Channel 4’s attempt to stereotype and demonise all of Britain’s 2.49 million unemployed by focussing on just 6 carefully chosen people and showing them in the worst possible light in their programme Benefits Street last night was so successful that Twitter exploded with threats of violence and even death against the participants
in Britain, business enterprises like international gun-running are mere whispers in the halls of Westminster, and remain well-hidden behind the walls of London’s infamous city state – the financial Square Mile. A new report this week (see full article below), accuses the British Government of having been caught in their own ‘Fast and Furious’ episode – this time shipping some 44,000 guns to East Africa – in the last 15 months alone. That’s just the tip of the global iceberg. Does this also explain how all of those lovely weapons made it into the hands of rebel fighters in Libya and Syria?
We all live in an information age – or so we tell each other as we caress our smart phones like rosary beads, heads down, checking, monitoring, tweeting. We’re wired; we’re on message; and the dominant theme of the message is ourselves. Identity is the zeitgeist. A lifetime ago in ‘Brave New World’, Aldous Huxley predicted this as the ultimate means of social control because it was voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
For 2014 though, plenty of signs point to a tectonic shift in the geopolitical map of Eurasia, with Iran finally emerging as the real superpower in Southwest Asia over the designs of both Israel and the House of Saud. Now that’s (geopolitical) entertainment. Happy New Year.
The US secretary of state vowed Washington’s support for the Iraqi government in its fight to regain control of towns in its western province taken over by militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
That’s rich. The government of Syria is battling to root out these same al-Qaeda-linked militants. But in that country, Washington offers no such support.
Robert Parry, Consortium News joins Thom Hartmann. Al Qaeda is back – with a vengeance. Islamic militants linked to the terrorist group have taken over two Iraqi cities – almost 10 years after the American military took those same cities from insurgents during the bloody early days of the Iraq War. Has Bush’s Invasion of Iraq doomed the people of the Middle East to decades of sectarian violence?
On the same day that the government announced it was scrapping the £180-million-a-year Social Fund for the destitute, a new survey showed that the big US internet companies operating in Britain have increased their UK sales last year by 18 per cent but paid even less tax to the Treasury than the year before.
Geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser on Press TV explained what is behind recent infighting between foreign-funded fighters battling along and within Syria’s borders. It is suggested that a new narrative is in the making, portraying “good terrorists” locked in battle with “bad terrorists,” thus providing a new context within which the West can continue arming and funding terrorist groups waging war on Syria.
The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who “has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”. It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.
The performance of the US economy from the mid-1970s to the present was no match for its relatively robust performance during what economists call the Golden Age – 1949 to 1973. This was in fact the longest period of sustained growth in US history, when most (white) working people had achieved a degree of material security unknown earlier and unattainable since. But from the late 1960s and through the 1970s economic malaise was increasingly in evidence, signaling worse to come: high rates of both inflation and unemployment -stagflation- was not supposed to be possible in a Keynesian (1) world, but there they were, and seemingly intractable.
contrary to the frequent assertions in the last week (including by Fred Kaplan) that Snowden is particularly reprehensible because he “broke his OATH of secrecy,” neither Snowden nor anyone else broke such a secrecy “oath.”
Such an oath doesn’t exist (look up “oath” on the web). Rather he—and I—broke an agreement (known as Standard Form 312) which was a condition of employment.
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.
The stolen memos, reports and internal correspondence provided the first tangible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of American citizens then known collectively as “the New Left.”
