The New York Times vs. Russia’s “White Book": Part One
by Walter C. Uhler / May 9th, 2014
Daily examination of the online headlines and news links found on the Kyiv Post allows any disinterested observer to conclude that it is a propaganda bullhorn for the provisional government; the one installed after the duly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted in a violent anti-Russian coup. Thus, it was hardly a surprise when, on May 6, the propaganda bullhorn published an article of opinion by Oleh Tiahnybok that was riddled with rubbish.
Mr. Tiahnybok is the leader of Svoboda, a right-wing party that captured 38 seats and 10 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections and …
What are the signs that an institution is clinically insane? For over thirty-five years I have been trying to persuade psychological and psychiatric specialists and their professional associations to take up this serious subject for study and corrective suggestions. Alas, to no avail. They are totally occupied with the mental health of individuals.
One symptom of institutional insanity is when the mass media repeatedly goes wild covering offensive words, while ignoring systemic offensive deeds that reflect those words. In 2009, Donald Sterling, owner of the NBA Los Angeles Clippers, settled for $2.725 million with the Department of Justice for unlawfully excluding …
“Live free or die” is the motto of the state of New Hampshire. I hope the residents are prepared to die, because living free is not what they do. NH is merely a cog within the Amerikan Stasi State, but I am referring to what goes on within NH itself, not the police state existence imposed by Washington. On May 5 attorney William Baer was arrested at a school board meeting at which he went over a 2-minute speaking rule while trying to get some explanation from the Gilford, NH, school board for assigning sexually explicit reading material to …
Support Kerry and Return to Pointless Negotiations
by Stuart Littlewood / May 9th, 2014
Britain’s Foreign Office, presided over by William Hague, has come up with the most fatuous response so far to the collapse of the latest peace talks stage-managed, as always, by Israel’s partner in crime, America. Here it is……..
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Foreign Affairs Council/General Affairs Council
The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington):
7 May 2014
Middle East Peace Process
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [Agent Hague] will attend the Foreign Affairs Council on 12 May, and I will attend the General Affairs Council on 13 May. The Foreign Affairs Council will be chaired by the …
Chris Hedges, a columnist for the Truthdig web site, recently wrote the following regarding the dismissal of a lawsuit (Hedges v. Obama) that he had brought:
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government …
Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
—George Orwell
Rise to Prominence
Anne-Marie Slaughter had a successful academic career at elite institutions. After receiving degrees from Princeton, Harvard Law, and Oxford, she taught law at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. She was the first woman Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Slaughter is currently President of the New America Foundation, a centrist DC think tank (Google’s Eric Schmidt is chairman of the board of directors which includes Fareed Zakaria, Steven Rattner, …
Ever heard of the International Monetary Conference? No, I’m not referring to the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank but rather to another, more secretive annual gathering – this one hosted by the American Bankers Association and bringing together chief executives from over 100 of the world’s largest banks.
Hailing primarily from Western Europe and North America, the banking chiefs meet for several days along with invited guests who hold prominent “public official” positions – major finance ministers and central bank governors among them. The meetings of the International Monetary Conference are notoriously private, with very little if …
On 30th April 2014, Saudi Arabia staged its largest-ever military exercises codenamed “Abdullah’s Shield” after the kingdom’s 91-year old ruler and coinciding with the ninth anniversary of his ascension to the throne. The exercises involved 130,000 Saudi troops and showcased some of the latest weapons purchased by the kingdom from the United States and China, including the Chinese CSS-2 intermediate-range ballistic missiles with a range of 2,650 kilometers (1,646 miles) which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The Chinese version of these missiles is already equipped with nuclear warheads. This was the first time that these missiles had …
by Clinton Kirby and Glenn Augenstein / May 8th, 2014
NOTE: This interview was conducted in late February 2014, before a sentencing hearing that was eventually postponed. Ms. McCulley was then sentenced to a year each of prison and probation on April 25, 2014. She is now requesting a Reconsideration of her sentence, and this request will be heard on May 8, 2014.
If you follow the news of foreclosure fraud and bad banks, you have certainly heard that on February 7, 2014, a Gallatin County, Montana jury awarded Ms. Mary McCulley an incredible $6 million verdict against US Bank of Montana, with $5 million of that figure being awarded for …
In Iraq there is an ongoing massacre. Below are the figures of the dead and wounded brought daily to just one hospital in the country’s largest governorate, Anbar Province, the Emergency Department of the Fallujah General Hospital, between 28th February 2014 and 7th May 2014.
They are the victims of the US-imposed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s militias.
The UN representative in Iraq is near silent, the varying Ambassadors in Iraq are silent, including those of the US and UK, whose actions and lies about fictional “weapons of mass destruction” are responsible for the ongoing, daily …
Now come on Wall Street don’t be slow, why man this war is a-go-go. There’s plenty good money to be made, supplying the army with the tools of the trade. Now come on generals let’s move fast, your big chance is here at last. Time you got out and get those Reds, because the only good commie is one that’s dead. You know that peace can only be won, when you blow ‘em all to kingdom come.
— Vietnam Song, Country Joe and the Fish, 1969
Corruption is strangling the land. The police force is watching the people, and the people just …
Think of any period in human history when empires and imperialism were common features of society, whether from ancient Egypt, Rome, China, to the Ottomans and the rise of the European and Japanese empires. There is an institution that – with few exceptions – was prevalent across most imperial societies: the family dynasty.
In a world dominated by institutions – organized hierarchically and embedded with their own functions and ideologies – the ‘family unit’ is very often the first and most important institution in the development of individuals. For the rich and powerful, the family unit has been the principal institution …
a whole lot of writing going on, but no more shaking . . . rattling the cages
I’ll get to the school and the yard and the fights in a minute. But . . . .
Okay, a guest on the “alternative radio show” in Portland, KBOO-FM.
Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Micah Uetricht, author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. Uetricht explains why the struggle of teachers in Chicago should matter to all of us. The Chicago Teachers Union strike was the most important domestic labor struggle so far this century—and perhaps for the last forty years—and …
Not since the US and EU took over Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, East Germany, Poland, and the Balkans and converted them into military outposts of NATO and economic vassals, have the Western powers moved so aggressively to seize a strategic country, such as the Ukraine, posing an existential threat to Russia.
Up until 2013 the Ukraine was a ‘buffer state’, basically a non-aligned country, with economic ties to both the EU and Russia. Ruled by a regime closely tied to local, European, Israeli and Russian based …
The British government’s policy to rid England’s cattle of bovine TB by culling badgers is unravelling, falling to pieces bit by embarrassing bit as more information is disclosed. Last year’s pilot culls were meant to test whether killing badgers by controlled shooting would be “effective, humane and safe”. Not safe for badgers but for the public trying to prevent the killing.
So ineffective has it been that the government has decided not to allow any independent monitoring of this year’s culls, a decision which may just get the British Veterinary Association off its fence and withdraw its backing for …
Shortly after the signing of the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993, the Jerusalem Post ran a cartoon that depicted a critical aspect of those accords which has rarely been discussed much less acknowledged. In the cartoon, a smiling Yasser Arafat was sitting upright on a stretcher giving a “V” sign. The stretcher bearers were Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
Its message was clear: the Oslo agreement had come to the rescue of the PLO chairman whose reputation among his fellow Palestinians had sunk to the bottom of the barrel. The price …
WASHINGTON, May 6 2014 (IPS) — The head of the U.N. team that investigated the August 21, 2013 Sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, Ake Sellstrom, is doubtful about the number of victims of the attack reported immediately after the event.
Sellstrom has suggested that many people who claimed to have been seriously affected by Sarin merely imagined that they had suffered significant exposure to the chemical.
Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.
Underlying Sellstrom’s doubts are data on symptoms from a …
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Unalienable Rights. Self-evident Rights. You might say the modern definition of Human Rights springs directly from that unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. You probably wouldn’t be given much of an argument.
President Obama on healthcare. “Well, I think it should be a right for every American.” Obviously healthcare as a right isn’t self-evident to President Obama.
Why Jerry Brown’s Rainy Day Fund Is a Bad Idea for California
by Ellen Brown / May 6th, 2014
There is no need to sequester funds urgently needed by Main Street to pay for Wall Street’s malfeasance. Californians can have their cake and eat it too – with a state-owned bank.
Governor Jerry Brown is aggressively pushing a California state constitutional amendment requiring budget surpluses to be used to pay down municipal debt and create an emergency “rainy day” fund, in anticipation of the next economic crisis.
On the face of it, it is a sensible idea. As long as Wall Street controls America’s finances and our economy, another catastrophic bust is a good bet.
Getting off the Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Terminal, I immediately saw a man in his mid 50’s digging through a garbage can. With his right hand, he held a plastic tray on which were placed whatever edible scraps he could find. Lickable flecks clung to his ample brown beard. Chewing while scavenging, he was quite leisurely with his task and no one among the many people sitting or standing nearby paid him any attention. Done with one trash can, he moved to the next, and since there were so many in this huge building, I imagined his daily …
Sometimes it just takes one person with a creative mind to shake up the entire legal system. In the case of Costa Rica, that person is Luis Roberto Zamorra Bolaños, who was just a law student when he challenged the legality of his government’s support for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He took the case all the way up to the Costa Rican Supreme Court—and won.
Today a practicing lawyer, Zamorra at 33 still looks like a wiry college student. And he continues to think outside the box and find creative ways to use the courts to fuel his passion for …
To ensure the Internet is open to all on an equal basis we must act now to prevent mega-corporations from destroying Internet Freedom
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 5th, 2014
Update: Actions every day starting on Wednesday, May 7th, at noon and 5 pm. To Save The Internet, we are building a People’s Firewall against the FCC’s proposed rule that will create a ‘pay to play’ Internet by ending net neutrality. The FCC is located at 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20554.
If we act NOW, we can ensure a free, open and equal Internet for the 21st Century. On Wednesday, May 15 the FCC will vote on a proposal to end net neutrality and impose class-based Internet discrimination, but we have the power to stop them.
MSNBC’s slogan, “Lean Forward,” does not encourage actually moving forward
The central argument of Michael’s Arria’s lively new book about America’s so-called “progressive network” is not that MSNBC is bad at what it does, but that, all too often, even what MSNBC does well doesn’t do much good for most Americans. As Arria puts it in the introduction of Medium Blue (a spring 2014 release by CounterPunch Books):
This book doesn’t possess a hidden agenda. It’s an attack on MSNBC from the left, an attempt to highlight and track the problematic ties between the …
Let me preface these new thoughts by stating that what another billionaire says or does because he feels ‘above the rest of we serfs‘ is never surprising to me. What Don Sterling, owner of the Clippers basketball team, said and implied is murmured to this writer many times by many people… always in either whispers or in secure settings. Racism is alive and well in Amerika, as it always has been since our founding. What cracks me up is how much television and radio time is reserved for this latest “major scandal”. One can understand the sports media jumping all …
The war and occupation of Afghanistan by US-led forces has gone on for almost thirteen years. The current war was preceded by another twenty-three or so years of war; first between the Soviets and US-funded mujahedin and then between the various mujahedin factions, with the final result of that episode of war being the triumph of the Taliban. That brings us up to October 2001 when US forces attacked Afghanistan for harboring Osama bin Laden. The Taliban were vanquished, with many being killed, many captured and most of the rest going back to their previous lives while Washington put its …
When Prime Minister David Cameron pulls a stunt or announces a “ground breaking” new policy, it is pretty well guaranteed to backfire. Indeed, his coalition government policy U-turns are heading for encyclopedic.
Is he opportunistic, spineless – a lethal combination of the two – or something less sinister? In opposition, to prove his “green credentials” he headed to the Arctic for a photo-op with Huskies, leaping “aboard a Husky-powered sled to visit a remote Norwegian glacier to see first hand the effects of global warming.” As the (UK) Telegraphput it at the time: “Cameron turns blue to prove …
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / May 2nd, 2014
Preamble
Over the past few years, we have written a series of articles about the global crisis. ((See, for example, Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2008. Contours of Crisis: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil? Dollars & Sense, December 29.
Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2009. Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality. Dollars & Sense, April 28.
Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2010. Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism. Monograph, Jerusalem and Montreal (July): 1-42.
Kliman, Andrew, Shimshon Bichler, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2011. Systemic Crisis, Systemic Fear: An Exchange. Special Issue on ‘Crisis’. Journal of Critical Globalization Studies (4, …
Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.
One is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup. These areas of Ukraine are former constituent parts of Russia herself. They were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century when both Ukraine and Russia were …
Over the last 25-30 years Sweden’s military, security and foreign policy elite has changed Sweden’s policy 180 degrees.
These fundamental changes were initiated by the Social Democratic government under Goran Persson and foreign minister Anna Lindh and have been carried through virtually without public debate.
The rapprochement with interventionism, militarism and US/NATO in all fields has been planned, incremental, furtive and dishonest; in short, unworthy of a democracy.
This elite is more loyal with Brussels and Washington than with the Swedes.
If your image of Sweden is that it is a progressive, innovative and peace-promoting country with a global mind-set …
