To confront the climate emergency we need to dismantle the WTO and the free trade regime

Click here to access article from La Via Campesina.

Launched in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) completed the Bretton Woods trio with the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in promoting neoliberalism and corporate globalization. The WTO was particularly special in its power to legally enforce and penalize countries, taking away the policy space of governments, and on several occasions, forcing them to change their national laws in order to implement global free trade rules.










The article provides examples of how international trade agreements usurp local control of the economy. It also shows what policies are needed to promote a healthy, ecologically sustainable economy. However, it fails to identify the system of capitalism which of necessity promotes harmful policies. In spite of this omission the article reaches a sound, although rather vague conclusion:

To really address the climate crisis, a world without the WTO and the FTAs, one that is not dominated by transnational corporations and the global free trade regimes, is necessary! We have to change the system, and we have to do this now.

Is climate change already dangerous? Part 1

Click here to access article by David Spratt from Climate Code Red.

This is a first installment in an unknown number of series that tries to determine if the human race is already "screwed" due to their extravagant use of fossil fuels and other assaults on the Earth's ecosystem.

In a compelling survey, this report answers the question many are afraid to ask: is climate change already dangerous?

This science survey measures the current manifestations and impacts of climate change against the "safe boundaries" metric; surveys the literature on tipping points and non-linear climate events; and provides a detail study of significant recent events in the Arctic.

Controlling the Flow: Thoughts on the Free Flow of Information Act

Click here to access article by Tricia Todd from The Huffington Post.

While many Mainstream Media outlets support the law, it does little to benefit the freelancers who frequently provide robust coverage of under-reported stories. Further, it specifically targets those who publish in what some members of Congress would deem questionable outlets, such as watchdog groups or independent blogs.

This discusses a key piece of legislation before Congress that could mark a major turning point in the control of information that we now have access to. This law might be an effort at constructing a noose to hang many independent journalists and others like myself who pass on their reports. 

This proposed legislation is another illustration of how constitutional guarantees can be rather easily subverted by the ruling class whenever they are seen as impediments to their rule. In this case we might see a direct assault on constitutional guarantees of press freedom. In most cases unconstitutional actions are engaged in through various means such as government secrecy, control of major media, persecution of leakers, even targeted assassinations of journalists (see this, this, and this), control of courts, and international agreements such as the so-called "free trade" agreements.

A Short History Of The War On Syria - 2006-2014

Click here to access article by Bernhard from his blog Moon of Alabama.

This very astute political analyst provides an excellent summary of the events leading up to this current crisis and the agreement, but he is a lot more optimistic than I am about the recent agreement between Russia and the US over Syrian chemical weapons to provide any kind of stable peace in the region.

The people of the United States have, for the first time in decades, stopped a war that their president wanted to pursue. That is a huge victory and a precedence. They should remember it well when the next manufactured war on this or that small country comes up. They have the power to stop it.

While the argument that the Obama administration needed and got a face-saving way out of their "red-line" attack on Syria because of a lack of public support, I think that there is far too much momentum behind the effort to destabilize Syria, and far too much at stake for the Empire's ambitions in this key area of the world to simply cease and desist from their plans. The directors of the Empire likely see this as only a temporary setback, and who knows what nefarious actions they will come up with to continue with their Middle East agenda.

The catastrophic management of catastrophe

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

...there will eventually have to be a point where the irresistible force of market fundamentalism runs up against the unmovable object of popular resistance. The social collision course upon which the ruling elite has embarked is now playing out in front of our very eyes. A global class war is unfolding.

Well, I agree, but it seems likely to me that it will be too late to save an ecosystem capable of sustaining human life.

Syrian Complexities And The Geopolitical Context – Analysis

Click here to access article by Zaakir Ahmed Mayet from The Palestine Chronicle. 

The world seems to be spiraling out of control. As murder, death and wanton destruction becomes the order of the day; these realities are demonstrated in Syria. The mass slaughter occurring within the borders of Syria appeals to the humanitarian in most, except for those that seek to rain cruise missile democracy upon the Syrian populous.

The author carefully follows the evidence related to Syria's internal war and finds that the trail leads to Israel and Zionist regional ambitions.

Washington maneuvers in Syrian negotiations to lay groundwork for war

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

The author lays out the evidence which supports the view that Western and Zionist forces are intent on using the current Syrian peace negotiations in order to provide a pretext for an attack.

Referring to a French resolution regarding Syrian chemical weapons, the author writes:

The resolution is designed to create a series of triggers for military attack. Like similar conditions imposed on the government of Saddam Hussein before the US invasion of Iraq, it aims at forcing the Syrian government to prove the impossible, that it is not hiding a single chemical weapon within its territory, and creates the conditions for riding roughshod over the country’s sovereignty in order to better prepare a war for regime change.

No More War for Israel?: The People Against the 800 Pound Gorilla

Click here to access article by Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone from CounterPunch.

An American friend who knows Washington well recently told us that “everybody” there knows that, as far as the drive to war with Syria is concerned, it is Israel that directs U.S. policy. Why then, we replied, don’t opponents of war say it out loud, since, if the American public knew that, support for the war would collapse?

Chemical weapons arsenals and the hidden truths about the "Convention"

Click here to access article by Manlio Dinucci from VoltaireNet. 

The hammering by politicians and the corporate media about chemical weapons use in Syria, which, according to secret CIA "evidence" was used by government forces, has generated the widespread false impression that it is only Syria that now possesses such weapons and threatens the rest of the world with them. That’s the power of the weapon of mass distraction....

Labor Leaders, Obamacare, and the Fate of the Unions

Click here to access article by Shamus Cooke from Workers Action.

A funny thing happened a couple of months ago: labor leaders finally awoke from their coma and realized that Obamacare was not only bad for unions, but for working families in general.

Once the biggest salespeople of the bill’s passage, union leaders are suddenly full of rage and “shock” at the realities of Obamacare.

China stitches up (SCO) Silk Rd

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

... we have to come back to the ultimate adage of the times; while the (Washington) dogs of war bark, the (Chinese) caravan does deals.

While the Empire threatens more chaos in the Middle East, Escobar reports on all the quiet developments in Eurasia focusing on the Chinese capitalists to create an infrastructure...

..."economic belt along the Silk Road" is a supremely ambitious, Chinese-fueled trans-Eurasian integration mega-project, from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea; a sort of mega free-trade zone. Xi's rationale seems to be unimpeachable; the belt is the home of "close to 3 billion people and represents the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential".

And the Chinese and Russians are increasingly seeing the need to collaborate to counter the imperial designs of the West. While such plans are seemingly motivated to create a "multi-polar" world, you can be certain that the future will be see deadly inter-capitalist rivalries just as we witnessed in the horrors of the 20th century world wars. Capitalist competition never remains in a benign state. Chinese and Russian capitalists are no more moral than our own or what we saw from fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 20th century. That is precisely why the US Empire is now doing everything it can to thwart the plans of these rivals.

As ordinary people across the world, if we continue to be used as pawns in the rivalries between various capitalist gangs, we can only expect more wars with greater devastation, and the inevitable clash with our planet's ecosystem that is capable of sustaining human life.

Defeating AIPAC Starts with Syria

Click here to access article by Philip Giraldi from AntiWar.

AIPAC operates with a budget exceeding $50 million and has several hundred full time staff. Let there be no mistake about what the organization is and what it stands for: it wants the United States to start what almost certainly would quickly escalate into a major war on behalf of another country as a prelude to yet another war against yet another Middle Eastern country.

Rania Masri and Chris Hedges On Obama's Syria Address

Click here if you wish to access the transcript of part 1 of this interview from Real News Network. 



Part 2 of 2 of this interview:

Repression and Violence in Honduras Do Not Just Happen--They Are Policy

Click here to access article by Dana Frank from Rights Action. (This post was forwarded to me from Rights Action, a humanitarian group working for social justice in Honduras and Guatemala.)

I receive postings like this constantly from sources in Central America. Honduras and Guatemala are disasters as societies, and have been made that way with the close supervision of US and Canadian authorities. Occasionally liberals in Congress make moralistic noises about the many human rights crimes and civil rights violations against indigenous and opposition groups by multi-national corporations operating there or by the Honduran and Guatemalan militaries, but nothing is ever done to hold them accountable. News of these violations are rarely reported in US media with an occasional exception as we see here in this guest article published by the Miami Herald.

The (farcical) emperor is naked

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.

In this article Escobar shows real insight on the fake government that millions are led to believe governs the US while pointing at the real people who manage the puppets from behind the screen of corporate media. However, it appears that fooling people is getting harder and harder.

It's as if Dick Cheney had never left the building; paperboy Barack is Dick Cheney with a ''human'' face. The only good outcome in this multi-sorrowful tale is that the real ''international community'', all around the world, has seen the naked Emperor in all its (farcical) glory.

Kevin Ryan Exposes “Another 19″ 9/11 Suspects

Click here to access the 44:53m audio interview with Kevin Ryan by James Corbett.

Author Kevin Ryan's research has come up with another list of  9/11 suspects who had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry off the 9/11 operation.

9/11 researcher Kevin Ryan...joins us once again to discuss his new must-read book, “Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects.” We discuss some of the individuals and corporations identified in his book and those who have helped to cover up investigations of them, as well as what works like this can accomplish and where the 9/11 truth movement should head from here.

Also, you might be interested in this 45:07m video which suggests that much of what we saw on TV during and following 9/11 might have been a Photoshop-type production.

Too Many Years Of Lies from Mossadeq to 9/11

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his website.

The plutocracy through their corporate propaganda organs commemorates 9/11 today so that you will never forget that we are are constantly threatened and must pursue wars of self-defense and humanitarianism indefinitely. Besides, it's good for the stock market, and the stock market is good for America.

I hear some doubters out there who claim that the true story will inevitably come out about 9/11. Ha, ha. Well yes, but you will have to wait a bit.

If 60 years is the time that must pass before Washington’s crimes can be acknowledged, the US government will admit the truth about September 11, 2001 on September 11, 2061. 

Russia Throws Obama a Life Preserver on Syria

Click here to access article by Jim Lobe from Inter Press Service. 

With President Barack Obama facing increasingly certain defeat in his quest for Congressional authorisation to carry out military strikes against Syria, the Russian government Monday appeared to offer the White House a way out of the crisis.

Seizing on what seemed to be an offhand remark by Secretary of State John Kerry during a London press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pledged that Moscow would support any effort to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control and eventually destroy them.

The "offhand remark"?

“Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week – turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting,” ... “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

Why the US, UK, EU & Israel hate Syria

Click here to access article by Adrian Salbuchi from RT. 

A young, soft-spoken girl living the Syrian tragedy spells it out with far more common sense, truth and honesty than powerful Western governments and their money-controlled mass media puppets.









In this article the author expands on comments made by her in a YouTube video in which she cited “eight reasons why the NWO (New World Order) hates Syria.” 

Also, you might want to watch her and her friend debate so-called "Free Syrian Army" advocates on an Australian TV political program. 

By viewing her YouTube videos you will learn a lot about Syria that is never reported in corporate media.

Does your local government have a “black budget” too?

Click here to access article by Matthew Cagle from American Civil Liberties Union.

As we learn more about the US intelligence community's top secret, multi-billion dollar "Black budget" and how the NSA pays technology companies to comply with the Prism spying program, another mostly unnoticed pipeline moves billions of federal surveillance dollars from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to local governments for dragnet surveillance systems that include video camera networks, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and even drones and tanks.