Latest articles
Under the Thumb of the Global Financial Mafiocracy
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / November 27th, 2015
November 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.
To date, only a handful of the world’s largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the …
There are Thousands of Reasons Not To
by Lesley Docksey / November 27th, 2015
Yesterday Prime Minister David Cameron stood up in Parliament and told all the MPs how very important it was that the United Kingdom joined the orgy of bombing Syria. He is closely following Tony Blair’s path to Iraq, using fear of ‘terrorism’, exaggerating so-called ‘intelligence’ and wanting desperately to be seen as a tough leader. In a few days MPs will hold a vote on this and he’s sent them all home to ‘think it over’ during the weekend.
There are many reasons why Members of Parliament should not vote in favour of bombing Syria. The most obvious reason is that …
by Thomas Smith / November 26th, 2015
Part I: Introduction
Retreat from our predicament is not an option. We must push through the Anthropocene, indeed accelerate our modernity, and accept our species’ dominion over the Earth.
— Leigh Phillips (186)
Though imperceptible to the human primate body, the sun is growing hotter. It is predicted that in about a thousand million years, its temperature will increase to such an extent that the oceans will evaporate, plate tectonics will stop and, in a further two or three billion years, the earth will become uninhabitable for all but the most extreme of extremophiles, those microscopic creatures which can survive anywhere from close …
by Alex Anfruns / November 26th, 2015
Of Guatemalan origin and an undocumented resident in Chicago, Ilka Oliva Corado is a prolific writer inspired by social struggles for the rights of the undocumented and of sexual diversity and against gender and racial discrimination in the heart of the empire. In this exclusive interview for El Diario de Nuestra América (The Newspaper of Our America), the author analyses with a clear focus the difficult situation of her compatriots in the pre-electoral context of a country governed for seven years by the “first black President in its history.”
Ilka Oliva …
by Ramzy Baroud / November 25th, 2015
I still remember that smug look on his face, followed by the matter-of-fact remarks that had western journalists laugh out loud.
“I’m now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq,” General Norman Schwarzkopf, known as ‘Stormin’ Norman, said at a press conference sometime in 1991, as he showed a video of US bombs blasting an Iraqi bridge, seconds after the Iraqi driver managed to cross it.
But then, a far more unjust invasion and war followed in 2003, following a decade-long siege that cost Iraq a million of its children and …
Joseph built the pyramids to store grain
by Gary Leupp / November 25th, 2015
Joseph in Egypt: A Myth
I confess: I don’t believe in the biblical story of Joseph. Quite aside from the fanciful notion that Joseph built the pyramids for grain storage (as alleged by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson), I don’t believe in the Bible character himself–any more than I believe in Prometheus, Rama, or the Yellow Emperor of Chinese mythology.
You perhaps recall the story. But I should not assume that, of course. (I am struck by how unfamiliar most of my students, at a highly competitive New England university, are with the Bible. This is in part because they come from …
by Dan Glazebrook / November 25th, 2015
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet today shows the utter desperation currently sweeping through the regime change camp as Russia closes in on the death squads in Syria – and does so with massive international support.
At 9.30am on Tuesday morning, a Russian SU-24 jet was shot down by Turkish fighter planes. Its pilots were then allegedly killed by Syrian Turkmen anti-government militias, with the body of one paraded on camera in a video that was immediately posted on youtube. Turkey claimed the jet had encroached on Turkish airspace, but Russia maintains the plane was shot down well …
by Rajesh Makwana / November 25th, 2015
Has the international community left it too late to prevent runaway climate change and widespread ecological degradation? Does the typical citizen and career politician have the inclination to accept the severity of the ‘planetary emergency’, let alone make the lifestyle changes and policy decisions needed to address it? And can the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Paris really signal an end to the unregulated dumping of carbon emissions, or mark a shift away from the business-as-usual approach to economic development?
These are among the many troubling questions that emerge when watching a new documentary written and presented by one of the …
by Yves Engler / November 25th, 2015
Two weeks ago police shot and killed an individual at Pacific Wildcat Resources tantalum mine in central Mozambique. The incident received some attention in Canada because community members responded by seizing the Vancouver-based company’s mine site and setting some equipment ablaze.
One protester told O Pais newspaper this wasn’t the first time someone was shot dead at the mine and another said:
We don’t want to see the managers of this company operating in the mine anymore. Otherwise we will take the law into our own hands. The director of the company does not respect us, and we cannot allow someone to come …
by Matt Peppe / November 24th, 2015
The thesis of anthropologist David Vine’s latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, is taboo in American political discourse. It is a radical notion to suggest that foreign bases don’t protect American interests but actively harm them. Candidates who fail to reflexively support U.S. militarism face a political land mine. Even putative leftist Bernie Sanders has refused to challenge the status quo, in which the United States has 800 foreign military bases while the rest of the world combined has 30.
Vine makes his argument by comprehensively detailing the profligate, unsustainable spending on …
by Paul Craig Roberts / November 24th, 2015
UPDATE: A friend, George Abert, suggested a reason why the Turks shot down the Russian fighter-bomber over Syria. The Russians have a technology that they recently demonstrated against the newest US missile cruiser and Israel’s US jet fighters. The technology shuts down the communication systems of hostile forces, leaving them blind. He wonders if the Russian aircraft was shot down in order to encourage the Russians to use its unknown technology whenever Russian aircraft are in the vicinity of NATO and Israeli aircraft. He bets that the US has sent every Raven and ELINT specialist to the area in …
by E.R. Bills / November 24th, 2015
On Saturday, December 2, 1933, a 30-year-old white woman named Nellie Williams Brockman was murdered near Kountze, Texas. Brockman had headed to town to visit a department store and run into trouble along the way. She was shot to death and her body and vehicle were found partially burned. Some folks claimed they had seen a shotgun-wielding black man in the vicinity and law enforcement officials mounted an intense search for the culprit, but turned up nothing.
A few days into the manhunt, the Kountze Police Department received a “secret” tip incriminating a young, African American ex-con …
by Jonathan Cook / November 24th, 2015
With dismaying predictability, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost no time in exploiting the massacre in Paris. As he has done many times before, he claimed Europe’s trauma was just a taste of the suffering Israelis have long known.
Discounting decades of a brutal Israeli occupation as the cause of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks, he said: “It is the terrorists who are to blame for terrorism, not the territories, not the settlements and not any other thing.”
Rather than criticising the occupation, he added, the world should learn from Israel’s “aggressive policy” how to defeat its enemies. …
by Jack Balkwill / November 23rd, 2015
The babies all got sick and when the doctor wanted money
He [John Henry] said, “I’ll pay you a quarter at a time
That’s the pay for a steel driver on the line.”
— “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer“, written by Johnny Cash and first appeared on his 1963 album Blood Sweat and Tears
“A threat by the nation’s largest health insurer to pull out of ObamaCare is a sign of the industry’s growing angst about the viability of the federal exchanges, sources close to the industry say,” begins a piece at The Hill this week.
You read that correctly. Obamacare is …
by Shepherd Bliss / November 23rd, 2015
SONOMA COUNTY, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA — Many good reasons exist, other than merely earning money, to be a food farmer, though getting paid is an important benefit. Working outside in nature is good for the body and soul. Nature is a helpful, abundant teacher that can aid humans to develop humility and understand our appropriate roles on this miraculous Earth, rather than damage the environment.
Seeing beautiful things–such as redwoods, oaks, and flying birds–can be pleasurable. I enjoy bringing freshly-picked berries up from the field to customers and watch them smile and start eagerly eating them.
Digging in the Earth, as I …
by James Petras / November 23rd, 2015
Over the past few decades, insurgent mass movements reflecting political discontent with the domestic economy and imperialist foreign policy have emerged to challenge the leadership and policies of the Democratic Party (DP). There are good reasons for this: The Democratic Party in power in Congress and the White House presided over (1) the deepening of inequality between labor and capital; (2) the decline of real wages; (3) the approval of repressive legislation; (4) the reduction of trade union membership by two-thirds; (5) deepening inequality between the races, (6) a trillion dollar (and counting) bailout of the banks and …
by Barbara G. Ellis / November 23rd, 2015
When presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently called for no-fly zones above the Syria to deter Russia’s aerial attacks on ISIS strongholds, even though ISIS is supposedly targeted also by the U.S. The contradiction seems to be that Hillary wanted it to be an American “show.” It was a mindless, knee=jerk repeat of what she said as secretary of state urging president Obama in 2011 to establish a no-fly zone in Libya and in 2012, one in Syria.
She knows a no-fly zone is code not only for being able to shoot down Russian and Syrian planes, but a violation …
by Stanley Cohen / November 23rd, 2015
I have no idea who was involved in the latest atrocity in Paris, the Russian airplane bombing in the Sinai, the attacks in South Beirut or recent siege in Mali, but I’m pretty sure there will be a long line of those only too willing to take credit for the mayhem; and even more talking heads assigning blame based upon their “experience,” source information, or six figure paychecks from main stream media, as token resident “terrorism” experts for sale. Who cares.
The real issue is what, if anything, can be done to stanch the mindless bloodletting that has become routine in …
by Kim Petersen / November 22nd, 2015
In a recent article, “In the fight against ISIS, is Anonymous the answer?,” CBC makes a bold claim in the opening sentence: “The West wants to put a stop to ISIS.”
Given that the West has armed and protected ISIS, the CBC article loses all credibility from the get-go. ((Ekaterina Blinova, “ISIL ‘Frankenstein’ Created by West and Its Gulf State Allies,” Sputnik News, 7 October 2015.)), ((Tyler Durden, “Russia Explains To Clueless US Public Why Obama Can’t Defeat ISIS,” ZeroHedge, 18 November 2015. And let’s not forget the Zionist connection with ISIS that CBC and …
by David Hoile / November 22nd, 2015
The Assembly of States Parties is meeting this month in The Hague to review the work of the International Criminal Court and to discuss the ICC’s budget. The ASP is the International Criminal Court’s management oversight and legislative body. The Assembly also elects the judges and prosecutors and decides the Court’s budget. The court’s proposed budget for 2016 amounts to €153.32 million, representing an increase of €22.66 million, or 17.3 per cent, over the 2015 approved budget. At face value, far from increasing the budget for the ICC, the Assembly of State Parties should be demanding a refund.
Established in …
by Ludwig Watzal / November 21st, 2015
When US President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met the other day in Washington they tried to get along fairly well. The fundamental conflict between the US superpower and its political client state was watered down and rhetorically whitewashed. Obama has put up a brave front because he thinks of the day after leaving the White House and the election chances of Hillary Clinton. And Netanyahu was in great shape because he got all his wishes fulfilled. A 50 % increase in subsidies, plus the most sophisticated warplanes in order to test them on the Palestinians and …
From Zündel to Topham
by Eric Walberg / November 21st, 2015
The trials of Arthur Topham, Canadian journalist and publisher of Radical Press, for “hate crime” (2007) and “hate propaganda” (2012) under new Criminal Code “Hate Propaganda” legislation, have resulted in exactly the opposite of what the prosecution, B’Nai Brith, wanted. Instead of quietly muzzling the gadfly critic, the result has been the highlighting of past Jewish hate crimes, and the increasing control by Zionist groups of Canadian politics to promote Israel and censor anti-Zionist criticism.
Topham’s trial is a storybook battle of the brave little guy against Goliath. The 68-year-old Topham lives on an isolated farm in BC, and has worked …
by Kieran Kelly / November 21st, 2015
You are at the edge of a canyon. Below you is a procession of thousands upon thousands of gagged people marching forward, their hands behind them in steel handcuffs. The sun mercilessly beats down on you and on the marchers causing real pain and distress. From your vantage you can see that they are marching to a cliff and to their certain deaths. You have been yelling and screaming to warn them, but your voice is distant and it is growing hoarse. It is never completely hopeless because occasionally people look up. Sometimes small groups together follow the gaze of …
by Paul Craig Roberts / November 21st, 2015
Washington has learned that threats and coercion do not work against Russia. All the threats have done is to build Putin’s public support to astronomical levels and to unify Russia against the West’s assault. This is a failed policy that Washington is abandoning as Washington sees a new opportunity in Russia’s desire for Western cooperation, not only against ISIS but also on a wide range of other issues.
Realizing that guile can be more effective than the stick, the West is moving toward drawing Russia into the Western system by offering a coalition against ISIS. Once Russia is in a coalition …
by T.J. Petrowski / November 21st, 2015
In the aftermath of the latest attacks on Paris that left more than 130 dead, the corporate, Eurocentric media of the West is in overdrive to scare working people into sacrificing their civil liberties and convince us of the need to launch more aggressive bombing raids, with the possibility of deploying troops, in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). The attacks reek of a false flag operation by French security forces, but even if the attacks were indeed the work of ISIS, the attacks are nevertheless the inevitable response to Western imperialism’s exploitation of the Middle East …
Negative Interest, the War on Cash, and the $10 Trillion Bail-in
by Ellen Brown / November 21st, 2015
In uncertain times, “cash is king,” but central bankers are systematically moving to eliminate that option. Is it really about stimulating the economy? Or is there some deeper, darker threat afoot?
Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations …”?
That may still work if you’re a Wall Street banker, but if …
by John R. Hall / November 20th, 2015
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.
— George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty, April 2001
Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan are responsible for the title of this piece. No other words seem to adequately describe my daily visits to Dissident Voice and a few other websites where truth and intelligent analysis are valued and sought after commodities. And now that my articles are being published on several bastions of sanity in a world gone mad, I feel a closeness and comforting …
by Ralph Nader / November 20th, 2015
Candidates for public office, especially at the state and national levels, are never asked this central question of politics: “Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution, how do you specifically propose to restore power to the people in their various roles as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers?”
Imagine that inquiry starting the so-called presidential debates of both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. I’m not sure any of the candidates – so used to saying “I will do this” and “I propose that” would even know how to respond. Regardless of their affiliation with either of the two dominant parties, …
by Andre Vltchek / November 20th, 2015
It sometimes happens in the middle of a dark night, when I don’t expect it, when I think that I am sound asleep but am not, or when perhaps I really am but not completely. I don’t know. All that I witnessed and overheard, all that I thought I forgot but couldn’t, all that I tried so desperately to forget comes back, first in spasms, then in full force.
I often think that the West went mad. Totally, irreversibly! It turned into a monster itself, and it keeps manufacturing new, smaller but equally toxic brutes all over the world. It rolls, …
On the Second Point of the Mont Order
by L'Ordre / November 19th, 2015
In October, the Mont Order society’s top bloggers talked about the central role of technology in political and social change. Mentioning that the Mont Order and other modern political gatherings depend on the internet to exist in their current state, the second point in the Mont Order society’s value system alluded to inevitable forms of globalization brought about by technology.
Although one type of globalization is negative, the type mentioned above is positive. It is negative globalization when one country tries to forcibly remake the world in its own image. When, on the other hand, there are winds of technological …
