Latest articles
by Ron Forthofer / July 12th, 2014
U.S. transnational corporations are working behind the scenes to change the rules governing them. You may say ‘big deal, this doesn’t affect me’. However if you use the internet, view movies, take pharmaceuticals, want a clean and safe environment, believe in democracy, etc., you likely will be negatively impacted.
Media’s Failure to Inform
Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), based on the fatally flawed NAFTA model, currently involve twelve nations in the Pacific region and have been underway since 2010. Mainstream media’s coverage about these negotiations has been essentially nonexistent. When mentioned, the media reports that the negotiations are about trade instead …
by Ralph Nader / July 11th, 2014
Large corporate capitalism is a breed apart from smaller scale capitalism. The former can often avoid marketplace verdicts through corporate welfare, strip owner-shareholders of power over the top company bosses and offload the cost of their pollution, tax escapes and other “externalities” onto the backs of innocent people.
Always evolving to evade the theoretically touted disciplines of market competition, efficiency and productivity, corporate capitalism has been an innovative machine for oppression.
Take productive use of capital and its corollary that …
Part 4: Financial Institutions Fear Global Revolution
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 11th, 2014
In Part 1 of the WoR Report, I examined Zbigniew Brzezinski’s warnings to elites around the world of the “global political awakening” of humanity. In Part 2, I looked at the relationship between inequality and social instability, and in Part 3 I examined the World Economic Forum’s warnings of growing inequality and the “lost generation” of youth who pose the greatest threat to oligarchic interests around the world. In this fourth installment in the series, we turn to reports from top banks and financial institutions warning about the growing threats to their interests posed by an increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished population – …
by David Swanson / July 11th, 2014
In this latest assault on Gaza, Israel had by Thursday already killed 69 Palestinians including 22 children and 13 women, plus 469 wounded including 166 children and 85 women, and 70 houses destroyed. These numbers have since increased significantly.
In this video from Thursday on CNN, Jake Tapper interviews Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the PLO. After failing to persuade her of Israel’s complete innocence, he tells her that Hamas is instructing women and children to remain in their homes to die as Israel bombs them. She responds by expressing doubt that people want to die. …
Jon Snow of C4 News And Jeremy Bowen of BBC News
by Media Lens / July 11th, 2014
On July 4, Independence Day in the United States, Channel 4 News broadcast a Jon Snow interview with Hillary Clinton, former US Secretary of State and presumed presidential candidate. For a self-proclaimed ‘pinko liberal‘ like Snow, this was a glorious opportunity to ask hard-hitting questions about US foreign policy and Clinton’s own role in shoring up the American Empire.
In the event, the interview was largely a series of soft questions, culminating in a cosy epilogue about Clinton looking forward to being a granny. As John Hilley of the Zenpolitics blog observed, it was ‘a safely-moderated version [of …
Warocracy, Not Democracy
by Dr. Hakim / July 11th, 2014
Afghanistan Analysts Network reported on 9th July that “he (Abdullah Abdullah) told the crowd that he had received phone calls from both US President Barack Obama and State Secretary John Kerry and had been told that Kerry would make a stop-over in Kabul on Friday. It was clear he wanted see what could come of that.”
Abdullah Abdullah’s phone call with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry who arrived in Kabul today, shows that it is the U.S. government, and not Afghans, who run this country. This is Amerikistan, not Afghanistan.
Even U.S. Senator Carl Levin has chipped in with …
by Dave Lindorff / July 11th, 2014
MUNICH — You have to wonder how much more the German public will take of the country’s ongoing humiliation by the United States and its extensive program of secretly spying on what nominally is one of America’s most reliable allies.
The latest scandal involves the discovery of a CIA mole working in the highest reaches of Germany’s Defense Ministry. This exposé follows, by less than a week, the arrest of another US spy in Germany’s own intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtsdienst (BND).
Yesterday, the German government ordered the expulsion of the CIA station chief in Berlin because of the discovery of the two …
by Ko Tha Dja / July 11th, 2014
Recently the Burmese government told the United States to mind its own business and not interfere with its political maneuverings amending the Burmese constitution. In exchange, the Burmese government told the United States it will do likewise and not interfere with constitutional and political issues in the United States. Fair is fair, after all.
Such a rebuttal to the United States reveals the aims of the Burmese civilitary government that retains twenty-five percent of its parliamentarians who are military officers. They are not moving aside for Aung San Suu Kyi voluntarily. Their so-called “opening” to the outside world, some have suspected, …
by James Hoover / July 11th, 2014
Over hundreds of millions of years, Earth and all living things have tolerated five mass extinctions, one of which wiped out over 90% of living things. You might say that such happenings are part of natural processes and beyond the control of Earth’s occupants, but humankind’s ascendency over what is seen as our kingdom defies, maybe even defiles, that judgment.
That over 90% of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct might elicit mild shock among the disengaged, for such events occurred over a 500 million year span, a very small part of which humans have had body …
by Graham Peebles / July 10th, 2014
Faced with a brutal repressive regime, the people of Ethiopia inside the country and within the worldwide diaspora –frustrated, angry and desperate – are considering alloptions to elicit fundamental change in the country.
The EPRDF, who seized power from the communist Derg in 1991, rule the country through fear and intimidation. Development aid, including food and other essentials, is distributed in a partisan manner, so too employment opportunities. The Government’s human rights record is appalling and an arsenal of ambiguous, universally condemned legislation is used to control and suppress the populace. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) the “deeply flawed” …
“Operation Protective Edge”
by Felicity Arbuthnot / July 9th, 2014
Yet another massive assault on Palestine is underway, where, of course, according to the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish population are guests not occupiers since: “ …the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of (this) it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …”
Overnight (July 8th/9th), however, one hundred and sixty targets were initially hit, including the European Gaza Hospital (a war crime without a war.) Twenty-eight people were …
by Harry J. Bentham / July 9th, 2014
Literature has served an indispensable purpose in exploring ethical and political themes. This remains true of sci-fi and fantasy, even if there is such a thing as reading too much politics into fictional work or over-analyzing.
Since Maquis Books published The Traveller and Pandemonium, a novel authored by me from 2011-2014, I have been responding as insightfully as possible to reviews and also discussing the book’s political and philosophical themes wherever I can. Set in a fictional alien world, much of this book’s 24 chapters are politically themed on the all too real human weakness of infighting and …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 9th, 2014
As Iraq stands on the verge of a complete breakdown into mini sectarian states, former leading neoconservative and Iraq war advocate Richard Perle made a sudden appearance on Newsmax TV. His statements in the interview were yet another testament to the intellectual degeneration of a group that had once promised a ‘new Middle East’, only to destabilize the region with violent consequences that continue to reverberate until this day.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which didn’t exist at the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, has seized large swathes of Syria and, along with …
by Walter C. Uhler / July 9th, 2014
Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III, edited by Stephen Lendman (Clarity Press, May 2014), was rushed into print in order to capitalize on the current crisis there. Thus, the book has flaws and redeeming qualities.
The book’s introduction and 24 chapters are uneven in quality; ranging from rants to hurried sketches to documented scholarship. Although some writers contradict others, the chapters are uniformly liberal in their point of view; which is to say that the neo-Nazis and oligarchs in Ukraine, the neoconservatives, liberal interventionists and predatory capitalists in the United States, as well …
Israelis, not Palestinians, Excel at Vengeance
by Jonathan Cook / July 9th, 2014
Shock and anger have engulfed Israeli and Palestinian societies since they learnt last week of the barbarous murder of children from their communities. Hours after three Israeli teenagers’ bodies were located, long after their abduction, a Palestinian youth, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped, beaten and burnt to death, apparently as revenge.
These horrifying events should serve as a lesson in the obscene futility of vengeance. As a relative of one of the murdered children observed: “There is no difference between blood and blood.”
Sadly, that was not the message implicit in much of last week’s coverage. On social media, a juxtaposition of …
by Kathy Kelly / July 9th, 2014
During my recent visit to Gangjeong, on Jeju Island, South Korea, where a protest community has struggled for years to block construction of a U.S. military base, conversations over delicious meals in the community kitchen were a delightful daily event. At lunchtime on my first day there I met Emily and Dongwon, a young and recently married couple, both protesters, who had met each other in Gangjeong. Emily recalled that when her parents finally travelled from Taiwan to meet her partner, they had to visit him in prison.
Dongwon, who is from a rural area of South Korea, had visited Gangjeong …
Kill People, Kill the planet – Whatever Makes a Big Profit is Cool
by William Boardman / July 8th, 2014
John Kasich is a smart guy who knows better than to be an overt serial killer, so, as Governor of Ohio, he joins with others who prefer to do their mass killing by stealth, maybe spread the carnage out over future generations, who will be unable to hold the Kasiches and the ALECS of this world to account. Ever. However long that turns out to be.
This is not to single out Republican Gov. Kasich as the worst environmental monster in office (current term 2011-2015). On the contrary, his behavior seems rather centrist in the context of contemporary American …
Part 2: Interview with filmmaker Scott Noble
by Kim Petersen / July 8th, 2014
This is the continuation of an interview (see Part 1) with filmmaker Scott Noble based on his documentary series Counter-Intelligence. Noble’s films can be viewed for free online at metanoia-films.org.
*****
Kim Petersen: Part III of the series, “Strategy of Tension” gives an extensive listing of false flags from Israel’s Susannah, Gladio in Italy, and Phoenix in Viet Nam. False flags serve the function of allowing aggressor states to portray themselves as victims. Explain the false flag.
Scott Noble: “False flag” has basically come to mean any event in which group A poses as group B in order to …
Snowden Should Refuse to Play “Alice in Wonderland”
by Kevin Zeese / July 8th, 2014
Edward Snowden submitting to prosecution in the United States, would be like Alice going into the courtroom in Wonderland.
Alice stood before the King and Queen of Hearts who served as the judges. Knaves were chained on the ground before them. The jurors, Alice realizes are ‘stupid things.’ The first witness against her was the Mad Hatter who is as mad as the culture he represents. The guinea pigs who protest are immediately “suppressed” by having the mouths tied up and being put into a bag and sat on by the King so their protests cannot be heard. The most important …
by Brian J. Trautman / July 8th, 2014
Last month the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report titled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” shedding much-needed light on the emergence of a militarist ethos in policing across the nation. In a review of public records, such as incident reports, requested from more than 260 law enforcement agencies in 25 states and the District of Columbia, the ACLU found that, from the responses received, 818 SWAT operations from 20 local law enforcement agencies located in 11 states fully met their research criteria, which took geographic diversity into account, among other factors. The SWAT …
by Gilad Atzmon / July 8th, 2014
In his latest article in The Nation, Noam Chomsky selectively cherry picks the facts that fit his preferred narrative, while ignoring and disguising relevant details that contradict his thesis. One would expect an academic of Chomsky’s stature to perform at a much higher standard of intellectual integrity.
Reviewing Chomsky’s latest criticism of the BDS reveals that the MIT linguist borders on deception. It is especially fascinating to examine Chomsky’s tactics in light of the current violent events in Israel/Palestine.
Chomsky writes, “The opening call of the BDS movement, by a group of Palestinian intellectuals in 2005, demanded that Israel …
by Bill Quigley / July 7th, 2014
Despite the July 4 tributes, millions of US soldiers and veterans are in serious trouble.
Twenty two veterans kill themselves every day according to the Veterans Administration. A study by the Los Angeles Times found veterans are more than twice as likely as other civilians to commit suicide. Suicides among full-time soldiers, especially among male soldiers, are also well above the national civilian rate. USA Today reported a suicide rate of 19.9 per 100,000 for civilian men compared to rates of 31.8 per 100,000 for male soldiers and 34.2 per 100,000 for men in the National Guard.
Over 57,000 …
Prime Minister David Cameron’s Inane Efforts to Boost the “No” Vote
by Lesley Docksey / July 7th, 2014
When I wrote about the approaching Scottish Referendum on independence, I didn’t expect such a huge reaction. All I wanted was to make clear the shame and embarrassment I personally felt, caused by the heavy-handed and idiotic efforts of the “Better Together” camp to persuade, browbeat and in some cases bribe, the Scots to vote against independence. Also, as an Englishwoman I had taken no sides; I simply acknowledged how much Scotland has to be proud of, and the rest of us to be grateful for.
Readers responded in their thousands. Why? Were these people with Scottish ancestry, now living …
Part 1: Interview with Filmmaker Scott Noble
by Kim Petersen / July 7th, 2014
Scott Noble is an extraordinarily productive filmmaker who has built up an impressive treasure trove of documentaries at Metanoia Films. The films deal with topics such as the plutocracy’s determination to entrench and maintain its power and wealth through myriad means — among them psychological ops, black ops, propaganda, disinformation, and more. Last year, after watching Counter-Intelligence which relates how the tentacles of espionage agencies have permeated governments and societies, domestically and abroad, I began an email interview exchange with Noble to flesh out further points raised in the film.
Kim Petersen: What was your goal in making Counter-Intelligence?
Scott …
by Bruce Clark / July 7th, 2014
The Regina Leader Post on July 3, 2014, published an article under the headline “African Leaders Award Themselves Immunity from Court of Justice”:
A pan-African court set up to prosecute the continent’s worst criminals will not be allowed to try sitting heads of state or their cronies after they voted to give themselves immunity.
The continent’s leaders agreed on their exemption at a closed-door session of an African Union (AU) meeting, then tried to bury the decision in an obscure paragraph of the post-summit communiqué.
The decision was a “backward step in the fight against impunity … and a betrayal of victims of …
by Robert Hunziker / July 7th, 2014
The major issues of the world include the recovery of economies from the Great Recession and regional wars for control of territories, like Iraq. Whereas, first and foremost, the leaders of the world should really be focused like a laser on the attendant risks of a complete meltdown of the Arctic, which is the canary in the mineshaft for the entire planet.
Territorial fighting in the Middle East and the Ukraine, when compared to an Arctic meltdown, is equivalent to playing with tinker toys.
In fact, taking another simile one step further, the ultimate consequence of an ice-free Arctic; i.e. the Venus …
by Daniel Borgström / July 7th, 2014
Sunday, June 29th was a warm sunny day which is never to be taken for granted in San Francisco, a perfect day for the annual Pride Parade. I got there at about 11 a.m. and made my way up Spear Street to the staging area of our unit, there to march in honor of our heroic WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
There were about 200 of us assembled for the Chelsea Manning contingent, including people from Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans, and other groups and individuals. Daniel Ellsberg was also there.
One person, Henry Johnson, whom I’d known from the Lake Merritt peace …
It's about Mind over Matter
by Anthony Lawson / July 6th, 2014
Ever since the three Israeli teenagers went missing, police and army units have besieged Palestinian towns and villages in the area; their houses and shops have been ransacked and atrocities have been committed; Gaza has been bombed, and the death toll is still rising, yet international leaders have remained largely silent, when they all know that such reprisals amount to collective-punishment which is a War Crime.
A young Palestinian boy, 16-year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir, was abducted and killed in a suspected revenge attack by Israelis on July 2. See how Britain’s prime minister reacted to his death.
http://youtu.be/ldS0UTc7XUo
As the Fed Runs Out of Bullets, Local Governments Are Stepping In
by Ellen Brown / July 6th, 2014
Mortgage debt overhang from the housing bust has meant lack of middle-class spending power and consumer demand, preventing the economy from growing. The problem might be fixed by a new approach from the Fed. But if the Fed won’t act, counties will, as seen in the latest developments on eminent domain and litigation over MERS.
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts wrote on June 25th that real US GDP growth for the first quarter of 2014 was a negative 2.9%, off by 5.5% from the positive 2.6% predicted by economists. If the second quarter also shows a decline, the …
Something Happened in February, Something is STILL Going On
by William Boardman / July 6th, 2014
Environmental radiation releases spiked again in mid-June around the surface site of the only U.S. underground nuclear weapons waste storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), has been shut down since February 14, when its isolation technology failed, releasing unsafe levels of Plutonium, Americium, and other radio-nuclides into the environment around the site.
Radiation levels in the underground storage area, 2,150 feet below the surface vary from near-normal to potentially lethal. At the time of the February accident, more than 20 WIPP workers suffered low level radioactive contamination, even though none …
