{"article":{"id":260665,"heading":"Snowden and the three wise NSA whistleblowers","author":"Peter Lee","created":"2013-06-22 15:29:51","modified":"2013-06-22 19:28:44","last_modified":"Sun, 23 Jun 2013 03:28:44","article":"

And looking at these three men gives an idea of the interests, principles and powers that are being contested beneath the superficially simple tale of a young analyst who fled to Hong Kong to tell the world about runaway US government surveillance.

to read the two-part article by Peter Lee published on Asia Times Online June 21, 2013, click on

http:\/\/www.atimes.com\/atimes\/China\/CHIN-01-210613.html<\/a><\/p>\n","contact":"marc1seed@yahoo.com","link":"http:\/\/www.freembtranslations.net","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"Whistleblowing is a risky business. I expect that, as they planned their course of action over the four months, Edward Snowden and his main media minder, Glenn Greenwald, paid very close attention to what happened to three past whistleblowers who crossed the NSA.","numcomment":1,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2013\/06\/260665.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":260669,"heading":"The Tao of Containing China","article":"to read Pepe Escobar's article published June 20, 2013 on www.tomdispatch.org, click on\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/blog\/175715\/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar,_the_tao_of_containing_china\/\r\n\r\nYes, the predictions are in. By 2016 (or 2030?), China will have economically outpaced the U.S. So say the economic soothsayers. And behind them lie all those, in the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington, who secretly fear that, if nothing is done to contain it, China will within decades be dominant in the Pacific, the overlord of Asia, and perhaps later in the century the -- to steal a phrase -- \u201csole superpower\u201d of planet Earth.\r\n\r\nThe first signs of things to come, it\u2019s believed, are already there, including the way China has been building up its military and has started nudging its neighbors about a set of largely uninhabited islands in energy-rich areas of the Pacific, not to speak of recent more informal claims to a large, heavily inhabited, very militarized island in the region -- Okinawa. Like the previous global superpower, China, it is believed, has designs on turning the Pacific into its own \u201clake\u201d and possibly even setting up military and other bases (\u201ca string of pearls\u201d) through the Indian Ocean all the way to Africa.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s a great story, but hold your horses! As that peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular Pepe Escobar indicates in today\u2019s vivid plunge into China\u2019s roiled waters, that country faces potentially staggering problems. After all, contradictions -- to use a classic Marxist word -- abound: a Communist Party leading a capitalist revolution with its own stability as a ruling elite dependent, above all, upon ever greater economic growth. And yet this isn\u2019t the nineteenth century. China is on an imperiled planet. Every economic move it makes has potentially long-term negative consequences. For all we know, there may be no twenty-second-century superpower on planet Earth and if there is, don\u2019t necessarily count on China.\r\n\r\nAs Escobar explains, to spur the staggering levels of growth that keep the country and the Party afloat, the Chinese leadership is embarking on a kind of forced urbanization program that may have no historical precedent. It is guaranteed to destabilize the countryside, while yet more peasants flood into the cities. It\u2019s seldom acknowledged here (though the Chinese leadership is well aware of it) but China has a unique, almost two-thousand-year-long record of massive peasant uprisings (often religiously tinged) sweeping out of the countryside and upsetting established rule. The last of them was Mao Zedong\u2019s peasant revolution that established the present People\u2019s Republic.\r\n\r\nMass protest in China has been on the rise. Environmental conditions are disastrous. Let the Chinese economy falter and who knows what you\u2019ll see. This is not a formula for an expansive imperial power, no less the next master of planet Earth, whatever Washington\u2019s fears and militarized fantasies may be. Tom","author":"Pepe Escobar","parent_id":260665,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2013-06-22 19:28:44","modified":"2013-11-11 01:12:03","fileurl":""}]}