aversion to people who get their jollies by murdering animals. Banning guns becomes a way to protect wildlife...We need the Second Amendment for our own protection and for our constitutional rights...An armed population is not compatible with the police state that President Bush and the Republicans created and that President Obama and the Democrats have ratified.

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par Federico Fuentes - 2 décembre 2009

Venezuela lance l'appelle pour tenir le 5ieme internationale, pour la construction "d'un socailisme du 21 siecle".

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Alison Weir
7 February 2010

Currently, the New York Times has only one bureau to cover Israel-Palestine. This is in Israel and its chief editor, Ethan Bronner, consistently shows Israeli bias, as I’ve noted in a number of previous postings (even apart from the fact that his son has recently entered the Israeli military). The Times‘ other major correspondent, Isabel Kershner, is an Israeli citizen.

New York Times Editor Bill Keller, in defending his decision to retain Bronner as their bureau chief despite Bronner’s conflict of interest and profoundly flawed track record, writes that he feels Bronner’s intimate family ties with Israel “supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries.”

[Read the report]

By Radha D'Souza The devil’s advocate? It was a bizarre spectacle, Karan Thapar interviewing Dr. Binayak Sen on CNN-IBN on Maoist violence in India. The subject of Maoist violence, more than any other at present, agitates the powers that be, including the media. The choreography of the debate follows a similar pattern. Invite a respectable person(s) for a “debate” on the issue of violence, lure them into believing they are invited because the media wants to present a contrary point of view; once there, corner the person, prevent them from making their point of view, heckle them if necessary, and somehow wring a statement, even if by slip of tongue, that can be bandied about as endorsement for the military offensive against the Maoists, as a moral justification for the so called “war on terror”. This desperation for moral endorsement from respected citizens like Dr. Sen, is itself evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the powers that be.

The feminist perspective to family is very different from the original male stream sociological discourse on family which considered it as a group of individuals related to one another by blood ties, marriage or adoption, who form an economic unit, the adult members of which are responsible for the upbringing of children [1]. Juliet Mitchel provides the radical feminist understanding of the family.

This page is a mirror of the January 2010 update of the Gurgaon Workers News blog. Contents: 1) Proletarian Experiences - Daily life stories and reports from a workers’ perspective *** Garment Export Workers’ Reports and Escapist Hopes of the Export Regime - These reports were told by workers during the distribution of Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar in autumn 2009. Most [...]

This study, from Nagarik Mancha and NESPON, outlines the causes behind the closure of tea gardens in North Bengal, the demand of workers from the ground, the extent of implementation of schemes like NREGA and the role of NGO's, and the functioning of Operative Management Committees (OMC) which are often glorified as outstanding workers' initiatives.

Organised by PERSPECTIVES COMMUNITIES, COMMONS AND CORPORATIONS The Struggle for Rights and Resources Date : 24th and 25th February, 2010 Venue : Room No. 22, Faculty of Arts North Campus, University of Delhi PROGRAMME SCHEDULE Wednesday, 24th February - 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm Arundhati Roy, Activist and Writer Usha Ramanathan, Law Researcher and Lecturer in Law, Indian Law Institute Felix Padel, Anthropologist working [...]

By Pratap Chatterjee
Could Pakistan 2010 go the way of Cambodia 1969? It would be a sad day if the drone strikes, along with the endless war that the Obama administration has inherited and that is now spilling over ever more devastatingly into Pakistan, were to create a new class of fundamentalists who actually had the capacity to seize power

By Stephen Lendman
Justice is again denied, Siddiqui another victim, a human tragedy, portrayed by the dominant media as a jihadist, and getting public sentiment to agree because disturbing truths are carefully suppressed

By Yvonne Ridley
Many of us are still in a state of shock over the guilty verdict returned on Dr Aafia Siddiqui. The response from the people of Pakistan was predictable and overwhelming and I salute their spontaneous actions. From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their thousands demanding the return of Aafia

By Ashley Smith
The U.S. intervention in Haiti shows that the US wants to reverse its setbacks of the last decade, reassert its geopolitical dominance and re-impose its economic program--the plan of death--throughout the region

By Jeff Gates
The Christmas Day terrorist is the latest in a series of staged incidents meant to make The Clash of Civilizations appear plausible and the war on terrorism rational. The storyline does not hold together. Not even a little bit. As usual, the source of this media-fueled fear campaign traces directly to Tel Aviv-with a supporting role by the FBI

By Mary Shaw
In Sarah Palins keynote address at a tea party convention in Nashville she said that the would-be Christmas airline bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, stopped talking after he was read his Miranda rights. The right wing likes to use that talking point to further their belief that terrorism suspects deserve no rights

By Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association
Shahzad Ahmed the most recent prize catch of the Delhi Police is being charged with the murder of Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma during the Batla house encounter

Once the Gaza Freedom March arrived in Cairo I repeatedly heard justification that organizers did not want to put Egyptian protesters at risk. Yet, Egyptians regularly protest in Egypt despite the risks. For a group of outsiders to justify the exclusion of our involvement without asking our opinion -- in spite of the good intentions of "protecting" us -- felt paternalistic and demeaning. Philip Rizk comments for The Electronic Intifada.

from london noborders, 7 February 2010: "Under instruction from the town authorities, the elite French CRS riot police today forcibly evicted the new Calais migrant centre - called Kronstadt Hangar - by smashing down the front doors, less than 24 hours after migrants and No Borders activists pushed through police lines to occupy the building, which has been legally rented by No Borders and SoS Soutien aux Sans Papiers..." more