I do think it’s important and worthwhile that Amnesty International are doing work like this, and it’s much better that they release this kind of report than not.
But on a first and partial reading, I do also think that it offers yet more evidence of how Amnesty tend to go softer on the alleged Crimes of the Official Good Guys than they do on the alleged Crimes of the Official Bad Guys.
Modern thought control is dependent on subliminal communication. Messages influencing key perceptions are delivered unseen, unnoticed, with minimal public awareness of what is happening or why.
For example, journalists tell us that Hugo Chavez was ‘divisive’, that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are ‘narcissistic’, that George Galloway is ‘controversial’. But beneath their literal meaning, these adjectives communicate a hidden message: that these individuals are acceptable targets for negative media judgement; they are fair game.
“September 11 – The New Pearl Harbor” is a 5 hour documentary by Massimo Mazzucco that summarizes 12 years of public debate on 9/11. While aimed primarily at a general, uninformed audience, the film also contains some new findings that may be of interest to advanced researchers
The BBC has an outstanding record of misrepresenting the facts about Iran’s nuclear activities. The most egregious example of this was the ‘File on 4’ programme ‘Iran’s Nuclear Standoff’ broadcast on Radio 4 on 28 May 2013. This programme performed the remarkable trick of purporting to examine the latest intelligence on Iran’s nuclear activities, while uttering not a word about the publicly available assessments of US intelligence on the matter.
Chris Hedges speaks about suing the Obama administration for the NDAA, the conspiracy to use Al Qaeda to strip civil liberties and make a police state, the death of Osama Bin Laden, attack on journalists and more in this Buzzsaw interview hosted by Sean Stone.
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.
One of my favorite language shifts over the years has been the move to “corrections facilities” from “jails” and “prisons.” What makes this verbal change so noteworthy and Orwellian is that jails and prisons have moved steadily away from any focus on rehabilitation to just getting prisoners out of circulation—that is, away from anything like “corrections.” It is reminiscent of the shift from Department of War to Department of Defense back in the late 1940s, coinciding with the shift in that Department’s real mission from defense to offense and expansion (i.e., “containment”).
“We find it very disconcerting that the government of law and order seem so intent on desecrating the legal system, ignoring the safeguards the law provides for all individuals and continues to act unlawfully through its many departments including the MoD.”
JP Morgan doesn’t want to make this settlement; especially if they have to admit guilt or wrong doing because that could cement more civil fraud settlements by all the investors who bought the bank’s RMBS. According to JPM’s quarterly filings, those investors equal at least $160 billion of private rmbs litigation these days. And while JPM is a very profitable bank ($2.4 trillion in assets) making money hand over fist it doesn’t have enough cash to payoff all those private rmbs suits at the dollar amount they could likely legally win if they ever went to trial.
the financial elite is above the law. It, like the aristocracies of old, is immune from the laws that apply to the lower orders. In America, people are routinely sentenced to long prison terms for petty crimes that involve hundreds of dollars. The speculators and swindlers who steal millions and billions, however, do so with impunity. They control the government and both political parties.
“A state’s appetite for collecting intelligence expands in direct relationship to the failure of its media to hold it tenaciously to account.” And the emphasis is on “tenaciously”.
British fraud prosecutors next week are expected to publicly name roughly two dozen traders and brokers who they believe were involved in a scheme to manipulate benchmark interest rates, according to people familiar with the plans.
