The Panama Papers, a one-year investigation by over 100 reporters worldwide (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism) of offshore money hiding/laundering/taxation avoidance, is a cause célèbre of underhandedness seldom, if ever, revealed to the world’s public. It is comparable to lifting a rotting log in the woods and finding an active nest of millipedes, red worms, and cockroaches scampering about to escape the bright sunlight. They can’t stand the sunlight because darkness is their life.
It’s the biggest leak in history, dwarfing the data released by the Wikileaks organization in 2010. For context, if the amount of data released by Wikileaks …
Migration is a major political and social issue throughout Europe; in the UK it is a highly emotive matter, distorted by the rabid right wing media and irresponsible politicians.
The numbers of asylum seekers (people fleeing conflict and persecution of one kind or another) arriving in the UK are small, tiny in fact – in 2014, according to UNHCR, a total of 31,400 people applied for asylum in Britain, compared to Turkey – 87,800, Sweden – 75,100, and Italy – 63,700. At the end of 2014,UNHCR relates, “refugees, pending asylum cases and stateless persons made up just 0.24% of …
Lebanon cannot stand on its feet, anymore. It is overwhelmed, frightened and broke.
It stands on the frontline, facing the ISIS in the east and north, a hostile Israel in the south and the deep blue sea to the west. 1.5 million (mostly Syrian) refugees are dispersed all over its tiny territory. Its economy is collapsing and infrastructure crumbling. The ISIS is right at the border with Syria, literally next door, or even with one foot inside Lebanon, periodically invading, and setting up countless “dormant cells” in all Lebanese cities and all over its countryside. Hezbollah is fighting the ISIS, but …
It is hard to imagine that anything worse could befall Fallujah after the war crimes and criminal assaults by the US military in 2004. At the time, one correspondent wrote:
There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.
Seventy percent of houses and shops were reported destroyed, with those still standing damaged. Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, described a city:
… completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. …
The terror bombings in Paris and Brussels have raised a cacophony of voices, ranging from state officials, Prime Ministers and Presidents, to academics, journalists and media consultants. Tons of ink and print have focused on the psychology, networks and operations of the alleged perpetrators – radicalized young Muslim citizens of the EU.
Few have examined the long-term, large-scale policies of the EU, US, and NATO, which have been associated with the development and growth of the worldwide terror networks. This essay will discuss the historical links between …
The recent revelation resulting from the Panama Papers is nothing new. It just helps to highlight the sheer scale of criminality being perpetrated by those wealthy enough to benefit. What we are witnessing from a tiny island, nestled neatly between North and South America, is a glimpse of a global money laundering fest on a truly oceanic scale.
There are 82 countries listed globally as tax havens or jurisdictions of financial secrecy. Collectively Britain is the number one on the list of offenders, mainly because of its extensive overseas territories such as Jersey, Isle of Man, Gibraltar etc. In reality, though, Britain …
The International Monetary Fund has been at odds with other partners in the Greek bailout saga. Its economists have wondered whether strangling a state with the noose of austerity is a decent way of either eliminating debt, let alone stimulating growth. Not that the body has gone entirely anti-austerity.
The European Commission, and the European Central Bank, have enjoyed taking the high road on trimming the Greek state while seeking debt repayments. Their obsession with credit, and their reduction of states and their citizens to bank balances, has betrayed a mania for debt hood over sovereignty. The point was amply illustrated …
If you think that the worst thing for the country is electing yet another establishment politician to the presidency, what is your best, most principled action? By you I mean the millions of Americans who have supported the candidacy of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. They have enormous potential power.
Skip forward to the general election and imagine that both Sanders and Trump have not made it to the presidential ballot, a very likely scenario. Clearly, both Trump and Sanders supporters strongly oppose the political establishment. The status quo of what amounts to more of a plutocracy than a legitimate …
Last week students at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) disrupted a board meeting after learning administrators planned to sign a $50 million, seven-year, contract with security giant GardaWorld. Protesters are angry the administration has sought to expel student leaders and ramp up security at the politically active campus as they cut programs.
The world’s largest privately held security firm, Garda is open about its need for repressive university, business and political leaders. The Montréal firm’s chief executive, Stephan Cretier, called the 2012 Québec student strike “positive” for business. “Naturally, when there’s unrest somewhere – the Egyptian election or some disruption …
Following Bernie Sanders victory in Wisconsin—his seventh out of the last eight primaries and caucuses—Hillary Clinton remains ahead in the (super) delegate count. Her frontrunner status means the news media and citizen journalists ought to pose more questions to her in the coming months.
This is not easy given that Clinton has held very few press conferences during the campaign—it’s been about 120 days since the last one. She avoids the national press, wrote one reporter, out of “personal preference . . . and as a strategic choice.” Some voters might think she has something to hide, or would prefer …
A thousand Israelis and their supporters gathered in Jerusalem’s International Convention Center on March 28 at a conference aimed at combating the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).
The conference was a display of “fear, paranoia, anger and determination,” as described by Antony Loewenstein, and featured top government officials, members of the oppositions and a strange conglomerate of guests, including celebrity has-beens like Roseanne Barr.
Statements made at the conference were predictably frightening and antagonistic – they amounted to nothing more than a display of the language of blood and vengeance that people have grown accustomed to within the Israeli political …
Cactus Ed is out there somewhere in the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Pima County, Arizona, his tough old carcass still decaying and decomposing inside that tattered blue sleeping bag. Becoming fertilizer for cactus and sagebrush, as per his request. There’s likely not much left by now, other than a calaca covered with wisps of his signature whiskers, still clinging to brittle wrinkled remnants of skin. A bag of bones, defying the laws of the land with an illegal burial, much as Ed advocated throughout his life, which ended prematurely back in 1989. Edward Abbey was 62 when he joined the ranks of the deceased.
The Danish government is doing it – as are others. The Australian government, however, may count itself as one of the first ones to take the concerted step to repel potential asylum seekers who arrive to Australian shores by boat with threatening films. There is nothing sophisticated about the script behind such messages. All insist on repulsion. All, ultimately, insist on the hostile world that awaits those seeking to take to the sea.
The Journey is the most recent instalment in this campaign to use celluloid as a means of dissuasion. Commissioned by the propaganda specialists of the Australian immigration department …
We all feel the seemingly oppressive impact of the conservative force that has taken over the United States, but feel hard-pressed to identify where it started and the specific entities responsible. Most of us suspect that it was no accident. We can be most certain that it isn’t.
Most of us attaining maturity in the 1960s remember with some fondness the progressive wave awash in America after World War Two. Prosperity was with us. The middle class was surging. Consumers were spending. Into the 1960s and 1970s, government action on behalf of citizens, consumers and workers seemed irrepressible.
On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks published classified military footage of a July 2007 attack by a US Army helicopter gunship in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. The video titled Collateral Murder depicted the killing of more than a dozen men, including two Reuters staffers. At the time of release, the WikiLeaks website temporarily crashed with a massive influx of visitors, while versions popped up on YouTube, reaching millions.
The importance of The Collateral Murder video has often been talked about from the perspective that it provided visual evidence of unaccounted US military power and brutality. Now, on the …
A new song by Time. Chris Time Steele made this song called Flint State of Mind in solidarity with the people of Flint and dedicated it to the Flint Democracy Defense League and Water You Fighting For, and all the other groups fighting for justice.
Struan Stevenson, President of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA), is calling for “urgent action to end callous food and medicine blockade” of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
Mr. Stevenson was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014 and was President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq from 2009 to 2014. He outlines starkly the ongoing tragedy of the “City of Mosques”, which was seventy percent destroyed by US troops in 2004 with football pitches being turned into cemeteries such was the human carnage wrought by the “liberators.” The suffering, assaults and siege has never …
“Privacy is a fundamental human right that is being eroded more and more in the modern world. Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar.” Few could disagree with the essence of this statement by Panamanian lawyer Ramon Fonseca, one of the founders of Mossack Fonseca, which has made the news in the last few days.
The Panamanian firm is known for one vital speciality: giving advice to an assortment of mainly powerful clients in areas of tax evasion, or minimisation, depending on the moral, and ethical take on the matter. Evasion tends to …
Colette Pichon Battle gave up a great job working as a corporate immigration lawyer in Washington DC to live in a tent in front of her flooded family home 50 miles from downtown New Orleans. She is now a much honored director of a small but powerful non-profit climate justice human rights firm advocating all along the Gulf Coast. Why the big change in her life? Katrina, climate justice and fish dinners.
Hypocrisy, the most protected of vices.
— Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673.)
On March 18th the twenty-eight European Union leaders reached: “an agreement that has an irreversible momentum”, according to German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
From Monday April 4th, all refugees and economic migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey after March 20th, the majority Syrian and Iraqis fleeing for their lives, risking the perilous sea crossing in which over eight hundred have died, the risk being preferable to the dangers at home, will be returned to Turkey.
In exchange for this disgraceful human-beings-as-chattels deal, Turkey, which already hosts three million fleeing refugees, would see the …
What’s another 200 dead? That appears to be the logic behind the Obama administration’s recent drone strike in Yemen from March 22.
The attack came on the heels of a strike the week before in Somalia that killed upwards of 150. Even by the standards of the Obama administration’s drone war, this is a marked escalation.
When the president was asked about the increased body count from the two strikes, he gave a typically political non-answer. “There has been in the past legitimate criticism that the architecture, the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes or other …
Now that the Syrian armed forces have liberated Palmyra, President al Assad has thanked Vladimir Putin and the Russian people for the substantial support they provided to his country. Side by side, Syria and Russia have been fighting against the ISIS and other terrorist groups operating in the region – mainly the implants from the staunch allies of the West: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
After recent victories in Syria, the myth of invincibility of the terrorism has collapsed, smashed to pieces. It has become clear that if fought honestly and with full determination, even the most fanatical ones can be …
118 years after U.S. troops landed at Guánica, Puerto Rico, the liberal political site the New Republic asks, “Why Are We Colonizing Puerto Rico?” The occasion for this comically tardy acknowledgment of Puerto Rico’s colonial status is a Republican proposal to deal with the island’s $72 billion debt problem by allowing a cabal of unelected technocrats to carry out austerity measures against the will of the Puerto Rican people. Or, as the bill puts it: “To establish an Oversight Board to assist the Government of Puerto Rico … in managing its public finances.”
The Republican plan most certainly would “spell disaster for …
Compliance, Rise of the Punishment Class, Poverty and Foreclosures and Fines Make “them” a lot of money! (Part 3 of 5)
by Paul Haeder / April 3rd, 2016
Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
– Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power“, Voices of Democracy, 1966
It’s a living felony, minute by minute, poor person by poor person, convicted “criminal” by convicted criminal.
I am on the front lines, former faculty, teacher, erudite not, but still, teacher of literature, drama, English composition, journalism, writing, poetry, even politics and rhetoric. Adjunct, fired, laid off, vilified because my toes saw no line to step to, cared little for any of the Dean-lets or ADMIN class, and found abhorrent the …
It might have been a moment that jolted Israelis to their senses. Instead the video of an Israeli soldier shooting dead a young Palestinian man as he lay wounded and barely able to move has only intensified the tribal war dance of the Israeli public.
Last week, as the soldier was brought before a military court for investigation, hundreds of supporters protested outside. He enjoys vocal support too from half a dozen cabinet ministers, former army generals, rabbis and – according to opinion polls – a significant majority of the Israeli Jewish public.
Most Americans have probably never heard of the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Flemming v. Nestor. It is one of several important facts about Social Security that are unknown to the public. The essence of the ruling is that nobody has an “earned right” to Social Security benefits, no matter how much money they have paid into the program.
The court upheld the denial of benefits to Nestor even though he had contributed to the program for 19 years and was receiving benefits. In it’s ruling, the Court established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not a “contractual …
Fear and suspicion of undocumented immigrants has lead to a showdown of sorts. The issue is a polarizing one, with some showing compassion and welcoming the alien merely seeking refuge from hostilities aboard. Others, however, see this as a threat to employment, welfare, security and overall stability of the homeland.
None have taken a stronger stance than Billionaire mogul and business tycoon Bruce Wayne of Gotham City, waging a war of aggression against one such alien from Krypton. In a recent press conference, Wayne said the following: “When Krypton sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending men of …
[H]istory is past politics, and politics is present history.
— Edward A. Freeman (November 18, 1880)
When the tormented history of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is written, the eyebrows of legal authorities will be raised in assortments of confusion. Soon after the Radovan Karadži? verdict, the harshest dished out by the ICTY, the firebrand and frequent patriotic buffoon Vojislav Šešelj of the Serbian Radical Party found himself acquitted. It had taken some 13 years for the Chamber to reach that conclusion, a lengthy circus of delay, obstruction and challenge.
Šešelj, labouring with the effects of cancer, neither cared, nor …
All fans of science fiction are familiar with Star Trek. It is an iconic science fiction show that has bequeathed the public with five TV series, ((A sixth series will debut in 2017.)) one animated series, and a number of films over five decades. The storyline of Star Trek, however, spans three centuries. What makes Star Trek particularly attractive for many viewers is its progressivism. Star Trek depicts a future where the scourges of sickness, racism, poverty, and war have been eradicated on Earth and throughout much of the Federation, an inter-planetary alliance of which the Earth is a founding …
Sometimes even to the most towering cynic, American hypocrisy is more than breathtaking.
As they lambast their latest “despot”, Syria’s President al-Assad — a man so popular in his country and the region that the US Embassy in Damascu had, by the end of 2006, devised a plan to oust him — arms sales to countries where human rights are not even a glimmer on the horizon have for the US (and UK) become an eye watering bonanza.
The latest jaw dropper, as Saudi Arabia continues to bombard Yemen with US and UK armaments dropped by US and UK-made aircraft, is …
