Many tributaries, very tricky to navigate, flow from this main current of public avowals and disavowals; not least, must an apology lead to reparation, if it is to be to be at all meaningful? That is, without a subsequent act of reparation or restitution, can it be fully constituted as an apology? Or is the performance of a speech act something that itself makes change?
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 …
Supreme religious body faces growing backlash as critics compare Israel’s religious freedoms to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan
by Jonathan Cook / January 21st, 2016
More than one in 10 Israeli Jews cannot marry legally in their own country, Israeli legislators heard last week, as Israel’s religious authorities face a growing backlash against their wide-ranging powers.
Campaigners for religious freedom in Israel presented data showing that some 660,000 Israeli Jews were denied the right to marry. More than half – 364,000 – are immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose Jewishness is not officially recognised.
According to government figures, Israel’s Jewish population stands at about 6.3 million.
The Chief Rabbinate, the supreme religious authority in Israel for the Jewish population, has exclusive control over a range of personal …
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 …
Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism's War on Europe (Part 3 of an 11 Part Series)
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / January 21st, 2016
As German independent TV station K-TV has revealed, the current refugee crisis is most likely the brain child of the afore-mentioned US military grand strategist General Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett was a strategic advisor to former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and currently works with the Israeli military consultancy firm Wikistrat. Wikistrat are close collaborators with US Africa Command (Africom). Barnett’s books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action have had a major influence on US/Israeli global military geostrategies.
A former student of Vice-Admiral Andrew K. Cebrowski, former director of the Office of Transformations in the US Department …
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 …
Priority number one is protecting the American people and going after terrorist networks. Both al Qaeda and now ISIL pose a direct threat to our people, because in today’s world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to poison the minds of individuals inside our country; they undermine our allies. But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands…. they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants …
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 …
Through a vast display of medical examinations and scientific data, the film Concussion directly links repeated violent brain trauma of NFL worker-athletes to dementia, depression, memory loss, mental illness and even suicide. The truth is all laid out here. Yes! It’s an ugly reality, and a bit uncomfortable for most football fans, but truth is, the National Football League (NFL) is a billion dollar industry that doesn’t a give a damn about its player-employees.
To the owners, management and corporate CEO’s who reap most of the NFL’s financial gains, the NFL brand is the …
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 …
Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism's War on Europe (Part 2 of an 11 Part Series)
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / January 20th, 2016
Artificial mass migration as imperial policy has a long history. To illustrate this, we will cite a few historical examples. According to Bulgarian historian A, Eminov, civil wars in the Balkans in the 13th and 14th centuries led to significant population decline, which greatly facilitated colonisation of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire. The deportation of nomads and organised transportation of Muslim refugees by the Ottoman Empire played a significant role in the colonisation of this region.
Though Turks comprise over 8 percent of the Bulgarian population today, Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism has sparked accusations from Bulgaria’s nationalist party Attack that …
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 …
Good evening. I have purchased this television time tonight on every available media outlet here in Iowa, just days in advance of the 2016 caucuses. I address you, because the choice you make in a few days time could well determine whether we live in peace or go to war, possibly nuclear war. The very survival of humanity could hang in the balance. And it hinges on whether you vote for me or for my principal opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Let us be blunt, she has never seen a war she did not like. And …
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 …
Conventional political wisdom has long held Hillary Clinton to be the odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States. But as was the case back in 2008, cracks are once again emerging in the façade of Clinton’s “inevitability.” Is history repeating?
According to a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll released Thursday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has narrowed the gap with Clinton in Iowa to within 2 percentage points, well within the poll’s margin of error. Meanwhile, Hillary on the Ropes? Sanders continues to hold a respectable lead in New Hampshire. The possibility of a Sanders sweep …
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 …
Alternative media site or account A endorses politician X’s campaign. Is this really a productive thing to do under any circumstances, for those wishing to challenge the “mainstream” narratives in the media?
Much of the alternative media on the web today consists of independent bloggers who are tired of the “mainstream” and want to fight back against it all. A particular nuisance to many people is the tendency of some papers and broadcasters to demonize.
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is the prime example today of a victim of this demonizing of political opposition in the supposedly free press. And in the …
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 …
The gift of giving of one's time spurs social awareness and a capacity to be inside someone else's skin
by Paul Haeder / January 18th, 2016
You Shall Receive an Awakening as Volunteer
In times of crisis, you should be able to count on your neighbors. We’re not talking about needing an extra egg or cup of sugar in a pinch. Think of Ice Storm 1996 (devastating Spokane, Washington, and surrounding areas for weeks with snapped trees, downed electrical lines, broken pipes, ice covered homes and roads) or this past Wind Storm Twenty-Fifteen (sheer hurricane force winds in November, 140 mph, and torn roofs, down power lines, clogged roads, electricity service off for 185,000 people for days).
The tradition of volunteering includes barn-raising, helping with the …
Paul Kagame has long been the darling of prominent liberals such as Bill Clinton, Samantha Power and Tony Blair. But, it’s become ever more difficult to publicly back the bloodstained Rwandan dictator.
After two decades in power Kagame recently had the constitution changed so (only) he can keep running for office. Alongside Kagame’s move to stay president for life, the regime has employed increasingly brazen tactics to deter dissent. Extending their assassination program beyond East Africa, in recent years Rwanda has assassinated (or attempted to) a number of former top officials in South Africa.
In Canada Gerald Caplan is Kagame’s leading liberal …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / January 18th, 2016
Corporation for Enterprise Development’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad explains the whitewashing of Martin Luther King’s legacy, transforming him from a leader for racial and economic justice who died in struggle to a post-racial patriot who died in victory.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
— Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
Britain’s aiding and abetting of the brutal, head chopping, summarily executing, flogging regime of Saudi Arabia continues unabated.
In spite of a “Letter before action sent as a threat of legal action over arms export licences to Saudi Arabia increases …” by London law firm Leigh Day, acting on behalf of Campaign Against the Arms Trade “… challenging the government’s decision to export arms despite increasing evidence that Saudi forces are violating international humanitarian law (IHL) in Yemen …“, it transpires that UK military …
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
– Albert Einstein ((Einstein: A Portrait (Corte Madera, CA: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1984).))
When we talk about violence in the context of mortal struggle between or inside nation states, we have to consider the factors that generated it. It is a given that every decent person in the world should decry the killing of kids, women, elderly, and civilians of all ages anywhere. However, our rage, analysis, and criticism should be directed primarily on all those …
There is no afterlife so one life to give is our only option: educate, agitate, infiltrate, regenerate!
by Paul Haeder / January 17th, 2016
Yes. I think that what is more important in Mexico is education. It’s for the children to be able to go to school. Of course, hunger is also a very big problem. But the one that really, really, really for me is very painful is education. And there’s very little money spent on education, on good teachers, on schools, on even rooms where children can go and work. And I think this is the worst problem in Mexico that has to be taken care of. And it has not been taken care of. I remember when I came to Mexico …
It is noteworthy that the only government objecting to the substance of our initiative is the United States, which for many years has stood in almost complete isolation trying to block successive efforts of the international community to prevent an arms race in outer space.
– statement by Russian Foreign Ministry on resolution for no first deployment of weapons into outer space which was approved by UN General Assembly on 8 December 2015. ((Matthew Bodner, UN Approves Russia-led Proposal …
An article in the Guardian on bosses’ pay by the director of the High Pay Centre, Deborah Hargreaves, presents the disparity between bosses’ pay and the average wage in the UK thus:
“Chief executives in the FTSE 100 companies took home £4.96m in 2014 compared with average wages of £27,645. And, if anything, the pay gap is getting wider. A typical incentive award for a top boss increased by 50% of salary compared with the previous year, while workforce wages were up by £445. Bosses’ remuneration has risen from around 47 times average wages in the 1990s to around …
I’ve been writing about the abuses going on in adult guardianship proceedings now for over ten years. Details regarding the physical and financial abuse of seniors and disabled are nothing new to me. One might have thought I would have been prepared for The Worst Interests of the Child, by Keith Harmon Snow. But I was not.
“This book is about the organized crime of Family Courts in the United States,” writes Snow in the preface to this book. Keith Harmon Snow is an award- winning journalist, photographer and writer who has worked in 45 countries. He worked as …
Judge Napolitano in an article ((“Two Smoking Guns: FBI on Hillary’s Case” by Andrew P. Napolitano)) explains the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. There are two aspects of the investigation. The original source of her trouble is the charge that she failed to safeguard national security secrets.
As Judge Napolitano explains, this crime does not require intent and can result from negligence or simply from a lack of awareness that a secret is being revealed, as in the case that Judge Napolitano provides of the US Navy sailor who was prosecuted for espionage because a “selfie” he sent …
In a landmark infrastructure bill passed in December, Congress finally penetrated the Fed’s “independence” by tapping its reserves and bank dividends for infrastructure funding.
The bill was a start. But some experts, including Congressional candidate Tim Canova, say Congress should go further and authorize funds to be issued for infrastructure directly.
For at least a decade, think tanks, commissions and other stakeholders have fought to get Congress to address the staggering backlog of maintenance, upkeep and improvements required to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century. Countries with less in the way of assets have overtaken the US in …
