Excerpt from an analysis of the Obama approach by Naomi Klein : “Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. The problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. This too can be traced to the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional “experiences” – branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands.

Obama launched last year a $787bn fiscal stimulus, which includes tax cuts, expansion of unemployment benefits and increased spending in education, health care, infrastructure and the energy sector; European Greece is condemned to fiscal starvation. If the creditors are not really interested in repayment but are using the debt as a tool to exploit the debtor country and strip it of its assets, the creditors’ bluff needs to be called. Below is a first excerpt from a very important, crucial editorial by Costas Douzinas in the Guardian, which calls for resistance against EU/IMF imposed policies which have already a record of destroying many economies.

Both major parties were obviously inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Twitter didn’t feature in Obama’s campaign but has quickly become Labour’s mode of choice. 8220;We are providing the tools so that people are able to mobilise of their own accord,” one Labour insider told me. Will Straw reports about developments in the UK , and how they challenge the old party structures: “While the digital world that we live in has its downsides, it has provided an exciting new arena for exchange of information between the government and the governed, or between one activist and another.