Tuesday 30 December 2008

Cynthia McKinney SLAMS Israeli Navy

Israel once again bullying others, utilizing vehicles and weaponry the US provides them.

The most moral military in the world? I don't think so.



May We No Longer Be Silent
By Paul Craig Roberts
30 December, 2008
Countercurrents.org

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church. The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.

more...

Monday 29 December 2008

Gaza massacre continues

The death toll is now at least 320, with over 1,000 people wounded. According to UNRWA at least 51 62 civilian women and children have been killed, an estimate that is “conservative and it is certainly rising”. In fact most of the casualities appear to be civilian police.

more...



Stop the Massacre in Gaza – Boycott Israel Now!

Occupied Ramallah, Palestine - 27 December 2008: Today, the Israeli occupation army committed a new massacre in Gaza, causing the death and injury of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including a yet unknown number of school children who were headed home from school when the first Israeli military strikes started. This latest bloodbath, although far more ruthless than all its predecessors, is not Israel 's first. It culminates months of an Israeli siege of Gaza that should be widely condemned and prosecuted as an act of genocide against the 1.5 million Palestinians in the occupied coastal strip.

more...

Eine Kleine Nacht Murder: How Israeli Leaders Kill for their People's Votes

In order to grasp the latest devastating murderous Israeli expedition in Gaza one must deeply comprehend the Israeli identity and its inherent hatred towards anyone who fails to be Jewish and a hatred against Arabs in particular. This hatred is imbued in the Israeli curriculum, it is preached by political leaders and implied by their acts, it is conveyed by cultural figures, even within the so-called 'Israeli Left’.

more...

from Palestine Think Tank

EU expresses 'grave concern' at Israeli attacks on Gaza

The European Union has expressed its "grave concern" at Israel's continuing attacks on the Gaza Strip that have killed close to 300 Palestinians and injured around 900, calling the airstrikes "unacceptable" and urging both sides to halt military actions.

more...

Sunday 28 December 2008

Sarkozy fears spectre of 1968 haunting Europe

As disparate but linked militant youth protests simultaneously erupt in a number of countries across the continent, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has retreated on two controversial pieces of domestic legislation out of fear that a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of 1968.

more...

Britain: A Country without Shame
Britain and US refuse to demand end to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza.

more...

Violent protests at Israeli Embassy in London

275 dead in Gaza, meanwhile in London we are shopping.

Israel used its measured diplomacy and murdered 275 civilians; Pakistan has sent thousands of troops to the Indian border, meanwhile in London people were fighting over....handbags.

Yes the stupid season is here once again folks. The Government has destroyed all sense and prudence by slashing interest rates so that those that did have some money in the bank have been punished, and those idiots who borrowed to the max are now the victors and are binging again on shopping they really didn’t need.

more...

Saturday 27 December 2008

Iranian President Ahmadinejad's 2008 Christmas Message Speech

Congratulations to Channel Four for risking the howls of tribal indignation it would provoke from the embedded mainstream media in giving air-time to one of the West's favourite hate figures.

Though I never waste my time with the platitudes of the Queen's X'mas Speech I thought it worth watching this one by the Iranian Prez. And I wasn't disappointed. Nor were a lot of others who choose to think for themselves despite the MSM's incessant stream of warmongering propaganda; and whose motives are exposed in the video below, Why we Fight.



Why we (the USUK) Fight



Thursday 25 December 2008


Big Brother
Secret gag orders undermine core Western values

"UK undermines core Western values"


WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE/EDITORIAL, December 24, 2008

British courts continue to disgrace Enlightenment values.

This month saw a secret UK court hearing, with secret participants, produce a secret order to secretly gag the population, the terms of which are secret and the revelation of which is punishable by up to 15 years of imprisonment. How many of these orders exist is unknowable--we glimpse at the severity of the problem only when the orders are violated.

Secret gag actions are usually associated with the likes of Saudi-Arabia, China or North Korea. Closed-door justice in the UK is not only detrimental to the state of British democracy, it permits repressive regimes across to point to the UK for validation.

It is time civil society treated such orders with the the contempt they deserve by releasing them for all to see.

Wikileaks previously released the gag order for the Northern Rock bank collapse, now we release the secret gag order made by High Court Justice Tugendhat on Dec 15, 2008 aimed at covering up an email leak from the British establishment. The secret order first targeted UK newspapers, but our copy was destined for the UK Parliamentary blogger 'Guido Fawkes', editor of 'order-order.com'. The summary states:

1. The identities of the Applicants/Claimants must remain confidential.
2. The fact of the existence of the Orders must remain confidential.
3. The terms of the Orders must remain confidential.

The order concerns emails from Zac Goldsmith, a noted 2005 Conservative party recruit, and social climber sibling Jemima Khan. Both are [heirs] to the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith. Needless to say there are no teachers, small business owners or technicians being granted secret media gag orders in the UK.

The order states that anyone who knows of the order must obey it, so plaintiff lawyers Carter Ruck have served the order on media outlets across the British Isles.

Britain is an increasingly dangerous Western disgrace, but you won't hear about it in the British press. The examples needed to elucidate just how the country is failing can not be mentioned, accelerating its decline.

In the last five years Britain has become the the world's largest arms exporter, the preferred home of Russian and middle-eastern oligarchs, the world center for "libel tourism" and, as far as we can tell, the Western capital of secret gag orders.

Only a week ago, on December 17, the High Court of London gave the go ahead for a libel tourism action against the New York Times.

The same day the Hon. Denis MacShane (Labour) with two MPs from other parties, told Westminster that UK courts had become a "Soviet-style organ of censorship".

The UK has recently introduced a national Internet censorship scheme, a national ID card and is about to spend 12 billion pounds pushing the British population's web-searches, emails, sms messages and telephone callings records through a central database run by its spy agency, GCHQ.

This month also saw British police go into Parliament, without a warrant, and rifle through the files of a senior member of the opposition, the Hon. Damian Green MP, who was alleged to have leaked trivial details about immigration policy to the press.

What's left? The Gulag?


Sunday 21 December 2008

YouTube Partners with MOSSAD

I know it sounds too weird to believe, but that's the news. YouTube now has on-board one of the US’s domestic branches of Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad. The ADL, the Mossad’s most "professional" organizations whose "speciality is spreading hate", are recruited as a professionals in the just struggle of "fighting against hate"?!

more...

Friday 19 December 2008


Barack Obama: The Naked Emperor


"I am writing this in the last days of 2008 as I watch with dismay as vast numbers of people across the world, including many who should know better, have been duped by the mind-game called Operation Obama.

Even people with some understanding of the conspiracy have said things like: 'Well, at least he's not Bush' and 'Well, at least it's great to see such a new spirit of hope'. No, he's not Bush - he's potentially far more dangerous; and what is the use of a spirit of 'hope' if it's based on a lie? In fact, what use is 'hope' at all?"

more...


Wishful thinking for 2009
The good news for the new year is as follows


January: Tony Blair is arrested at Heathrow Airport as he returns from yet another foreign speaking engagement (receipts since leaving office: £12m). He is flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes for his part in the illegal, unprovoked attack on a defenceless country, Iraq, justified by proven lies, and for the subsequent physical, social and cultural destruction of that country, causing the death of up to a million people. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, this is the "paramount war crime". The prosecution tells Blair's defence team it will not accept a plea of "sincerely believing". Cherie Blair, a close collaborator who has compared her husband with Winston Churchill, is cautioned.

more ...

Thursday 18 December 2008


Yes, we are all completely out of our minds

Does anyone else feel like asking the powers that be: “Excuse me, what exactly is going on? Where do you think you are taking us? Are you all completely out of your minds?

“Why else would you pretend not to notice that our civilization is systematically killing life on Earth?”

more...



Nobody threw shoes at Brown – but his guilt is still undeniable
The Prime Minister shares in the responsibility for the crime that is Iraq


"Throwing footwear at the front man for the perpetrator-in-chief, the limitlessly disgusting Dick Cheney, is a splendid way to express revulsion and let off steam. Next to sticking Messrs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Mr Tony Blair in a dock at The Hague, however, and banging them up for the rest of their days, it doesn't quite cut it.

In that naive but heartwarming fantasy, Gordon Brown would be in Holland with them. Any sane reading of collective responsibility, not to mention what Nuremberg decided about the efficacy of obedience to orders as a war crimes defence, would ensure that he and everyone else who rubber-stamped this neo-imperial adventurism take equal responsibility for the crime itself and for the horrors that stemmed from it."

more...

Did the shoe cause rebellion at Baghdad's July 14 Bridge?

Monday 15 December 2008

Bush attacked with Shoes!

Bush gives a Press Conference where he is attacked by a journalist throwing two shoes at him, the act being a particular nasty insult in the Arab world.

Considering that Bush is a mass-murderer and a war criminal he got off lightly ... this time. Please sign the petition in favour of the shoe-thrower, Muntather al-Zaidi, here.



Now read on ...

Thursday 11 December 2008


Al Qaeda does not exist and never has

The acceptance of the hoary old myth of Al Qaeda by those who oppose the government-led conspiracies concerning 911, the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, and the 'War on Terror' indicates just how deeply brainwashed we all are by the Bush propaganda.

Those who persist in referring to Al Qaeda as a terrorist entity are either ignorant of reality or are in some way part of the conspiracy to keep us all hoodwinked.

"The basic truth is that Al Qaeda does not exist and never has. Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy who was created by the Bush Administration in order to have an excuse to wage a war for the control of the world’s oil resources."

This article from the Pravda forum demolishes the myth ...

Thursday 4 December 2008


The Mumbai Attacks: More Than Meets the Eye

As details emerge about who was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week, the evidence points to a militant group and network of associates that can be linked to a number of intelligence agencies, including the ISI, the CIA, and MI6.

more...

New World Order



Wednesday 3 December 2008

Mumbai Terror Attack: Further Evidence Of The Anglo-American-Mossad-RSS Nexus

Andrew Marshall is a respected author; he is clearly saying here that terrorists looked like Anglo-American covert operatives and that the entire Mumbai operation was an attempt by Anglo-American forces to destabilize India and push it further into the Israel-US orbit.

more...



Monday 1 December 2008


India's 9/11. Who Really Was Behind The Mumbai Attacks?
Washington is Fostering Political Divisions between India and Pakistan

My readers will note that, apart from including an incisive comment from Deepak Chopra about the nature of terrorism, until now I have held back from commenting upon the recent Mumbai atrocities.

All along I have suspected that the news we were being fed about the Mumbai attacks had in it a strong aftertaste of disinformation. Most of the news we hear on the mainstream media is not to be trusted. The snip below, revealing how the US military is blatantly merging psyops with news releases in Afghanistan, is merely indicative of how the mainstream media is used to promote its imperialist wars and to bamboozle and pacify the public.

Now Michel Chossudovsky points to who may very well be the real culprits behind the Mumbai atrocity. Given the geopolitical interests of the USUK in this part of Asia Chossudovsky's article not only makes sense, it is very likely to be the truth ...

more...


US Psyops and Press Agencies to be Merged

If you thought you were being lied to about the war in Afghanistan here is definitive proof of how the US controls both NATO and its Press Office.

"What we are seeing is a gradual increase of American influence in all areas of the war," [a] NATO official said. "Seeking to gain total control of the information flow from the campaign is just part of that."

Thursday 27 November 2008

Ex-CIA Spy, Boris Korczak, speaks some home truths on World Events










Deepak Chopra: 'War on Terrorism' is an Oxymoron
CNN.com Asia, 26 November 2008

"It's interesting how it takes someone from a poor country, at the other end of the stick, [who] finds it so easy to describe the world exactly as it is, and yet we who hold the stick find his statement of the obvious "extraordinarily enlightening", as if it were cloaked in some kind of impenetrable mystery."

Medialens,
27/11/08


Chopra: I think Mr. Obama has a real opportunity here, but a challenging opportunity, a creative opportunity.

Get rid of the phrase "war on terrorism." Ask for a creative solution in which we all participate.

King: Is it because the war on terrorism really can never be won because the terrorists (inaudible)?

Chopra: Because it's an oxymoron. It's an oxymoron, Larry, a war on war, a war on terrorism.

You know, terrorists call mechanized death from 35,000 feet above sea level with a press of a button also terror. We don't call it that, because our soldiers are wearing uniforms. They don't see what is happening, and innocent people are being killed. So, you know, terror is a term that you apply to the other.

King: Thanks, Deepak Chopra, as always, extraordinarily enlightening.

Saturday 22 November 2008


Agents of war: How British papers did Bush's dirty work
Posted on MEDIALENS, November 22, 2008

Morning Star 21/11

SOLOMON HUGHES investigates how British papers did Bush's dirty work.

IF YOU or I told the editors of the Times, Telegraph or Sun that their coverage of the "war on terror" was just a lot of US Department of Defence propaganda, I am sure that they would say that we were crass and crude and conspiracy theorists to boot.

The intelligent and well-educated journalists on those newspapers would be proud to say that they swallowed all the lies about weapons of mass destruction and failed to see the truth of secret US torture camps entirely of their own accord.

Well, actually, it turns out that they were helped to these rotten conclusions over drinks and dinners in smart London clubs and the US Department of Defence picked up the tab.

Since 2003, the nominally private Policy Forum on International Affairs has invited British journalists to meet top US politicians in London clubs and restaurants.

However, the organisation, which introduced British editors and columnists to mostly neoconservative politicians who were arguing for the "war on terror," was actually funded by the US Department of Defence.

The Policy Forum is a British-based company with two directors - low-profile London multimillionaire Zac Gertler and high-profile New York rightwinger Devon Gaffney Cross.

They say that they wanted to counteract the way that "American foreign policy and its goals and motivations in undertaking the war on terror were increasingly subject to caricature and worse in the European media."

The organisation, "based in London," says that it "began hosting a series of roundtable discussions, often off-the-record, with key American policy-makers and leading columnists, editors, writers and producers from the UK."

People like James Woolsey and Paul Wolfowitz were introduced to British journalists at posh clubs and restaurants. The Forum says that "editors of The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, The Economist, The Sun and The Spectator have all participated in our discussions" as well as "leading columnists."

Gertler and Gaffney Cross are independently very wealthy, but they didn't pay for the dinners after all. At the end of last year, the US Department of Defence paid the Policy Forum around $80,000 for "consulting services for public liaison and media outreach services in support of the diplomacy mission, including addressing and informing European and Middle Eastern audiences on the challenges facing US national security policies."

Three months later, the Policy Forum officially dissolved itself. It seems that the Department of Defence was actually paying for the previous five years of private diplomacy aimed at British journalists.

The forum looks like yet another way that the Bush administration ran foreign policy outside official structures. As a private organisation, the forum could invite speakers mostly from the neocons rather than represent the whole of the US leadership to all British papers. However, the initiative was ultimately funded by the US government, although, as with other Bush schemes, through the Department of Defence rather than the State Department.

Obama's election presumably means the end of this kind of clandestine diplomacy.

Devon Gaffney Cross's brother Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan official, wrote in the press that Obama's election would lead to "global theocratic rule under shariah and the end of our constitutional, democratic government." His sister Devon may not have made similar comments, but it is hard to imagine her being invited to run secret lobbying of the British press for president Obama.

The dinners-with-neocons scheme also shows yet again how London was central to Washington's propaganda effort over Iraq and the war on terror.

The US government liked placing stories in the British press to pass its dubious stories out to Europe and the Middle East and back to the US.

Placing lies in the US newspapers was too obvious. Tall tales about terrorism in the US media look like US propaganda. However, if the same stories are "confirmed" in supposedly independent British papers, the propaganda is sanitised.

Our newspapers acted as a laundering scheme to wash the US government fingerprints from official lies. If we ever get a real inquiry into the Iraq deception, that inquiry should concentrate on what was written in British newspapers as well as by British officials.

Thursday 20 November 2008


A revolutionary reworking for Marx's 'Kapital'

Treatise on capitalism to be turned into manga comic 140 years after publication


Karl Marx, the German revolutionary who predicted that capitalism would crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, is making a comeback – in the form of a comic.

More than 140 years after Marx's Das Kapital was released on an initially baffled world, its dense exploration of political economy and alienation is to be splashed across speech bubbles on the pages of a Japanese manga.

Set for release next month, the comic is expected to be a bestseller. A string of publications have found success capitalising on Japan's growing inequalities and economic insecurity.

more...

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Don't let Rupert Murdoch decide Ireland's future

In whose interests did the 'Sunday Times' decide to campaign against the Lisbon Treaty? ...

more...

Tuesday 18 November 2008

Top judge: US and UK acted as 'vigilantes' in Iraq invasion
Former senior law lord condemns 'serious violation of international law'

One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".

more...

Saturday 15 November 2008

Totally New Green Energy Source on a par With Nuclear Power

We often hear that solar and wind power are the future of renewable energy, and of course they're important. Important, though, is not enough.

We live in a 24/7 society, but neither wind nor solar are 24/7 sources. If you've ever used your computer or turned on a light on a windless night, whether you're aware of it or not, the power is coming from a conventional power plant, fired either by fossil fuels, hydroelectric, or by nuclear power.

That's the reality we're facing no matter how much we invest in solar and wind. The technologies simply don't work when the wind and sun are down. While that's obvious to anyone who's ever been outdoors, policymakers and those who have huge amounts of money at stake would prefer that the issue remain unaddressed. You simply can't turn up the sun or wind with demand.

They have another problem as well. If you've ever seen a wind farm or a commercial solar system, you know they take huge tracts of land, necessary because the energy source they're tapping is not very dense. At best, it takes a whole lot of real estate to gather enough power to make a difference - assuming, of course, that the source of the needed energy happens to be available at that moment.

Hydrothermal Vents are the solution ...



more...

Friday 14 November 2008

For the Earth to Live, Capitalism must Die

This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” - has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth.

The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class - understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

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Massaging Capitalism rather than Managing the Crisis

UK Premier, Gordon Brown, is proposing tax cuts in order to avoid making tough decisions about the economy. We should demand more honesty from our leaders.

more...

Thursday 13 November 2008

Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart
Why Americans Shouldn't Go Home
By Tom Engelhardt

Political Washington is a conspiracy -- in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation.

Leave Obama to them and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for "change we can believe in," which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror.

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Wednesday 12 November 2008


The day that we remember the victims of those who profit from war: Remembering that War is a Racket on Remembrance Day

A day too late to have been published on Remembrance Day but better late than never. Yesterday I was unable to bring myself to comment on Remembrance Day, so profound is my feeling of disgust for the manner in which our rulers continue to sanctify the meaningless slaughter of humanity in their selfish, imperialist wars.

Chycho's article says it all and I commend it to my readers ...

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Beware of the Obama hype. What 'change' in America really means

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes that the lauding of Barack Obama has a history and that 'historical moments' ought to be less about their symbolism and accompanying histrionics than what they really mean. The question is: what is Obama's true relation to unchanging American myths about the imposition of its notorious power?

more...

Britain's Big Brother: Government black boxes will 'collect every email'

Home Office says all data from web could be stored in giant government database

Internet "black boxes" will be used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government's plans for a giant "big brother" database, The Independent has learnt.

Home Office officials have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the "black box" technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government.

more...

Tuesday 11 November 2008

Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse?

Most Serious Economic Crisis in Modern History

The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.

This is the most serious economic crisis in World history.

more ...

Wednesday 5 November 2008

Nader speaks on an Obama Presidency







Now go to November5.org


Obama Wins



Sunday 2 November 2008

Beyond the Triple Crisis: A Green New Deal

An imaginative and radical set of policies is needed to address the triple crunch of debt, peak oil and climate change ...

more

Friday 31 October 2008


Reflections of Fidel -- The Worst Variant

TODAY I read that the U.S. Federal Reserve had opened a new line of credit for the central banks of Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and Singapore.

The same report claimed that similar credits have been issued to the central banks of Australia, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the European Central Bank.

Based on these agreements, the central banks will receive funds in exchange for hard currency reserves from these countries, which have sustained considerable losses due to the financial and trade crisis.

This consolidates the economic power of the U.S. currency, a privilege granted at Bretton Woods.

The International Monetary Fund, which is the same dog with a different collar, has announced the injection of large sums of money into its Eastern European clients. Hungary will be receiving the equivalent of 20 billion euros, a large part of which are dollars from the United States. Their machines keep printing bills and the IMF keeps granting its leonine loans.

For its part, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) stated in Geneva yesterday that, at the current rate of spending, by the year 2030, humanity will need the resources of two planets to maintain its lifestyle.

The WWF is a serious institution. There is no need to be a University graduate in Mathematics, Economics or Political Science to understand what this means. It is the worst variant. Developed capitalism hopes to continue plundering the world as if the world were still able to sustain it.



Fidel Castro Ruz, October 30, 2008

Granma Internacional

The End of Prosperity

From too much of a good thing. From the 1980s and 1990s excesses. From the longest ever US bull market. Heavily manipulated to keep it levitating. From August 1982 to January 2000. An illusory reprieve from October 2002 to October 2007. Fluctuations aside, all lost in the past 12 months. The wages of sin are now due, and payment is being painfully extracted. From all nations globally. Affecting ordinary people the most who had nothing to do with creating booms and busts. They got little on the upside but are paying dearly for the down.

more

Toward a North American Union

The global elite, through the direct operations of President George Bush and his Administration, are creating a North American Union that will combine Canada, Mexico and the U.S. into a superstate called the North American Union (NAU). The NAU is roughly patterned after the European Union (EU). There is no political or economic mandate for creating the NAU, and unofficial polls of a cross-section of Americans indicate that they are overwhelmingly against this end-run around national sovereignty.

more

Thursday 30 October 2008


The "Dirty Little Secret" of the US Bank Bail-Out

27 October 2008 "WSWS" --- In an unusually frank article published in Saturday's New York Times, the newspaper's economic columnist, Joe Nocera, reveals what he calls "the dirty little secret of the banking industry"--namely, that "it has no intention of using the [government bailout] money to make new loans."

more

Tuesday 21 October 2008


Marx Popular Amid Global Financial Crisis

Karl Marx is back in fashion, says one German publisher, who attributes his new popularity to the economic crisis.

more

Find out more about Marx: Reading Marx's Capital by David Harvey


Saturday 11 October 2008

US Army Prepares to Invade ... the US



The plans to implement martial law in America have been taking shape for decades, hidden behind "Continuity of Government" contingency planning. Now, with public outcry over the banker bailout bill at fever pitch, all of the pieces are in place for the U.S. Army to start policing American citizens.

For more information and analysis, please visit http://www.corbettreport.com

Friday 10 October 2008

British Satirists Say it All

This brilliant duo, John Bird and John Fortune, who started their illustrious careers in satire 40 years ago with programmes like That Was the Week that Was and Not So Much a Programme More a Way of Life still keep British audiences in stitches with brilliant, satiric sketches such as the following on current affairs:




Anticapitalista in the City
There was today a demonstration of anti-capitalists in the City. The police pushed a few folk around but were unable to prevent the demonstrators from breaking through police blockades.

Meanwhile in London, 5000 public transit drivers went on strike for a higher basic wage.



Photo and video thanks to Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb

Wednesday 8 October 2008


Now it's £500 Billion!

What began earlier today as an announcement that UK Premier Gordon Brown's bailout of UK banks was to be £50 billion turned out, after the math was done, to amount to ten times that much, £500 billion or $970 billion at present exchange rates!

"The UK government has announced a £50bn investment plan," says the BBC "to inject cash into UK financial institutions, offered a further £250bn in loan guarantees, and increased another lending scheme to £200bn.

"It is an unprecedented move, and arguably the government's biggest intervention in the country's banking industry."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7658596.stm


That Brown is prepared to play fast and loose with such huge amounts of public money shows a level of addiction to gambling that is unequalled anywhere. It also gives us a unique insight into the true magnitude of the Anglo stakes in the Anglo-American financial fraternity that rules over global capitalism.



Britain might be a small, overcrowded island with a rapidly-increasing poverty level in what is supposedly one of the richest economies in the world. A commitment by Britain's ruling elite to risk £500 billion of public funds to bolster British capitalism shows just how mercilessly it is prepared to screw the poor in order that the fatcats can continue to wallow in obscene levels of material wealth.

If ever a Revolution was called for it is surely now. Who's up for it?

The NWO fascist coup has begun!

The 'war on terrorism' has predictably spread from Muslim 'Al Qaeda terrists' to ordinary, white Americans and Brits. Bush recently threatened Congress with Martial Law if it didn't pass his $700 billion bailout!

The First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division has been deployed to police the streets of the USA!

Will the November presidential election be allowed to go ahead and if so will it be rigged and the inevitable protests that follow be stamped-down heavily by a dictatorship?

The financial crisis is being talked-up by Bush and Palin. "This is not FDR talk," warns Naomi. What they are planning doesn't take much to imagine.

Naomi Wolf illustrates how Bush is preparing for a Mussolini-type takeover of the United States. Should this happen Bush's quislings in London will not be far behind.

The only way to stop the coup is to arrest Bush, Cheney and the cabal!

Naomi Klein - Give Me Liberty



From the Wayne Madsen Report

"(FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.

In addition, Army Corps of Engineer sources report that the assignment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) to the Northern Command's U.S. Army North is to augment FEMA and federal law enforcement in the imposition of traffic controls, crowd control, curfews, enhanced border and port security, and neighborhood patrols in the event a national emergency being declared. The BCT was assigned to duties in Iraq before being assigned to the Northern Command.

On April 3, 2008, WMR reported on a highly-classified document regarding the martial law scenario: WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document.

The document is being called the "C & R" document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world. "Conflict" is the "C word" in the document. The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government. "Revolution" is the document's "R word."




Britain's Robber-barons steal £50 billion Public Funds!

The £50 billion bank bailout that the UK PM, Gordon Brown, has announced is being described as a part nationalization. It is nothing of the sort.

It isn't even a loan. Brown's £50 billion bailout is a straight subsidy being given the banks in the hope of getting them to function again. Once they are alive and kicking again the subsidy is supposed to be withdrawn and the loaned money paid back to the Treasury. If, on the other hand, they didn't revive the public taxpayer will have thrown away £50 billion on a bad investment.

Even part nationalization would require the state to play some sort of regulatory role in the future running of these banks. That won't happen and though finance minister, Alistair Darling, made it quite clear in a press conference this afternoon that the bailout did not amount to part nationalization the point is being missed by the BBC.

As left-wing Labour MP, John McDonnell, has said this option that Brown and Darling have taken is the riskiest one of all and will cost the British taxpayer dear: finding the £50 billion will inevitably lead to higher taxation and more cuts in public expenditure leading to a further deterioration of an already-ailing national health system.

And even were the bailout to revive the banks, then what? Where are the guarantees that they would not simply return to the speculative, Ponzi-schemes which triggered off this present crisis? In sum, Brown's bailout is really no different to the much larger $700 billion pay-off that the Bush gangsters just extorted from the taxpayer in favour of the US fatcats.

And how is it that while in the US such a scam was required to be pushed through Congress --however cynically-- that its British equivalent is simply announced as a diktat by Brown and Darling? Is any further evidence required to show the rest of the world how British parliamentary 'democracy' has been usurped by a dictatorship of the privileged elite?

Unlike in the US I am not seeing any spontaneous demonstrations yet of public anger, they must surely follow. Meantime Brown and his cohorts must again be exposed for the robber barons they really are.



Monday 6 October 2008


A People's Programme for the Capitalist Crisis
Left Economics Advisory Panel

The Government needs to act urgently to protect the British people against the economic turmoil that was not of their making, but is now resulting in them losing their jobs, and struggling to pay their rent or mortgage, and fuel bills. There should be no blank cheques to bail out the banks that contributed to this crisis.

We are calling upon the Government to implement a people's programme to protect our people from the crisis not just the bankers, including:

1) nationalising the banks and establishing democratic control over banking decisions, ensuring democratic representation on boards, ending the bonus binges, controlling executive pay and share holder rewards;

2) Cutting interest rates significantly and immediately, restoring democratic control over key economic decisionmaking by not only widening the remit of the Bank of England beyond ensuring price stability to advising on the wider economic health of the country but also reverting the bank's role to being one voice amongst many others to be taken into account;

3) Securing people a home by converting repossessions to social rentals so that people have a 'right to stay' in their homes and embarking on a massive council house-building programme;

4) Enhancing security in employment by ensuring people have a say over the future of the companies by strengthening rights and representation at work;

5) Bring fuel bills under control with price controls on the consumer price of gas and electricity, so that people are not being forced to choose between heating and eating this winter, with the threat of nationalisation if needed.

We call on all people to support these measures and to campaign to the Government for their implementation.

Are no personal messages off-limits from Government spying?
Michael Meacher, 5/10/08

Deep Packet Inspection may not mean much, but it ought to bring to a head the simmering tension over privacy between personal liberties and fighting terrorism which the Government has been dragging far too far in the direction of State control.

Deep Packet Inspection refers to equipment which the Home Office is planning to embed with internet and mobile phone providers (such as BT and Vodafone) so as to monitor and store the calls and emails of everyone in Britain all the time. This is a staggering project in every sense - cost, complexity, and unprecedented intrusiveness in ordinary people's lives and their most intimate communications.

It goes even further than the Government's other massive programmes of prying on citizens via identity cards, car number plate recognition, and increasingly universal CCTV. The scope of the new plan is mind-numbing. Last year there were 57bn text messages sent, mobile calls made totalling 99bn, and a trillion emails sent.

The ostensible purpose of this ultimate Big Brother surveillance programme is to fight crime and terrorism which it is said are aimed at destroying the values of our society. But there comes a point when the totalitarian methods deployed to root out crime and terrorism can insidiously undermine the fundamental values and principles of British society even more than the evil they seek to eradicate. With this latest Orwellian monstrosity, there can be no doubt we are well past that point.

Interception of calls and emails is already occurring on a far greater scale than is generally understood. Very few people realise that there are over 650 bodies which can already legally have their communications intercepted by the authorities, or that last year this was exercised in over half a million cases. I have put down PQs asking, for each of the last 10 years, how many of these calculated intercepts actually yielded information material to trapping terrorists and criminals. What is now proposed is a totally indiscriminate monitoring of the unimaginably vast database of all calls and emails by everyone everywhere all the time in this country, and the hit rate for gathering relevant information must decline to utterly infinitesimal proportions.

There are several reasons for stopping this latest venture in its tracks. The expected cost is £12bn, which on past experience of vast Government IT projects is all too likely to escalate dramatically. On the basis of the same evidence it is all too likely not to work. Nor, from several recent notorious episodes, can the authorities be trusted to keep all this personal data secure from being lost, stolen or even corruptly sold on. Nor again can we be sure that official snooping on this scale will not be used for quite other purposes than fighting crime and terrorism - like spying on companies or political opponents, or fishing expeditions to see what is turned up. It would transform Britain from a (relatively) free society into a Stasi-penetrated nightmare.


Leaders 'Don't Grasp Scale of the Abyss Facing EU'

The EU's failure to agree a unified strategy to tackle the financial crisis shows that its leaders don't grasp how serious it is, write German commentators. It's time for politicians to stop blaming the bankers and to realize that at this point, only the state can avert a very dangerous crisis of confidence.

... German editorial page writers say it's no longer enough for politicians to point the finger of blame for the crisis at bank managers. The current escalation of the problem isn't due to reckless speculation and poor risk management, they argue, but rather the threat of a systemic crisis that is undermining confidence in the entire banking system and preventing banks from lending each other money.

more ...

Saturday 4 October 2008


While Rome Burns, Bush fiddles another Huge Military Budget to keep the Empire's Wars in Business

While debate over the Paulson bailout package dominated the headlines, the US Congress quietly passed a landmark $615 Billion defense spending bill.

One of the few people to comment on the measure was Chalmers Johnson, in his article "We have the money". Chalmers explains to Real News Senior Editor Paul Jay how the military-industrial complex is a driving force behind the current financial crisis and a determinant of much of what happens in Washington. He also criticizes the omission of the military-industrial complex from the political discourse determined by the two major parties and the media.



Chalmers Johnson taught from 1962 to 1992 at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California. From 1968 until 1972 he was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. He has written 17 books. His most recent releases are “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (Metropolitan Books, 2000) and “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic” (Metropolitan, 2004) and his newest book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (Metropolitan, 2007). Chalmers has been a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation among others, he appears in the 2005 prize-winning documentary film "Why We Fight".

Friday 3 October 2008


Americans, no-one should trust the BBC

Whether it be to report on US Foreign Policy, USUK military imperialism in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Bush regime's systematic attacks on the US Constitution and its people's liberties the Little-Sir-Echo BBC remains a faithful and unquestioning conduit of the Empire.

The manner in which it has reported and promoted the Bush line on the US Treasury $700 billion Bailout Plan shows how utterly committed the BBC is to play the role of an international propagandist for the lame-duck Bush regime. Yet ironically US viewers still turn to the BBC in the hope of a more balanced reportage than they could hope to hear from the likes of Faux News and the Murdoch mediocracy.


davidHorsey.com/Seattle Post Intelligencer

US viewers should turn to websites like Medialens to understand just how dangerously mistaken it is to put any trust in the BBC. Since the illegal invasion of Iraq, the BBC has been enthusiastically complicit in all the war crimes and crimes against their people's committed by both the US and the UK. The BBC is no different to the rest in its disseminating the USUK's imperialist propaganda. With nearly 90 years of experience, it is simply far more sophisticated in its methods of sowing lies and disinformation.

The only free source of news reportage is to be found on the Internet and even that is under constant threat. The following video from YouTube shows that whereas this report was good enough for C-Span to cover it was studiously ignored by the BBC. No prizes for guessing why!

Rep. Brad Sherman Martial Law