Unfortunately, given the way this I.R.S. scandal slid so easily into ideological definitions, I fear that few non-politicos are recognizing the real disgrace here: that the federal government—Congress, the White House, the tax agency, and the Supreme Court—has created a situation where blatantly political organizations are able to legally break the law by pretending they’re something that they’re not.
It is the job of journalism not only to report what authorities say, but also to confirm their claims, and address anomalies, errors, inconsistencies, outright lies, and cover-ups, large and small.
When it comes to falsehoods of all types, we’ve seen plenty of doozies, and you don’t have to go all the way back to the Tonkin Gulf incident—which helped pave the way for the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Most people now understand that circa 2002-2003, the George W. Bush Administration knowingly exaggerated and deceived in order to justify a desired invasion of Iraq.Baker is an investigative journalist who, like myself, is appalled by the collusion of mainstream media with official government sources regarding the event. In this Orwellian time that we are now living in, corporate media has become nothing more than a propaganda organ of the ruling capitalist class.
Two years after the failed NATO intervention, Libyan society is in chaos. Over 50,000 were killed in a mission that was meant to protect civilians, and there are reportedly more than 1,700 competing militias marauding the streets. One outcome of this chaos was the attack on U.S. mission in Benghazi which led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens on September 11, 2012. There have been Congressional hearings on this attack....But, are we of the 99 Percent learning anything of value from these hearings? Campbell thinks not.
...these hearings did not come close to the real questions that should be posed to David Petraeus: what role did the use of Benghazi as a CIA station for the training of Jihadists play in the attack?
The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America's innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.
Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan.
One of the world’s leading climate scientists Dr James Hansen has warned British MPs that exploiting the tar sands and oil shale would make the problem of climate change “unsolvable”.Also, see this article entitled "Our Oil Addiction Ignores CO2 Milestone" posted on the same website and by the same author.
...scientists have called the 400-ppm threshold a sobering milestone which should serve as a wake-up call for all of us to support clean-energy and reduce our dependence on oil. But the ripple the milestone caused last week has quietly passed. It is back to business as usual.
Everywhere you look our addiction continues unabated. One of the world’s leading universities, Oxford has since announced a £6 million tie up with global oil giant Shell.
In a sign of how far the forces of enclosure have come, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that re-using seeds that are patented, knowingly or not, amounts to an act of piracy. Of course, re-using seeds has been the tradition in agriculture for millennia, just as re-using songs and text is an essential element of culture.
No matter. The masters of "intellectual property" hold the whip hand, and they don't want us to re-use and share seeds as the natural course of things. If you think that a farmer ought to be able to use the seeds from one crop in the next season, you are entertaining illegal ideas.
Several thinkers whose names have since faded from memory were, back then, innovators in formulating the ecological critique of industrial capitalism that we take for granted today. Among them were Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), René Dubos (1901-82) and Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).
They have, Brian Morris argues, been forgotten too quickly. At a time when we are still struggling—intellectually, politically, and ethically—to grasp the reality of climate change, to face its implications, and to prevent it from getting worse (and in some cases even acknowledge its existence), the work of these three philosophers contains wisdom that is stimulating and germane. In Pioneers of Ecological Humanism, Morris has taken on task of demonstrating their intellectual stature and reaffirming their continued relevance.
How could Europe’s downtrodden youth ever possibly conceive of shaking the global financial order? It is to this impossible question that I will turn in my next post.
...the Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank.While mainstream US media plays up the persecution of the Tea Party theme, we have here an alternative report on what the real story is. I suspect that the widespread reporting of this manufactured scandal provides a useful distraction from the real scandal of government spying on the private communications of journalists.
The street protests conducted by Bersih have all the hallmarks of US-backed "color revolutions," and this recent attempt to overturn election results that do not favor an overt US-proxy, foreshadows the same destructive, divisive, violent, and regressive unrest that has plagued Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria after US-engineered uprisings have left each in turn destabilized, failed states overrun by extremists, dictators, and traitors many times worse than the governments activists sought to overthrow.I think that the headline should be stated as a question, however the article provides substantial evidence in the affirmative.
The decision last week by British physicist Stephen Hawking to abide by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel has predictably touched off a major controversy. While he has attracted many supporters, Hawking has also received a large degree of vitriol from certain pro-Israel quarters.Could Hawking be (shudder!) an anti-Semite, too? (sarcasm)
See the world through a different lens [with] Andrew Gavin MarshallOn the other hand, we might think about ourselves all getting a bit more powerful by reading his well-documented and well-reasoned material. (Some examples: this, this, and this.) This brilliant scholar, in contrast to media directors hired by the One Percent, has dedicated his life to unraveling the truth that they hide behind many layers of deception. He, no doubt, could earn a very comfortable income working in some academic institution writing obscure intellectual articles that served the interests of the One Percent. His dedication serves us by empowering us with knowledge about the real world so that we can create effective tools to re-arrange the organization of existing societies to serve OUR needs, not theirs.
Part children’s fable, part economic parable, Papelitos was written by Hernán Casciari, one of the rising stars of Argentinean literature, with the help of his eight-year old daughter Nina. It is a tale about how a small, idyllic village succumbs to the destructive influence of financial speculation, triggering asset bubbles and ultimately wealth destruction for most of its inhabitants.
Media groups and government watchdogs said the U.S. Justice Department interfered with press freedom when it secretly collected telephone records from Associated Press reporters and editors over a two-month period last year.Eric Draitser provides us with the more chilling implications of this incident in the last part of this 3:32m video from RT.
Two essential factors are driving the trampling of democratic rights and the shift towards authoritarian rule. The first is the massive growth of social inequality, which in turn is driven by the historic crisis of the world capitalist system. While it robs the population in order to pile up ever greater and more obscene levels of private wealth, the financial aristocracy is terrified of the emergence of social opposition. Not from a position of strength, but out of extreme fear and vulnerability, the billionaires look to police state repression as a means to preserve their status, power and wealth.
Second, just as democracy is incompatible with such levels of social inequality, it is incompatible with imperialist war. The US military and intelligence agencies have for twelve years been wading in blood in a drive to plunder the world's strategic resources. The dead, wounded and displaced number in the millions.
The status of the US dollar as the world reserve currency gives the US a number of advantages over other countries. The world’s most important commodities are priced and traded in dollars, even if most of these commodities are not produced in the US. The fact that the world’s financial system is based on the dollar allows the Federal Reserve to export inflation to other countries, while the Federal Government runs a huge deficit with impunity.This article provides a perfect segue to my yesterday's commentary in relation to Marshall's excellent study entitled "Large Corporations Seek U.S.–European 'Free Trade Agreement' to Further Global Dominance".
Corporations are undertaking unprecedented drives for the accumulation of profit and power, promoting agendas and projects which re-shape the world in their image, treating governments as toys, the environment as an enemy, and impoverishing populations around the world. We are witnessing a transnational social engineering project, driven by large corporations, aimed at facilitating economic, financial, political and social consolidation into their hands.
Welcome to the era of Cosmopolitical Corporate Consolidation and Colonization.
Perhaps then, the civil war has already begun.... Our lives becomeWhat I felt was especially valuable in the article is his description of how the Federal Reserve's policy of "quantitative easing", or expanding the money supply, is actually functioning.
changed and mutated by these experiences. A child born into wealth lives
in a far different life, a life filled with opportunities. While a
child born into this existence without wealth, is offered a life in the
new American, post industrial poverty, decorated with a continuous
subtle fear and a blankness of opportunity.
These are not the children of one America, but of two peoples.
The Washington Post lauded the intervention in Libya. The demise of Gaddhafi threw the country into deep chaos. The Washington Post is now working to instigate a like intervention in Syria. To be able to do so it has to hide the chaos in Libya.And, then Bernhard continues by reporting on the real chaos carefully omitted by this US "newspaper of record".
High levels of military spending played a key role in the unfolding European sovereign debt crisis — and continue to undermine efforts to resolve it.From all that I have read, it appears that the US spends even more on military items than all Europeans combined to insure the Empire's control over the world's markets and resources. And you can be dead-certain that no sequester cuts will occur for direct military weapons and supplies to continue and expand this control. Pentagon spending is so obscured--deliberately so--by "black budgets" that nobody knows what they really spend. David Vine has long made efforts to ascertain how much they spend, and this is what he concluded:
Wanting to figure out the real costs of garrisoning the planet myself, for more than three years, as part of a global investigation of bases abroad, I’ve talked to budget experts, current and former Pentagon officials, and base budget officers. Many politely suggested that this was a fool’s errand given the number of bases involved, the complexity of distinguishing overseas from domestic spending, the secrecy of Pentagon budgets, and the “frequently fictional” nature of Pentagon figures. (The Department of Defense remains the only federal agency unable to pass a financial audit.)You can be sure that the ruling capitalist class will not in any way be inconvenienced by such cuts: witness the quick exemption on cuts to air traffic control which was inconveniencing their travel. And likewise for Israel-firsters who are currently making efforts to exempt our generous "welfare" package to Israel (see this and this).
The ramping up of US military operations against Syria is accompanied by diplomatic efforts to bring about a post-Assad government on terms favorable to US imperialism. Secretary of State John Kerry has sought an agreement with Russia, which would pave the way for a power-sharing arrangement.