On the weekend of November 16th, the G20 leaders whisked into Brisbane, posed for their photo ops, approved some proposals, made a show of roundly disapproving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and whisked out again. It was all so fast, they may not have known what they were endorsing when they rubber-stamped the Financial Stability Board’s “Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution,” which completely changes the rules of banking.
Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins …
Vimes knew how you could own a pub, but he wondered how you could own a trout stream because, if that was your bit, it had already gurgled off downstream while you were watching it, yes? That meant that somebody else was now fishing in your water, the bastard! And the bit in front of you now had recently belonged to the bloke upstream; that bloated plutocrat of a fat neighbour now probably considered you some kind of poacher, that other bastard! And the fish swam everywhere, didn’t they? How did you know which ones were yours? Perhaps they were …
As dead black bodies continue to pile and mount up across this nation-state after being murdered at state- and societally-sanctioned hands, it does an old Baby Boomer’s body and soul good to see that yes, finally, a new generation has blown the whistle, and picked up the mantle that my own generation dropped not so long ago. (For the record and for the curious, I’m 65, and have been on the racial battlefield my entire adult life. That means that I’m what we used to call back in the day a “race man” when it comes to …
I once lived in Peru’s southern Andes, in the majestic corn belt of the royal Inca. The dimensions of the surrounding sierra were enough to quiet my ambitious, over-sized and over-active American ego. Moreover, those rural and ancient environs were truly the agemates of eternity. The indigenous populace that stippled the earth there—my neighbors—kept it all alive. Andahuaylillas, my temporary hometown in the mountains, was a maize-growing hamlet of maybe three thousand people. Neighbors there were kind, and they constantly sought me out to share life with me.
I did not always reciprocate. I think about one friend and neighbor …
imperialism: noun – A policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonization, use of military force or other means.
— Oxford Dictionary
Betsy Ward, president and CEO of the USA Rice Federation, was fuming recently when the Iraqi Grain Board (IGB) neglected, once again, to purchase American rice from corporate behemoth Archer Daniels Midland and opted instead for more expensive varieties from Brazil, Uruguay and Thailand. It was the third consecutive strikeout for U.S. rice producers in Iraq.
“The results make no sense,” said Ward, according to Politico. “The U.S. is price competitive, the quality is excellent, the logistics …
And the prospects for a comprehensive agreement with Iran
by Alan Hart / November 30th, 2014
If a non-Jew had coined the phrase “Judeo-Nazism” he or she would have been verbally crucified by Zionism’s attack dogs and the mainstream Western media. The actual coiner of it was Yeshavahu Leibowitz, one of the most outspoken and controversial Jewish intellectuals of modern times. He was once described as “the conscience of Israel.” Before he died in 1994 he said “Judeo-Nazis” were on the rise in Israel. If he was alive today I imagine he would say, “They are now in control.”
The question awaiting an answer in the coming days and weeks is whether or not those who do …
This over-organized, techno-urbanized 21st century: we “live,” as it were, within enveloping enclosures — an ever-tightening mesh of interlocking institutional structures (1000’s of corporations, mega-banks, power plants, DoD, NSA, the Internet, etc.). Such is the over-arching scope and complexity of this “Mega-System” that a mere individual finds her unique identity virtually obliterated by the standardizing forces which surround her (“technology,” “finance,” “media,” “messages,” etc., etc.) Daily “life” has become a stream of stimulus-response reactivity—as her latitude for spontaneous, self-directed activity shrinks. As these institutional structures engulfing her have hypertrophied—through endless mergers and consolidations, as well as constant technological transformations—her autonomous …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / November 28th, 2014
Former labor organizer Bill Barry discusses the tenuous relationship between the working class and undocumented workers, and the forces that keep these groups at odds.
When discredited Missouri prosecutor Robert P. McColloch recently defended his calculated manipulation of a grand jury which led jurors to free the policeman who fatally shot Michael Brown last summer, McColloch declared piously that eyewitness accounts must “always match physical evidence.”
McColloch, however, did not apply that ‘always match’ standard in the case of Antonio Beaver, a St. Louis man wrongfully convicted by in 1997 of a violent carjacking case tried by McColloch.
That carjacking victim had told police her attacker was younger, shorter, and weighed less than Beaver. McColloch’s office secured a first-degree robbery conviction and 18-year sentence for Beaver despite …
Few, if any, of the correct questions were asked in the grand jury hearing to decide whether policeman Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown.
The most important unexamined question is whether police are trained to use force immediately as a first resort before they assess a situation or determine if they are at the correct address. Are the police trained that the lives of police officers are so much more valuable than the lives of possible suspects, or a houseful of people into whose residence a heavily armed SWAT team enters, that police officers must not accept the …
If you’re white, you’re all right.
If you’re yellow, that’s mellow.
If you’re brown, stick around.
If you’re black, get back!
– Ancient ghetto proverb
This image Looks like two different women, right? Wrong. Pictured above is the “before” and “after” effects of the constant application of “skin lightening” oils, creams and “treatment” by former model Irene Major. Major is originally from Cameroon, where some of this earth’s darkest people reside.
As quoted by Naturallymoi.com, Major explained her obsession with light skin thusly: “When my skin is lighter, I …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 28th, 2014
Tai Chi, Thai Stick: Hash and Cheese to Go (hold the Mule)
Roger Golden began studying Tai Chi and other martial arts forms after graduating from high school in the mid-1960s. A classic ‘clown,’ in the folk-lore sense of the cunning trickster who gets over on Power, as opposed to collaborating with, endorsing and representing it, he laughed his way from low-level street deals of the then ‘new thing,’ marijanna, to become one of the major ‘importer-exporters’ of this particular herb, in the United States (after the CIA, of course) until his incarceration for ten years in the early 1990s. With …
Sixty-six years after the establishment of the State of Israel, even the most ubiquitous term employed to describe the political nature of Israel as a “Jewish democratic state” is no longer valid. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing coalition partners are preparing a law, which will exclusively define Israel as a “Jewish State” for the “Jewish people”. For independent observers, who do not wear rose-colored Zionist propaganda glasses, Israel was never a democracy in the classical Western sense of the term, but always a Jewish democracy or a democracy sui generis, i.e. full democratic rights for Jews only. Jewish …
It is funny to see how sometimes the same story can be perceived differently. I was back in the nineteenth district of Paris for some few days, last week. It was without surprise that I could still witness the direct signs of the catastrophic situation of the French economy, as it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to be served at the local post office. But what worried me more, though, were the protests and demonstrations that had been taking place for weeks in different cities across France. Paris, Toulouse, Nantes and in many other cities, for days, images …
I wish there could be a Thanksgiving for the applied bounty that could come from the hundreds of thousands of political scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.
I am referring especially to those social scientists who are full-time, tenured professors at universities, colleges and community colleges who are not indentured to commercial moonlighting. Those of us who look for ways to get things done for the betterment of society seek such contributions from people who spend their days studying what is happening in our country, and to whom. Other than …
The Jewish activist Max Blumenthal wrote an expansive book on Israeli racism, but he failed completely and categorically to grasp the culture that drives Jewish supremacy within the Jewish State, Jewish politics and beyond. Interestingly enough, Blumenthal has a lot to say about ‘German pathology,’ German people, the colour of German people’s skin and their ‘sickening society’. If anyone still had hope that there was something positive that Progressive Jews could add to the discourse, Blumenthal’s latest interview will end that idea. He exhibits the ultimate form of Jewish racism, goy hatred: in fact, far more insidious than hard-core right …
When law is treated as an exercise of sterile objectivity, one where vision matters less than procedure, citizens can best forget that they play any viable role. Seen through a naked prism of law and order, Ferguson, Missouri simply looks like black indignation against white order. While it would be deceptive to tarnish all arguments with the colour divide, it is unavoidable in parts of a country where authority and policing are inextricably linked to race. Slavery, after all, co-existed with enlightened notions of human equality for decades.
The conservative press outlets, and certain commentators, have resorted to various tricks of …
Some supporters of Zionism are trying to disassociate from the meaning and use of the word. Recently with a growing number of people the word Zionism has a negative connotation, more so than any time before. Where it was once taboo to question anything related to Israel, it’s now become a contentious process defining what Zionism truly is and what it represents. Seeing and hearing different and completely contrary explanations to existing beliefs concerning Israel, makes some people understandably uncomfortable. While talking truthfully about Zionism will make some think twice, others will shut down instantly.
Barack Obama, the obsequious errand boy for the financial and corporate plutocrats who own the U.S. government, made a pathetic appearance on national television to try to persuade the “natives” to remain peaceful in response to the non-indictment of the Ferguson killer-cop. His inane comments extolling the value of non-violence and the rule of law seemed strangely incongruent with the militaristic rhetoric and policies of his administration over the last few years.
Yet, Obama’s positions on law and violence are not as contradictory as they might appear when these positions are resituated within the context of imperial logic and the framework …
When news reports alleged that the two cousins behind the Jerusalem synagogue attack on 18 November were affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a level of confusion reigned. Why the PFLP? Why now?
The attack killed five Israelis and wounded others. It was, to a degree, an expected addition to a violent episode caused by police-sanctioned right-wing violence and abuse targeting the Palestinian population of the illegally occupied East Jerusalem. Much of the violence targeting Palestinians is systematic, involving severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, targeting houses of worship, and nightly attacks by Jewish mobs assailing Arabs, or …
The American people tend to view the Republican and Democratic parties as near polar opposites, but this is far from true. Indeed, they are clearly more united on the fundamentals underpinning U.S. society than they are at odds.
The heated legislative and political battles that characterize both parties, which are fought bitterly every two and four years in national elections and throughout the 50 states, are taking place within a much larger context of agreement between the right/far right Republicans and the center right Democrats.
We will touch upon this matter after discussing the recent trouncing of the Democratic Party in the …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 26th, 2014
Where do They (you know: Them) get such chutzpah? You can’t buy that kind of chutzpah. Not even Amazon sells that kind of chutzpah…
*****
“So simple, even an American can do it…” (a running joke throughout)
And coming soon:
The Droned Stranger and his Double-agent Injun’ companion, Running Joke
an fer da inllectshulls:
The Coffin Factory, a Modern Urban Drama, based on the novel, by Dostoevsky, as adapted for the stage by Samuel Beckett and Lenny Bruce (later adapted for the screen by Richard Pryor and directed by David Lynch).
*****
Yeah, it’s the Two Minute Warning, but Maybe we’re not the losing team. I mean, every …
Relations between Israelis and Palestinians have descended into a dangerous melee of tit-for-tat attacks and killings, with the violence of the past few weeks centred on Jerusalem. The city, claimed by Israel as its “undivided capital”, has been torn apart by clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian residents since the summer, when 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burnt alive by Jewish extremists.
Subsequent attacks by Palestinians culminated last week in a shooting and stabbing spree by two cousins at a synagogue that killed four Jews and an Israeli policeman. In this atmosphere, both sides have warned that the political conflict is …
In the White City, all the days are beautiful days. The weather is temperate and mild. The parks are spacious and gleam with care. People stroll with elegant animals, talking on the latest devices, filling the cafes at all hours of the day. In the coffeehouses where the best coffee in the world is brewed cup-by-cup for them, they sit in parallel rows like they did as children in school, seeing no one else now, gazing intently into the white screens of their gleaming devices.
There are hardly any old people or school-aged children left in the White City. Everyone is …
President Barack Obama has always been quick to censure detractors when it comes to his regime spying on the public. His common retort always involves some sort of no-nonsense, Freudian super-ego-ish condescension, like, “I’m sure the NSA doesn’t care about what you’re doing on your computer.” And then he drones on, indulging himself in his awfully homiletic and providential presidential address.
Really? The government isn’t at all worried about what the anarcho-socialist workers and students do on their laptops in their homes, or what they’re reading in local libraries? Could Obama really be telling the truth when he says that he …
The trial is essentially a series of unfolding disasters.”
— Marko Milanovic, Radio Free Europe, Nov 20, 2014
He has been released, at least temporarily. Vojislav Šešelj found a warm welcome in the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) headquarters in Zemun after the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had tired of him. As he boarded a plane to Serbia on November 12, he proclaimed that he would first deal with politics, then health. It was a sound assessment. Politics seems to be shoring up his health.
His treatment at the hands of officials in The Hague …
In this age of pseudo GOP austerity, in which Republicans are eager to demonize government at all levels, public investment in our future suffers mightily. In effect, decrying public spending has become a Republican crusade, which reflects not just an anti-government doctrine but also a strategy to vanquish Democrats, especially Barack Obama. Perhaps the exception is looking after the military sector and the private elite.
In the private sector, today’s competitive global markets exert powerful pressure to improve return on investment (ROI), but concentrating on capital assets from a strictly financial viewpoint. Too little attention is paid to measuring and improving …
For all of Brand’s joking and braggadocio, a sagacious theme runs through his new book: that a peaceful revolution must bring about a fairer sharing of the world’s resources, which depends upon a revelation about our true spiritual nature.
*****
The political conversation on sharing is growing by the day, sometimes from the unlikeliest of quarters. And at the present time, there is perhaps no-one calling louder for a new society to be based on sharing than Russell Brand, the comedian-cum-activist and revolutionary. It is easy to dismiss much of Brand’s polysyllabic and self-referential meanderings, as do most of the …
The most recent Zionist reiterations of the claim to “eternal” Jewish ownership of East Jerusalem—as part of an “undivided, eternal capital of Israel” as specified by a “Basic Law” passed by the Israeli Knesset in 1980–make me want to review the Bible tales about Israel and specifically the city of Jerusalem.
I find those stories of more than mere literary and religious interest; they carry profound contemporary political meanings. And having first encountered them as a child, and having sincerely believed them (as I was taught to do at the time), they still retain for me a childlike charm. …
Did you really believe Darren Wilson was going to be indicted for murdering Michael Brown? Did you think a cop was going to face a trial for gunning down a young man he thought should be arrested? Do you think the law treats all people equally-civilian and cop, rich and poor, black and white? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have been watching too much television. From the crime drama Law and Order to FoxNews and CNN the viewer is fed a constant storyline that portrays cops as heroes in a system that is …
