The bankruptcy process will aid Orr—an unelected front-man for the banks—in selling off city assets, privatizing services, and reorganizing the city in the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The entire operation is aimed at maximizing the amount the banks, bond insurers and other financial institutions will extract from the looting of the city and its working class inhabitants.
While the media applaud the agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran, Thierry Meyssan, a personal friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sees in it an abdication by the new Iranian government. As far as he is concerned, it is absurd to pretend that the two parties have solved a misunderstanding supposedly maintained for eight years by the aggressiveness of President Ahmadinejad. The truth is that Iran gave up its nuclear research and began to dismantle it without receiving anything in return except the gradual lifting of illegitimate sanctions. In other words, the country, brought to its knees, has surrendered.
To the likes of [New York Times columnist David] Brooks, Snowden was a disconcerting mystery; Glenn Greenwald, though, got him right away. “He had no power, no prestige, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family, totally obscure, totally ordinary,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he was going to change the world – and I knew that.” And, Greenwald also believed, so would he. “In all kinds of ways, my whole life has been in preparation for this moment,” he says.
the neo-liberals have stopped pretending that they care about the ‘wealth gap’ and are instead trying to justify it. No longer must we regard inequality as a Bad Thing, but in fact, we should be celebrating it. We saw a classic example of that in the speech given last week by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to the Centre for Policy Studies think tank.
“I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth,” Johnson said.
Is aiding and defending a belligerent foreign power, land thief and serial abuser of human rights a listed policy in the Conservative Party manifesto? No. It is a private agenda for which Hague and Cameron have no popular mandate. And is terrorizing Iranian civilians with economic ruination, just for the hell of it (or because Israel wants it), Conservative policy? Well, I suppose it must be, otherwise Hague and Cameron would have been slapped down.
the war on terror is mutating, growing and spreading. Drone attacks, which have escalated under Obama from Pakistan to north Africa, are central to this new phase. And as Dirty Wars – the powerful new film by the American journalist Jeremy Scahill – makes clear, so are killings on the ground by covert US special forces, proxy warlords and mercenaries in multiple countries.
Time after time, shoddy and poorly-designed toxicity studies that show the safety of these products are given the seal of approval by bought-and-paid-for regulators, and independent studies that show contrary findings are subjected to arbitrary and nonsensical principles that supposedly undermine their validity. As a recent article at GM Watch points out, numerous GM-related studies have been retracted in the past few years for misleading and downright fraudulent research.
Ellen Brown, founder of WebofDebt.com, thinks so-called ‘bail-ins’ are coming. Depositors’ money will be legally taken. Brown says, “That’s the big disaster that’s coming. Probably one of these big derivative banks will go bankrupt . . . the derivative players will get first dibs. They’ll grab all the deposits, and there won’t be anything left.”
Benghazi has seen a surge in violence in recent days following a deadly battle Monday between the army and well-armed jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia, which left seven people dead and 50 wounded.
The Derna protests appeared to have been modelled on similar demonstrations against militias in the capital Tripoli and Benghazi, which have ignited deadly violence.
Britain has been placing officials in Libyan government ministries to lobby for “commercial interests”, a senior European politician has claimed.
The ComRes poll is powerful evidence that the media misled the public about the consequences of the war. The evidence is bolstered by the way the poll was ignored by the British media. Using Lexis-Nexis, the only prominent piece we could find about the poll in the British press was an op-ed by Ian Sinclair in the Morning Star, a small leftwing newspaper.
Where I’m from,
seeing cop cars drive
down the street feels a lot
like low-flying planes in New York
City. Where I’m from, routine traffic
stops are more like mine
fields, any wrong move
could very well mean your life.
