Latest articles
by Mark Weiser / September 9th, 2014
The economy is not nearly as complex as Wall Street economists and the U.S government would have you believe. When discussing the economy we’re often talking about things that are not tangible in themselves but rather some very basic cause and effect relationships which affect the conditions and overall health of the economy at any given time. It’s important to understand how these cause and effect relationships interplay with each other, and that certain conditions must occur before certain other things can happen. It’s impossible to discuss one aspect of the economy without discussing others and how they influence each …
The Fed’s Bizarre New Rules
by Ellen Brown / September 9th, 2014
In an inscrutable move that has alarmed state treasurers, the Federal Reserve, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, just changed the liquidity requirements for the nation’s largest banks. Municipal bonds, long considered safe liquid investments, have been eliminated from the list of high-quality liquid collateral. assets (HQLA). That means banks that are the largest holders of munis are liable to start dumping them in favor of the Treasuries and corporate bonds that do satisfy the requirement.
Muni bonds fund the nation’s critical infrastructure, and they are subject to the whims …
by Raymond Zwarich / September 8th, 2014
In a statement issued at the conclusion of the NATO Summit in Wales, US President Barack Obama said, “The path for Russia to rejoin the community of nations that respects international law is still there”.
The arrogance of this willingness to stand upon the world’s stage, and turn the truth directly on its head with an out and out bald-faced lie, is breathtaking. We can surely presume that most people in the US are primarily focused on the weekend’s ball games, or on who’s dating whom in Hollywood, and know very little about the facts concerning events in Ukraine. These …
by Paul Haeder / September 8th, 2014
Saying goodbye to a niece, bound for Alaska, basketball scholarship, from the frying pan of Phoenix to the fridge of Fairbanks. A great kid. Catholic high school, small, in the big ugly city of Phoenix: endless thermals along endless roads leading to endless warehouses and strip malls. The rotten university – ASU – proclaims the most sustainable (green) college status. What a sick joke, and that University of Phoenix shit for nothing education was invented there, and, well, ASU, one of the largest schools in the USA, has its own on-line perversion of a school (sic).
I cut my journalism teeth …
The unique national strategy for the state of Israel
by Paul Larudee / September 8th, 2014
Strangler fig is the generic name given to a class of vines that sprouts high in the canopy of trees in tropical forests. It is deposited by birds that eat its fruit. Its roots envelope the tree and feed off it, weakening the tree. If the process is allowed to continue indefinitely, it sinks its roots into the ground at the base of the tree and destroys it completely but takes its form, creating a hollow shell of living vines where the tree once stood.
On Friday, July 18, 2014, as one of the most powerful military …
by John V. Walsh / September 8th, 2014
“Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” is the splendid title of John Mearsheimer’s article in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs. Like Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the title alone, along with the prestige of the author in the firmament of the elite, make the book a potent weapon in the struggle to curb the U.S. Empire – before it permanently curbs us. Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-author with Stephen Walt, Professor and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / September 8th, 2014
All rolled into one, the paradigms of yesterday become the evolved fresh perspective of a new present moment awareness. A cascading vision of truth shimmering upon the lake’s surface as the pristine water of the River Tao flows flawlessly along in the gentle current. Ease and precision without a big fuss. Nothing to see in such a sanctified location except perfection. So move along if the only reason you came was to trample upon pearls. But if your third eye is open, and if you are awake and aware, and if you can hear the …
Free E-Book Offer for DV Readers
by Gary Brumback / September 8th, 2014
This is a preview of my new Kindle e-book, America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. The preview gives the table of contents and a portion of the preface telling about the book.
I am providing this preview as a way to announce that beginning on September 8 and lasting until September 12, 2014 people who have Kindles can get a free copy of my book. I am doing this free promotion because I do not want to make a dime off of America’s miseries. I am also doing it in appreciation for Dissident Voice, its staff, authors, and readers.
Table of …
by Paul Haeder / September 6th, 2014
Disregarding almost 90 percent of what is reported anywhere
You can say Snowden’s revelations matter and the big news about lies and Gaza killing matters and the unfolding bulletins about Jews and Zio-Nazi’s creating ISIS (you know all those historical terrorists that started the Jewish state and became prime ministers, generalissimos, presidents, heads of the .2 percent world wide disaster-shock doctrine capitalists WANTED an enemy to justify their existence as arms dealers, drone makers (future Buck Rogers child-woman-man killing unmanned air vehicles now in reality) matter. All of that pseudo crap of national and international scope, well, does it matter?
Think hard …
by William C. Lewis / September 6th, 2014
The media is selling fear of beheadings to the public. Syria is destroyed and so is Iraq, principally at the hands of the U.S. military machine and western partners. Oil pipelines and weapons deals are the reasons for this monstrosity that knows no end in its brutal occupation. The U.S. sold arms to Nouri al-Maliki to back his corrupt regime and backed his forces with drone strikes against ISIS, even though the American CIA also previously supported jihadist Sunni rebels, including the ISIS—procuring weapons for these groups, to attack the government of Bashar al-Assad. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / September 6th, 2014
I am thankful to all those who have walked the path before me and left lights on along the way.
The human species is designed by the Loving hand of God.
Creation is a constantly evolving miracle of The Lord.
Life itself is an unfolding of The Eternal Tao Process.
Verily, time is a river in flux.
Verily, space is as much within as it is without.
Many have said, ‘It is above as it is below.’; truly, this is quite so.
All is One at the Source. While here on Earth we are split into dualistic dichotomy.
At one frequency is the enlightenment of Heaven, pulsing in …
by Denis A. Conroy / September 6th, 2014
To this day, the Statue of Liberty bears the inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. That the world was indeed “giving” is testimony to the countless thousands of immigrants who found ingress through those portals that separated the old from the new world…perhaps the idea of this expansive bower, in vastness and availability, had its origins in dreams synonymous of an earthly paradise that was spurred on by self-seeding dreams… fueling the lust that drove the beast that built the nation.
But the order of our present world has changed and it seems …
An interview with law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell
by Angola 3 News / September 6th, 2014
by Lesley Docksey / September 6th, 2014
The debate over which way to vote in the Scottish Referendum is hotting up. The polls say that the gap between those voting to stay in the United Kingdom is now only a few points ahead of those planning to vote for independence.
With many still undecided, there has been a tidal wave of people registering to vote, particularly among the young. The norm for UK electoral turnout is poor. Fewer and fewer people bother to vote in local and general elections. Governments can come into power on less than a quarter of the electorate voting for them.
But in a few …
by Kamalakar Duvvuru / September 6th, 2014
On 15th October 2002, between 9 pm and 10 pm, five Dalits — Dayachand, Virender, Totaram, Raju and Kailash — were lynched in Duleena village, Jajjar district, Haryana, by a frenzied mob for the “speculated crime” of cow-slaughter, while the police and administrative officials – DSP, SHO Sadar, Jajjar, and three executive magistrates: the City Magistrate, BDO, Naib Tehsildar – stood by and watched. ((“Lynching of Dalits at Jhajjar, Haryana.” )) These Dalits, who were leather traders and were arrested on the same day by the police and kept in the police station for carrying the corpse …
by Mateo Pimentel / September 5th, 2014
Rocks have to go from one pile to the other. Big rocks. Pick axing and shoveling loosens them from the earth. Then we can get them where they need to go. An uninterrupted time for meditation is the perk of the job so far.
Pick-ax. Move rocks. Pick-ax. Move rocks—and so on. The work itself embodies the definition of monotony. Repetition and sameness echo like ghosts that haunt the flesh inside worn gloves and all down a tense back into achy hamstrings. Construction motors along under the white-hot radiation of the Andean sun. There is plenty of musky-green coca leaf for …
by Ralph Nader / September 5th, 2014
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) – the corporate lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for the disintegrating atomic power industry – doesn’t have to worry about repercussions from the negative impacts of nuclear power. For nuclear power is a government/taxpayer-guaranteed boondoggle whose staggering costs, incurred and deferred, are absorbed by American taxpayers via a supine government regulatory and subsidy apparatus.
So if you go to work at the NEI and you read about the absence of any permanent radioactive waste storage site, no problem, the government/taxpayers are responsible for transporting and safeguarding that lethal garbage for centuries.
If your reactors experience ever larger cost …
by William Boardman / September 5th, 2014
And the radioactive waste from Fukushima goes to: Fukushima!
Nobody in the world knows how to dispose of radioactive waste safely and permanently. That’s a given. The Japanese central government is presumably aware that anything it does with still the unmeasured, but a vast amount of radioactive waste from Fukushima’s six nuclear power generators will be temporary. Leaving it in place is not an option. So Tokyo announced August 29 that the Fukushima waste would be stored for 30 years in Fukushima prefect, in an “interim facility” to be built probably in nearby Okuma or Futaba (now evacuated).
“We’ve …
by Jonathan Cook / September 5th, 2014
I have mentioned before that more than 90 per cent of reporters are in some sense “access journalists” – that is, they rely on the active help of the key figures on their “beat”. Usually the people they regularly need to access are in power: crime correspondents need help from the police, much less so than criminals; diplomatic correspondents need the help of diplomats more than they need the help of drone strike victims, and so on.
It is difficult to convey quite how unhealthy this relationship – one largely of dependency – is for a profession that claims to be …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 5th, 2014
The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most worrisome so far. Paired with data from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, there is no question that the climate crisis is here and is accelerating at a faster pace than predicted. Its effects are widespread and dangerous, yet real solutions are being suppressed.
The climate crisis is a ticking clock that demands immediate effective action, but the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP), which is the international body responsible for creating agreements on climate change, has become nothing more than a tool for multinational corporations and financiers …
by Ron Jacobs / September 5th, 2014
Joseph Conrad is responsible for some of the best writing on imperialism’s darker side in the English language. The jungles of Marlowe and Kurtz in his classic novel Heart of Darkness remain some of literature’s ugliest manifestations of European hubris and white racism ever written. Conrad’s characters are so well contrived they have become metaphors for the imperial economic and cultural system of domination that is championed by its kings and rulers as much as it is maligned by its victims and those opposed to its machinations. The sheer brutality of the rational yet insane Kurtz represents the reality of …
by William Hanna / September 4th, 2014
According to a senior Israeli expert, Professor Hila Knobler at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot — stress, glucose and blood pressure levels rose significantly amongst Israelis during the 50-day Operation Protective Edge. This obviously concerned and very humane professor, however, failed to diagnose the ills that might have befallen the Palestinian people in Gaza during that same period of Israeli genocidal barbarity. The professor also appears to have overlooked the possibility that the rise of blood sugar and pressure levels amongst Israelis might have been due to their over-excitement as was witnessed on video recordings of ecstatic Right-wing Israelis — …
by Jack A. Smith / September 4th, 2014
The United States insists on throwing its formidable weight around and being recognized as world hegemon, but refuses to take any responsibility for the great number of negative results that emanate from its constant military and political interventions in the affairs of other states and regions.
At this time of great conflict in the world, U.S. foreign/military policy seems to be intimately connected to virtually everything that’s going wrong. Like the bull in a china shop, Uncle Sam’s blundering wreckage is left behind but the rich superpower emerges relatively unscathed to enter into yet another perceived trouble spot requiring its dubious …
by William A. Blunden / September 4th, 2014
NATO members are currently meeting in Wales to consider a joint defense agreement which stipulates that a cyberattack on one member would represent an attack on all of them. ((David Sanger, “NATO Set to Ratify Pledge on Joint Defense in Case of Major Cyberattack,” New York Times, August 31, 2014)) Though the concept of international teamwork may seem appealing at the outset there are at least a couple of issues that officials are [intentionally] neglecting.
High-End Anti-Forensics
For instance, how can countries mobilize to fend off a cyberattack when they can’t even tell who launched it? Deception is an age-old instrument …
Suppression of the innocent inside Ethiopia
by Graham Peebles / September 4th, 2014
Wrapped in dishonesty, arrogance and paranoia, Ethiopia’s ruling regime (as all such brutal brigades), are following a nationwide policy of violent suppression and constitutional vandalism.
It was the 24th June – midsummer’s day – in the adopted homeland of Andargachew Tsige, when he was detained by ‘Yemeni officials’ (State heavies in suits) whilst transiting through Sana’a to Eritrea. The British citizen and leading Ethiopian political activist was quickly and quietly extradited to Addis Ababa where he was imprisoned on spurious charges of treason or some such trumped up, paranoid twaddle. He had been unfairly tried in absentia in 2009, when Amnesty …
On Victory and False Victory
by Ramzy Baroud / September 3rd, 2014
In the rush to analyze the outcome of Israel’s 51-day war in Gaza, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, some may have neglected an important factor: this was not a war by traditional definitions of warfare, thus the conventional analyses of victory and defeat is simply not applicable.
That being the case, how can we explain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumphant statement on 28 August, and the massive celebrations on the streets of Gaza regarding the resistance ‘victory’ over Israel? To be truly fathomed, they must be understood in context.
Soon after the ceasefire declaration on 26 August, ending Israel’s most …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 3rd, 2014
Can we make anything of what, according to The Independent, is one of “the biggest celebrity hacks of all time”? Celebrities who crow and drape themselves over each other for the next ghastly “selfie” rush to lawyers and authorities when their fleshier items are revealed. Starring in the list of photos hacked from Apple’s iCloud service are images of Jennifer Lawrence, Mary E. Winstead and Kirsten Dunst. The website 4Chan proved to be a happy recipient.
Members of the public might struggle to understand how celebrity privacy could ever be viable. After all, the likes of Mark Zuckerberg suggest that …
by Walter C. Uhler / September 2nd, 2014
In its editorial titled, “Mr. Putin Tests the West in Ukraine” (28 August 2014), the New York Times excoriated President Vladimir Putin for playing “his dangerous game in Ukraine with cunning and deceit since the ouster in February of the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych lost him a president he could manipulate.” Relying on intelligence provided by NATO, the Times accused Mr. Putin of ordering a “significant escalation” in Russia’s military “interference” in Ukraine.
Many Western analysts believe Russia’s “significant escalation” explains why the separatists in Eastern Ukraine were able to halt their near encirclement by Ukraine’s army and launch a counterattack …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 2nd, 2014
Some historians see the period between 1914 and 1945 as the replication of another Thirty Years War. There was the illusion of peace between 1919 and 1939 – the failed efforts of the League of Nations (that failure is still misunderstood), attempts to outlaw war and attempts to construct a viable international system controlled by mild dispute resolution. But the war system was simply too alluring as a means of redressing grievances. The seeds sown in the trenches of the First World War flowered in toxic blooms for the Second.
The battles being waged across the scarred landscape of the Middle …
by Jonathan Cook / September 2nd, 2014
I have noted in several previous articles the unusual, possibly unique, problem relating to media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reporting corps is awash with “partisan reporters” – that is, Jews who have an ideological, social or familial connection and sympathy with one side, the Israeli side.
I have no objection to reporters having views, even strong ones, about this conflict, or any other issue in the news. I do myself. In fact, I believe journalists cannot be “objective”, as I have explained at length elsewhere. But in the case of Israel-Palestine, many reporters are being chosen precisely for their partisanship – and these reporters are …
