London — Morning breakfast news on the BBC’s Radio Four on Friday was a delightful affair filled with discussions on Russia (when do we not talk about that busy, stirring Bear these days?), Donald Trump, dossiers and the intelligence fraternity. Did it even matter that various sources have been unverified, subject matter lumped together in cumbersome conversations on fake news, sexual frolics and the like?
Discussants on the Beeb who kept listeners company over coffee included former, recently confessed spook Frederick Forsyth, for years the go-to creator of the spy narrative, and the official intelligence historian Sir Christopher Andrew.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg is a meticulously documented investigation of the historical roots of class inequality in the US. Despite the warm and fuzzy founding myths all American children are taught in school, the foundation for class inequality was laid during the earliest colonization of North America. The wealthy English elite who financed the colonies viewed the New World as a giant workhouse for England’s surplus poor (following the Enclosure Acts that drove them off the commons). British …
We are being assaulted by mass media “news” of alleged hacks by alleged actors, allegations of politicians compromised by financial dealings, and sexual hijinks.
First, governments and media do not belong in the bedrooms of the people.
Second, outside of religion and corporate/state media (let’s rubbish the misnomer of “mainstream” for what is predominately a “propagandic stream”), credible evidence is indispensable.
Imagine if justice were administered mainly on hearsay (ignoring the fact that justice is too often lacking in society). It is a cardinal rule of justice that rendering a decision of guilty must only be done when such guilt is beyond …
There is no doubt that US President Barak Obama is a war criminal as are his military and intelligence officials and most of the House and Senate.
Obama is the first president to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime. During 2016 alone the US dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
What does the administration have to show for eight years of illegal military interventions in …
Canadian capitalism is in crisis, with household debt reaching a record high 166.9 per cent of disposable income and about 208 per cent of GDP, and wage stagnation is a primary cause.
Richard Vague told the Globe and Mail “any country whose private-debt-to-GDP ratio goes beyond 150 per cent and that has a five-year growth rate of 18 per cent or greater in that ratio experiences a financial crisis at some point.” The Globe says Canada has already passed both benchmarks in its ongoing borrowing binge.
The headlines get grimmer every week and the causes, outlined by the business press, are surely …
In the early 1900s when the idea that industrialisation could potentially result in global warming was first posited, the consensus was that it was unlikely, and in any case, an increase in temperature was to be welcomed. What possible harm could it do?
Well, we are now witnessing the widespread consequences of climate change. Destructive, life-threatening effects, which demand a fundamental shift in the way we are living if we are to preserve the integrity of the planet, and protect the rich abundance of life on Earth.
Warmer year on year
The industrial revolution, beginning in Britain in the late 17th century, then …
When it comes to healthcare Donald Trump has a two-part plan, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. As with other proposals by the president elect, specifics remain scarce. Upon meeting President Obama and later Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor regarded as the architect of The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Donald Trump came to the same realization most Americans do when the law is broken down, he actually liked it.
Reduced to individual components, president Obama’s signature legislation is extremely favorable. Most, if not all, individuals agree health insurers ought not deny coverage based on preexisting conditions or a costly …
In the last full week of Barack Obama’s eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation’s prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen. Many activists for Puerto Rican independence, Native American and African American rights, and other causes were targeted by the political police’s illegal COINTELPRO program and convicted in sham trials. Now elderly, some in poor health, they may effectively be facing death sentences unless Obama decides within the …
It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust unthinkable.
— Zygmunt Bauman
Modernity, as the late Zygmunt Bauman noted in his magisterially provocative Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) has not necessarily entailed enlightenment, the liberation from immaturity. Since the cave dweller existence, humanity has retained traditional forms of savagery. What mattered was the sheer lethality of it all, driven by a sociopathic rationality: mass murder became industrialised; population control became ever more ruthless.
The zealous could be, essentially, more efficient, thereby doing, as Adolf Eichmann did, a sterling job for his employers in the Nazi death machine. Hitler may have …
Yes, that is what the ideological one-noters among Republicans want to do, so let them do it! Of course it’s not that simple, as even two-note Republicans have begun to acknowledge wanly, since flat-out repeal could make enemies for the party, maybe twenty million of the suddenly uninsured. That’s almost ten times the number of votes Hillary won by. Bring it on.
Long before December 28, when Secretary of State, John Kerry took the podium at the Dean Acheson Auditorium in Washington DC to pontificate on the uncertain future of the two-state solution and the need to save Israel from itself, the subject of a Palestinian state has been paramount.
In fact, unlike common belief, the push to establish a Palestinian and a Jewish state side-by-side goes back years before the passing of United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947. That infamous resolution had called for the partitioning of Palestine into three entities: a Jewish state, a Palestinian state and an international …
Health of Spokane's Treasure is Indicator of our Communities' Values
by Paul Haeder / January 11th, 2017
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
– Novelist Norman Maclean
Many if not most of the people charged with protecting our river and/or discharging into our river have never been on it. Not a slam against them, just a notable that any connection beyond professional duties is missing. This in and of itself represents the profound disconnection that we have as we work on the river.
– Spokane, WA Riverkeeper, Jerry White, Jr.
Those Falls Once Hosted Salmon as Big As Wolves
The city is known for its falls, known for the Riverfront Park amenities, known for 14,000 acres …
The recent hysteria surrounding Russia’s alleged interference with the November presidential elections saw another episode after an intelligence report, jointly elaborated by the CIA, FBI and NSA, was released on Friday, January 6th.
After weeks of bombshell headlines based on statements from anonymous intelligence officials, western media finally had an official intelligence report to support their bombshell headlines. Unsurprisingly, all headlines look very similar, with the Guardian even changing the title of their main story after realising it was not menacing enough.
The problem is that, much like the old stories, the new ones do not …
Barbed wire along the perimeter and water tanks with Hebrew markings clearly visible to those living either side of the WALL show some of the brutal signs of occupation in Palestine. An Israeli watchtower with soldiers looking directly into the Gaza enclave bristles with guns, while antennas stand ready to demarcate the relationship between the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous are possessed of a religious fervour dating back millennia to Abraham, who instilled in his followers a disregard for collateral damage because they and they alone, were advised that ethnic cleansing was the way to achieve their ends… feint …
As Donald Trump prepares to become U.S. president on January 20, the future of NAFTA is in doubt. He has promised to either renegotiate or withdraw from the trade agreement. Despite the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, there are still many different existing North American integration mechanisms that remain in place. Over the last year, the globalists have quietly laid the foundation to ensure their continental agenda continues. They are positioning themselves so they can try to better influence the new Trump administration in advancing deeper economic, political and security integration in North America.
London —It has the air of being a well minted yet distinctly first world problem: inconvenienced commuters in one of the world’s first true megalopolises, gnashing their teeth as they are pushed and grounded together during the rush hour. All because of a strike by station workers on the London Underground, which supplies the arterial blood for commuter traffic in the city on a daily basis.
The strike, instigated by the Rail Maritime and Transport union and Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, had been calculated to cause maximum inconvenience. Their grounds remain traditional: a persistent dislike for the closing of ticket offices, …
Another lonely man dies of exposure while the world around him shops
by Paul Haeder / January 8th, 2017
Amazing how crass this culture is. I know, the whole slavery DNA and before, expropriation of not just the land and culture, but the body whole of Original Peoples, and all the massacres, the lynchings, the endless firing squads against strikers, workers, the murders by the law, and worse, structural homicide of this land, granted, all pretty disgusting. With these yahoos in office (Obama-to-Trump), who have always been in office, pink donkey or yellow elephant, it’s 24/7 “we beat ’em fair and square, so why not take it all, these effing reservations, all those goddamned countries in the world, stopping …
Al Jazeera is to be congratulated on an undercover investigation exposing something most of us could probably have guessed: that some Israeli embassy staff in the UK – let’s not pussy around, Mossad agents – are working with senior political activists and politicians in the Conservative and Labour parties to subvert their own parties from within, and skew British foreign policy so that it benefits Israeli, rather than British, interests.
One cannot really blame Israel for doing this. Most states promote their interests as best they can. But one can and should expose and shame the British politicians who are …
Imperialist demagogues, as well as religious fanatics, are known to live in their grotesque realities. They erect huge sand castles, invent mascots, and bombard the public relentlessly with self-promoting messages.
Those who refuse to listen and believe, those who dare to doubt and resist, are sidelined, starved to death, humiliated or simply liquidated.
Western religions and European/North American brutal colonialist practices are intertwined culturally. Hand in hand, for centuries, they have been destroying our Planet, from corner to corner, on all continents and even on the high seas.
All conquests, all genocides, all plunders have been eternally rationalized, painstakingly justified. Grand bogus concepts …
*****Ryan Dawson: This is Ryan Dawson of the ANC Report. With me today is Doug Valentine. I’m going to be asking him tonight about the CIA’s role in Ukraine and in infiltrating the media. Mr. Valentine, …
It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia.
The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the restoration of the USSR.
(The latter claim rests largely on Vladimir Putin’s comment that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a “catastrophe” and “tragedy” — which in many respects it was. The press …
The US Intelligence Community has accused Russia and Vladimir Putin personally of meddling in last year’s US presidential election, through hacking and propaganda. Craig Murray, a former UK diplomat and whistleblower joins RT to discuss this issue.
On April 4th, 1968, a single bullet forever silenced the man J. Edgar Hoover called “the most dangerous Negro in America”. A patsy named James Earl Ray would die in prison for the dirty deed, only to be exonerated after his death. Martin Luther King’s family, disbelieving the official U.S. Government song and dance, hired a friend and attorney named Bill Pepper to investigate and confirm their doubts. More than two decades of research and questioning, begun in 1977, culminated in a 1999 verdict from a Memphis jury. After listening to 70 witnesses testify under oath, the jury deliberated less than an …
Part 2 -- The Absolutely Essential Distinction: Wars of Aggression are not Equivalent to Wars of Self-defense
by Kim Petersen / January 7th, 2017
In part 1 it was stated that war is abhorrent. Most people undoubtedly would agree. However, an essential distinction must be made between/among the warring sides. Clearly, without the initiation of the violence, there would be no call for a violent self-defense. This is axiomatic and should be readily understandable to any mentally endowed person. That being the case, clearly blame, censure, and punishment should lie preponderantly with the initiator of the violence. If not for the violence of the initiator there would have been no requirement …
The global growth and survival of ISIS, in the face of opposition by governments, armies, intelligence agencies and police forces from nearly a hundred countries, requires analysis. We understand ‘ISIS’ as the organized, militant, violent Salafist movement sometimes funded by the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
The Opposition
Those generally opposed to ISIS, in many cases, have pursued a dual and contradictory approach. For example, the United States has, at different times and places, opposed or supported ‘ISIS’.
For example, Washington supported ISIS against the pro-Soviet regime in …
For many weeks we have witnessed the extraordinary attack by the CIA and its assets in Congress and the media on Donald Trump’s election. In an unprecedented effort to delegitimize Trump’s election as the product of Russian interference in the election, the CIA, media, senators and representatives have consistently made wild accusations for which they have no evidence. The CIA’s message to Trump is clear: Get in line with our agenda, or we are going to mess you over.
It is clear that the CIA is warring against Trump. But the CIA’s media assets have turned the facts on their head …
Critics of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or Obamacare) have openly advocated the full repeal of the legislation since its implementation some years ago. It is no secret that Trump has advocated for a full repeal as well. Given his tendency to renege on his word, however, it remains uncertain whether the president-elect will, in fact, replace the PPACA quite as he has promised. Nonetheless, Trump has vowed time and again to realize several changes that portend sweeping and awful effects for the American public.
Specifically, under Trump’s health policy reform plan entitled “Healthcare Reform to Make America …
When I began reading the work of Douglas Valentine about six years ago, I had not read his books, only the articles that the US online journal Counterpunch had published. In fact, I only began reading Counterpunch because of the accident of having been introduced to the two original editors of what was then only a printed newsletter. Later I was even able to publish a few pieces in that journal before its more famous founding editor’s demise. Why do I preface a book review with such personal observations? To that question I will return later.
In an unprecedented move, a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has agreed to investigate a complaint that the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has funded human rights abuses in Cameroon, beginning a process which until now has only been used for multinational businesses.
London — Populism has a much needed place in political arrangements, the necessary, disruptive gust that keeps the complacent from losing touch. For one, it often threatens to destroy those arrangements altogether, or at the very least provide a blustery challenge.
This, however, comes with its costs, notably in the modern State. For one, it promises a mixture of bloodletting and indifference to the technocrats and advisors who claim various skills and expertise. Killing the priest class, the monopolists on expertise and ritual, leads to blood, confusion, and the need for a good deal of re-ordering.
