Review of Peter Phillips' book Giants: The Global Power Elite
by Robert Hunziker / September 14th, 2018
According to a brand new book by Peter Phillips, the world is now controlled by a handful (actually several handfuls) of powerful/rich elites via interlocking capital exchanges spanning the globe.
This ultra small coterie dictates world events and expects results. However, they are painfully aware that forces from down below are growling, growing restless, very restless indeed!
Thus, Phillips’ riveting story of world domination by elites, a thoroughly researched analysis from A-to-Z, Giants: The Global Power Elite, Seven Stories Press, 2018.
Phillips forewarns on behalf of ninety-nine percenters (99%):
Twenty-five years on, analysts say Oslo didn’t fail: it offered Israel a formula to block the emergence of a Palestinian state
by Jonathan Cook / September 14th, 2018
There will be no anniversary celebrations this week to mark the signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington 25 years ago. It is a silver jubilee for which there will be no street parties, no commemorative mugs, no specially minted coins.
Palestinians have all but ignored the landmark anniversary, while Israel’s commemoration has amounted to little more than a handful of doleful articles in the Israeli press about what went wrong.
The most significant event has been a documentary, The Oslo Diaries, aired on Israeli TV and scheduled for broadcast in the US this week. It charts the events surrounding the creation …
Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps – or at least, it is in the official narrative we are being fed by our corporate media. The warring camps are presented as “moderate centrists”, on one side, and the “extreme right”, on the other. The question is framed as a choice about where one stands in relation to this fundamental political divide. But what if none of this is true? What if this isn’t a feud between two opposed ideological camps but rather two differing – and irrational – reactions to the breakdown of late-stage capitalism as an …
A photo of Hurricane Florence taken from the International Space Station. ESA/NASA
NEW 9-11 TERRORIST ATTACK!! Yes, it’s true! The other day (11 September 2018), terrorists based in Washington D.C., and sponsored by the dinosaur bones mining, pumping and burning industries, have relaxed rules restricting methane emissions from mines and oil and gas wells (for privatized profits at socialized costs), which will result in enhanced hydrocarbon atmospheric pollution that will accelerate Global Warming.
AND JUST IN TIME! Because Hurricane Florence, currently …
Yossi Beilin is back. This unrepentant Israeli ‘peacemaker’ is like the mythical phoenix, constantly resurrecting from its own ashes. In a recent article in Al-Monitor, Beilin wrote in support of the idea of a confederation between Israel and Palestine.
A confederation “could prevent the need to evacuate settlers and allow those interested to live in Palestine as Israeli citizens, just as a similar number of Palestinian citizens could live in Israel,” he wrote.
Bizarrely, Beilin is promoting a version of an idea that was promoted by Israel’s extremist Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.
The difference between Beilin and Lieberman is in how …
The Trump administration’s national security advisor John Bolton has never been a fan of international law, a concept he has found, at best, rubbery. Any institution supposedly guided by its spirit was bound to draw the ire of both his temper and temperament. Before members of the Federalist Society on Monday, Bolton took to the pulpit with a fury reserved for the unreflective patriot certain that his country, right or wrong, was above such matters. “The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.”
Last week, Peter Brookes tweeted his latest cartoon for The Times, commenting:
#Novichok not the only poison being spread around Britain. #LabourAntisemitism #Corbyn.
Referencing allegations that two Russian agents had been responsible for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on March 4, the cartoon depicted a British policeman holding up mugshots of a menacing, bug-eyed ‘Jeremy Korbynski’ (wearing an ‘I Love Hamas’ badge) and a vampiric, evil-looking ‘Seumasov Milne’ (wearing a ‘Down With Israel’ badge), with the policeman saying:
THESE TWO MEN ARE SUSPECTED OF SPREADING POISON AROUND BRITAIN…
For years now NSA and the Pentagon have feared foreign terrorists poisoning aquifers and municipal water supplies.
Come to find out, forget those foreign terrorists! The poisoning is already happening, internally, homespun! ISIS and al Qaeda are not needed. We’re poisoning our own people without the assistance of professional terrorists.
It’s homespun terrorism, right here in the good ole US-of-A, and the Trump administration is turbo-charging that terrorism by hacking apart the EPA.
Want proof: Ask any long-standing EPA employee about it: They’re aghast!
Trump’s motto: “Make EPA Ineffective Again.”
The Trump administration, after heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, is scaling back the way …
Last weekend I was on Iranian TV being asked about the meeting in Tehran at which the presidents of Iran and Russia had refused to agree with the President of Turkey to stop bombing people in Syria. I said Iran and Russia were wrong.
I also said that nobody involved, least of all the United States, was right.
Not only would the United States and the world be infinitely better off if in response to 9/11 the U.S. government had done nothing at all, as Jon …
and all the news fit for which to wrap up cadavers tells us to keep shopping on our Prime Amazon account until we drop!!
by Paul Haeder / September 12th, 2018
Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello
It’s more than disconcerting to hear the blathering now, September 2018, about Jeff Bezos. About Amazon dot com as richest company ever. To hear the fawning love of the rich guy, now, when we …
“Commune or Nothing – Free Men and Free Land,” mural in El Maizal. (Photo: Ricardo Vaz) In this article we examine the productive activities of El Maizal Commune, based on our visit in May. We also look at the relation between the commune and state companies, and explore the contradictions that emerge as the communal project moves forward.
*****
El Maizal Commune spreads over the states of Lara and Portuguesa, grouping 22 communal councils (10 in Portuguesa, 12 in Lara) and some 9000 people. Beyond its …
Indonesia (RI), the 4th most populous nation on Earth and the country with the largest Muslim population is, and since the 1965 US-orchestrated anti-Communist coup has been, the most radically pro-Western and anti-socialist place in Asia.
This is where you could end up in prison for publicly declaring that you are a Communist, or just an atheist. And this is where Western pop music, junk food and brutally meaningless Hollywood blockbusters are rubbing shoulders with the Saudi-style interpretation of Islam; with Wahhabism, that has been spread with the direct involvement of the US, UK and other Western countries.
Ethiopia is a landlocked country, bordering on Somalia which is dominating the Horn of Africa. Due to several border conflicts during the past decades with Somalia, many of them supportive of Ethiopia by the US military, the border between the two countries has become porous and ill-defined. Ethiopia is also bordering on Djibouti, where the United States has a Naval Base, Camp Lemonnier, next to Djibouti’s international airport. The base is under AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s African Command. AFRICOM has its boots in Ethiopia, as it does in many other African countries.
Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, has already demonstrated that …
It is being touted as part of a peace plan, but Jonathan Cook finds only a wasteland in the West Bank
by Jonathan Cook / September 11th, 2018
From the offputting concrete edifice that confronts a visitor to Abu Dis, the significance of this West Bank town – past and present – is not immediately obvious.
The eight metre-high grey slabs of Israel’s separation wall silently attest to a divided land and a quarter-century of a failed Middle East peace process.
The entrance to Abu Dis could not be more disconcerting, given reports that Donald Trump’s administration intends it to be the capital of a future Palestinian state, in place of Jerusalem.
The wall, and the security cameras lining the top of it, are the legacy of battles for control of …
A Review of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth
by Edward Curtin / September 10th, 2018
If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject.
For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were …
On Thursday lawyer Dimitri Lascaris called on two Liberal MPs to denounce death threats made by B’nai B’rith supporters against a number of other Liberal MPs and the Prime Minister. But instead of condemning those who called for racialized politicians to face the “guillotine” or “stoning”, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and Canadian politicians smeared the individual drawing attention to the death threats.
And on the weekend NDP leaders participated in this unprecedented multi-party smear campaign against one of Canada’s most effective advocates for Palestinian rights. At the behest of CIJA, MP Hélène Laverdière called Lascaris “anti-Semitic” …
This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it…
— John Mitchell (1969) Spoken to New York Times reporter and mentioned in his obit (1988)
Manliness and mastery required regeneration through violence, and by the 1890s, { Theodore} Roosevelt was spoiling for a fight: “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” he wrote. Any opponent would do, but “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages”.
— Jackson Lears, How the US Began Its Empire, NYRB 2018
There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy …
It’s no secret that the federal government needs more revenue going forward. Congress could put the Treasury on autopilot to raise billions (and ultimately tens of billions) year after year. Guided by fairness, it could enact spend-down rules for non-retirement accounts that mirror those for retirement accounts: at age 70 ½, require minimum distributions and tax all gains at ordinary income rates.
Let’s look first at the tax policy drawn up by lawmakers to govern the original individual retirement accounts (IRAs) in 1974. Then let’s see how the same policy points to duplicate rules for regular, non-retirement holdings.
The next blow in Boris Johnson’s chapter of political suicide has been made: a piece in the Mail on Sunday which supplied him ample room to take yet another shot at the ghostly British prime minister, Theresa May. There was nothing new in it; everybody knew what Johnson’s views were, and the position he had taken since hyperventilating over July’s Chequers statement on Brexit was simply reiterated with the usual reckless prose.
May’s Brexit deal, scribbled Johnson with an almost boorish predictability, was tantamount to wrapping “a suicide vest around the British constitution” and handing “the detonator to (EU chief …
Anarchism is the engine of post-modernism and post-modernism is the spirit of anarchism in the sense that both are the zenith and apex of radical social change, radical plurality, radical equality, and pragmatic-egalitarianism in its purest form. According to Errico Malatesta, anarchism “in common with socialism, has as its basis [and] point of departure…equality” ((Errico Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, ed. Davided Turcato, (Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2014) p. 3.)), just as post-modernism “is a social universe…formed by…plurality…[whereupon] all things [are in essence] equal”. ((Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, Trans. Wlad Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 10th, 2018
#WeRiseForClimate protest in San Francisco, September 8, 2018 from 350.org flickr
The Global #RiseForClimate actions are just one example of many that the climate justice movement is building the power needed to transform the economy and put in place policies to confront climate change. The ingredients exist for the climate justice movement to rapidly succeed. A challenge is not knowing how much time we have. Scientists have been conservative in their estimates, and feedback loops could rapidly increase the impacts of climate change.
The costs of …
The Trump presidency has proven to be a set of publicity-driven punctuations and blows, riddled by distractions contrived and accidental. Controversy and accusation characterise the next revelation, the next announcement that might throw journalists off the scent, confounded enemies off the trail. The presidency as spectacle, the White House as erratic film studio, is the means by which this particular president survives. Assaults and accusations are missiles seeking to find their mark, missing at the last moment, and the publicity vultures do the rest. Distraction is everything.
The latest of such distractions comes in the form of the anonymously authored …
On September 7, 2018, speaking at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, President Obama said that Democrats are running on “good new ideas like Medicare for All…”
This indicates a significant shift in support of National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA). President Obama is campaigning for Democrats in the mid-terms and his public support for NIMA right at the start shows how far we have come and that we have a real opportunity to win in the next few years.
Eight years ago when President Obama was pushing through the …
I had known John for 40 years on and off; just over a year ago he died. He was 62 and homeless, an alcoholic who over the course of four years or so had drunk himself to death. He died alone in a tiny basement room of a dreary hostel in London, where the local authority had placed him. A cocktail of alcohol and anti-depressants took him through the gates of death. It was a tragic, ugly end to a life that had once held such promise.
Along with millions of others around the world, John drank to escape the pain …
Unions are a force for good in the world. Too bad not all of them are a force for good everywhere in the world.
Canadian unions are largely indifferent to international affairs. And when they engage it’s rarely to challenge Ottawa’s foreign policy.
Over the Labour Day weekend the Ontario Federation of Labour and some affiliates published a 14-page supplement in the Toronto Star highlighting the union movement’s progressive face. It discussed Indigenous and LGTBQ rights as well as racism and domestic violence and the fight for a $15 minimum wage, improved work standards and pharmacare. The stories and ads in the …
Legal advice and common sense jettisoned as UK Labour Party leaders surrender to Zionist diktat
by Stuart Littlewood / September 7th, 2018
Jeremy Corbyn, knifed by his senior lieutenants and failed by his media team, is on the danger list and now looks isolated.
At the fatal NEC (National Executive Committee) meeting this week to discuss whether the party should adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, with all its examples, he prepared and presented a 500-word statement to water down the definition but this met with an angry reaction from most NEC members and he dropped it.
According to the Guardian the most controversial passage in Corbyn’s draft statement said:
It cannot be considered racist to treat Israel like any other state …
I know who wrote the anonymous “senior Trump official” op-ed in the New York Times. The New York Times wrote it.
The op-ed is an obvious forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that no senior official would express disagreement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it undermines the character of the writer. A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position to lend weight to his dissent.
The New York Times’ claim to have vetted the writer also lacks credibility, as …
Well, the harsh truth about the integrity and fortitude of billionaires is finally out in the open for all to see, and the results are repugnant: Billionaires are gutless, chicken-hearted cowards. The proof is found in the pudding as several Silicon Valley billionaires purchase massive underground bunkers built in Murchison, Texas shipped to New Zealand, where the bunkers are buried in secret underground nests.
All of which begs this question: What’s with capitalism/capitalists? As soon as things turn sour, they turn south with tails between their legs and hightail it out of Dodge. However, they feast on and love steady, easy, …
The US political commentator Michael Parenti once observed that:
Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for “objectivity”. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.
Once you understand the truth of that remark, seeing the daily biases and distortions of the corporate media becomes obvious. Thus, there is plenty of space on the BBC News website, and plenty of time on the BBC’s airwaves, to discuss the Venezuela migrant crisis, hyper-inflation and food shortages. Rob Young, a BBC News business correspondent, wrote:
Venezuela, now in its fourth year of recession, has joined a …
