The pundit class has offered a slew of postmortems in the attempt to extract meaning in the aftermath of the 2012 elections. Missing from the majority of these analyses altogether: the real winner of the 2012 election.  No, not Democratic Party President-elect Barack Obama nor Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but rather what Portland State University Professor of Urban Studies and Planning called the “Global Electioneering” industry in his 2005 book by that namesake.  “Corporate domination, centralization, and professionalization of political space have eliminated almost all but limited symbolic participation of ordinary people” in the electoral politics, Sussman explained in the first chapter of his book. On Nov. 10, The Washington Post reported that tens of millions of dollars were made by private consultants during the 2012 presidential campaign alone, writing:

In the presidential race alone, the two main media firms working for President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney earned profits for handling more than half a billion dollars of campaign advertising, according to disclosures and ad tracking data. Neither company is required to report how much it received in compensation for that work, but their combined cut could easily be $25 million or more at standard industry rates. 

Other big earners were the digital strategy companies, telemarketing firms, air charter services, pollsters and consultants who saw a spike in business in a presidential contest that cost at least $2.6 billion. The surge in spending was a ...

After a meeting on September 4 with international peace activists from School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) and Nicanet, president Daniel Ortega announced that Nicaragua would withdraw its troops from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)—formerly and more widely known as the School of the Americas (SOA). A combat training school located in Fort Benning, Georgia, the WHINSEC is notorious for training Latin American military personnel in techniques of repression, including human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and selective assassination.

Although four countries in South America have already withdrawn troops from WHINSEC—Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Ecuador—Nicaragua is the first Central American country to do so. Since its founding in 1949, the school has graduated approximately 64 thousand alumni, including some of Latin America’s most notorious dictators, generals, and soldiers. Among the latest to be connected with the school is the recently sentenced Pedro Pimentel Rios, a Guatemalan soldier sentenced to 6,060 years for the Dos Erres massacre of 1982, as well as Rito Alejo del Rio, the  Colombian general recently sentenced to 25 years for murder. Graduates of the school have also been connected to the Honduran coup of 2009.

“The SOA is a symbol of death, a symbol of terror,” president Ortega said. “We have been gradually reducing our numbers of troops at the ...

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive.  Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.

That should be a matter of serious immediate concern.  What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event.  It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist -- not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone.  It was not an easy task.  There was no good text available.  As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats” -- a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.

Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters.  It was entitled The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest.  The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the foundation of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples -- or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” Churchill was referring specifically to the reaffirmation of the Charter by Parliament in the Petition of Right, imploring King Charles to recognize that the law is sovereign, not the King.  Charles agreed briefly, but soon violated his pledge, setting the stage for the murderous Civil War.

After a bitter conflict between King and Parliament, the power of royalty in the person of Charles II was restored.  In defeat, Magna Carta was not forgotten.  One of the leaders of Parliament, Henry Vane, was beheaded.  On the scaffold, he tried to read a speech denouncing the ...

Almost six years after the nationalization of gas and oil reserves in Bolivia, foreign companies maintain an active presence in the sector, and the government is now offering them greater incentives to increase oil production.

During the same week that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina announced the expropriation of 51 percent of shares in the oil company YPF, previously held by the Spanish corporation Repsol, the Bolivian government issued a decree that raised incentives for crude oil production from 10 dollars to 40 dollars a barrel.

Supreme Decree 1202 establishes that the Bolivian national treasury will issue tax credit notes in the amount of 30 dollars.

For each barrel (159 liters) of crude they produce, foreign oil companies will continue to receive 10 dollars in cash in addition to a credit note that can be used for tax payments.

In a statement released by the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) on Apr. 19, company president Carlos Villegas stated that the reason for the allocation of this additional incentive was that "operators have not made significant investments to find larger reserves of oil."

Researcher Carlos Arze of the Centre for Research on Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA) explained that the contracts signed between foreign companies and the Bolivian government following the 2006 nationalization did not include clauses obliging the companies to replenish reserves.

On May 1, 2006, leftist President Evo Morales announced the nationalization of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon reserves. In October of that year, new contracts were signed with the oil and gas companies operating in the country – most of which were foreign-owned – and endorsed by the Bolivian Congress.

Six years later, these companies are earning 824 million dollars in ...