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Today, I want to speak about the once-in-a-generation chance we have, together, to improve the way we enhance the cause of human rights, freedom and dignity.

— David Cameron. Speech on the European Court of Human Rights, January 25. 2012

In June of 2014, speaking in his official residence,10 Downing Street, Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech on business:

“Britain has huge creative clout around the world …From Asia to America, they’re dancing to our music, watching our films and wearing our designers’ latest creations”, he trilled.

He omitted to say “and dying under our bombs.”

In December, United Nations High Commissioner for Human …

The Paris Attacks, the current flood of migration, and the incidents in Cologne on New Year’s Eve: it is hard to tell fact from fiction these days; the lines separating these incidents become increasingly blurred. What they have in common: they illustrate the supposed threat under which we all live. The German media does not get tired of stressing and discussing the ungraspable foreign threat. However, beyond engaging in discussions deliberately inciting public fear of terror, and discussions that either condemn or romanticize the refugee, the crucial point is to see how these incidents create dynamics that will fundamentally change …

Anybody who thinks they can buy me doesn’t know me.

–Hillary Clinton, The Hill, January 22, 2016

Hillary Clinton may still win the Democratic Primary race when the final votes limp through. But if she does, negativity and evasion will be her masters. Oh, and the motor of finance.

Clinton shares with her husband an insatiable appetite for speaking fees. Her words, and presence, are up for sale, and there are organisations and companies happy to throw money the way of Clinton Inc. This is a system of collusion that seemingly has no end, but at its core is …

In Part I, Erdogan’s mounting dilemmas—ISIS terrorism, Kurdish resistance, Assad’s Syria alive and well—showed how his bid for regional hegemony has gone awry. His pact with the ISIS devil, as long as they target Kurds, just made things worse. Davutoglu’s dream of a “common history and a common future” for the Middle East under Turkish guidance is now in history’s dustbin. The Turkish plan for a “global, political, economic and cultural new order” in the Middle East remains in the hands of the US and, of course, Israel.

Israeli rationale

Israel has been noncommittal about Syria since the uprising …

Tribal children in the African rainforests have been paid in glue to sniff, and alcohol, in return for menial work, a new Survival International report has revealed.

The report found instances of market traders in the Republic of Congo plying children from the Bayaka tribe with glue in 2013, in exchange for cleaning out latrines.

In Cameroon Baka tribespeople, illegally evicted from their forest homes, are often paid in five glasses of moonshine in exchange for half a day’s manual labor. A combination of poverty and depression caused by the theft of their land forces many to turn …

Forty years after Margaret Thatcher came to power the true extent of neoliberal market reforms are still unravelling and inequality, as we are now hearing almost daily, has inexorably taken a grip and harming society much more widely as a direct result with evidence of rising poverty its consequence.

The Equality Trust and High Pay Centre has average pay for UK workers calculated as £26,500. However, average pay conceals the reality for millions.

For instance, the top 0.1% are earning a few pounds over £1 million a year and the top 1% are earning an average £271,888. What this figure …

Corporatized and commercialized elections reach a point where they stand outside and erode our democracy. Every four years the presidential and Congressional elections become more of a marketplace where the wealthy paymasters turn a civic process into a spectacle of vacuous rhetorical contests, distraction and stupefaction.

The civic minds of the people are sidelined by the monetized minds of a corrupted commercial media, political consultants, pundits and the purveyors of an ever-more dictatorial corporate state.

The dominance of influence money by the plutocracy and now big business PACs, such as that …

When I consider what Hillary Clinton is likely to say in a presidential debate, I having one guiding principle. Namely, that electing her U.S. president is rationally indefensible, so her appeal to voters will inevitably involve lies or sleazy diversionary tactics. Such was my prediction for Sunday night’s presidential debate, and I was hardly disappointed.

But the nature of the candidate, and the timing and venue of the debate, should have alerted me more clearly to the nature of the forthcoming sleaze. As the pin-up girl for identity politics, debating in largely black South Carolina on the eve of …

Like all false flag attacks and assassinations, the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King was covered up. In the King case James Earl Ray was the framed-up patsy, just as Oswald was in the case of President John F. Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan was in the case of Robert Kennedy.

The King family, along with everyone who paid attention to the evidence, knew that they and the public were officially handed a cover-up. After years of effort, the King family managed to bring the evidence to light in a civil case. Confronted with the real evidence, it took the jury one …

When ISIS militias swept into Mosel, Iraq, in June 2014, Ibrahim Mahmoud plotted his flight, along with his whole family, which included 11 children. Once upon a time, Ibrahim was himself a child escaping another violent campaign carried out by equally angry militias.

In his life-time Ibrahim became a refugee twice, once when he was nine-years-old living in Haifa, Palestine, and yet again and more recently, in Mosel.

Just weeks before Israel declared its independence in 1948, Ibrahim lost his homeland, and fled Haifa, along with tens of thousands of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, after Israeli militias conquered the city …

Let’s get blunt: when the rich support presidential candidates they do so out of self interest. They don’t want to change anything other than perhaps get their taxes further reduced. The system has worked for them perfectly thus far. Why fix what ain’t broken? I suppose you could say most vote from self interest, but when their interests revolve around paying rent next month it tends to hold more weight than I want a bigger yacht.

Here’s a for instance, as brought to my attention by most excellent beat reporter Armando Salguero from the Miami Herald: Stephen Ross, real estate magnate …

Under intense pressure from the United States–not to mention Russia–Turkey has begun to reassess its support for anti-Assad groups. ISIS’s third attack in six months in Turkey has pushed it where it did not want to go. The first two attacks were against Kurds (one killed 33 outside a Kurdish cultural center in the border town of Suruc in July, another killed more than 100 in Ankara in October).

Caliph Harun al-Rashid (766–809)The poor Kurds have no friends anywhere. The West betrayed them at Versailles in …

Not the day after in the movie about a fictional war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact and a nuclear exchange between the United States and the former Soviet Union, but the Day After the Implementation Deal of the Iran Nuclear Deal. America was quick to acknowledge Iran’s commitment by imposing sanctions on it for its defense capabilities.

If we all share a common dream of some balance in this world, which would hopefully lead to more security for all, here is what must happen. With the nuclear-related UNSC sanctions against Iran lifted, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization …

As the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified over the weekend that Iran has completed the measures necessary to comply with the nuclear deal reached last July with the P5+1  governments, the New York Times Editorial Board proclaimed “the world is now safer for this.” They lauded the deal as a “testament to patient diplomacy” and President Barack Obama’s “visionary determination to pursue a negotiated solution to the nuclear threat.”

The Editorial Board takes for granted that Iran presents a threat. Iran has always maintained it has never intended to build nuclear weapons, and that its nuclear program was …

President Obama’s State of the Union laid out the awful state of disunion in our country. “America’s destiny is imperiled by a political system festering in malice, gridlock and in the grip of the rich and the powerful,” Obama said. In actuality, not since the Civil War era has our disunion been so strong.  That disunion was only slowly dissolved after a grisly war, leaving desolation of life, limb, and land.

Today, even the hardship of a Great Recession failed to dissipate the deliberate division fostered by the forces of extreme conservatism, promoting polarization initialized with the Reagan presidential …