Digests/Specials
Martin Parker writes: We live in an age of conspiracies about a world shaped by shadowy plots, secret organisations and deals behind closed doors. Since at least the mid-1960s, the Bilderberg meetings have been seen by commentators on the right and left as one of the places where the New World Order does its business….
Read More about Spotlight: The secretive Bilderberg meeting of global elites
INDIA
Jayati Ghosh writes: Fascism in the 21st century does have some new features, which are also common to at least some of the countries that are currently experiencing it. They are largely related to the possibilities generated by new technologies, especially communication and surveillance technologies, which are increasingly being used by governments with fascist inclinations….
Read More about Techno-fascism in the 21st century
Economy
Nityanand Jayaraman writes: A new report warns that India’s plans to import 12 nuclear reactors from ailing American equipment suppliers is financially fraught and irrelevant for India’s electricity needs. If built, the reactors will cost anywhere between Rs 6.3 lakh crore and Rs 11 lakh crore, thereby translating to unaffordable and obscenely high electricity tariffs….
Read More about Why is India importing US nuclear reactors that even the US doesn’t want?
Bookshelf
My hypothesis—let’s call it the Technospheratu hypothesis—is that the technosphere, having risen up on top of and in opposition to Gaia and the biosphere, possesses a certain primitive emergent intelligence that allows it to grow in complexity and power and to dominate the biosphere to an ever-greater extent. Unlike Gaia, it is a parasite upon the biosphere….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitry Orlov
Ratan Tata at the Bangalore Aero Show, 2013. The Tata Group is a major player in both mining and defence manufacturing.
Development/Growth
Rahul Varman writes: Bauxite or iron mines are opened up by grabbing people’s lands and homes against great resistance, and UAVs and other increasingly sophisticated weapons are used to quell this resistance. The corporate sector benefits both from the mining, as well as the demand for weapons, demand which is independent of the vagaries of the market system….
Read More about India’s rising Corporate-Military Complex: A critical appraisalConflict/Dispossession
Colin Todhunter writes: There is a notion that we can just continue as we are, with an endless supply of oil, endless supplies of meat and endless assault on soil, human and environmental well-being that intensive petrochemical agriculture entails. Given the statistics, this is unsustainable, unrealistic and a recipe for continued resource-driven conflicts and devastation….
Read More about Arms, Agribusiness, Finance and Fossil Fuels: The Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse
Protesters near the Kudankulam nuclear plant
Reuters
Digests/Specials
India drastically lowers nuclear energy target Deccan Herald With little progress on ground since the 2008 Indo-US nuclear agreement, the government has drastically cut the nuclear energy target from 63,000 Mwe by 2032 to just about 14,500 Mwe by 2024. Quiet Burial For India-US Nuclear Deal? Amit Bhandari, Gateway House Solar power developers have offered…
Read More about Special: Nuclear power wanes as solar rises worldwide
