US neo-cons are also sharpening their spears. As soon as early 2015 there may be a Ukrainian Freedom Act approved by the US Congress. Translation: Ukraine as a “major US non-NATO ally” which means, in practice, a NATO annexation. Next step; more turbo-charged neo-con provocation of Russia.
But despite repeated challenges from us and others, Owen Jones, Richard Seymour and David Wearing – regarded as fiery, independent contributors to the Guardian – have maintained a discreet public silence.
Most telling is that Monbiot does not even suggest that this area of corporate power needs fixing, let alone propose ways it might be done. That, ultimately, is because he is an employee of a corporation, one that sets implicit limits on what he can write about in relation to an area that is his stated expertise.
It’s 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know.”
It’s time they knew.
The US meat industry maintains a strict code of secrecy over what goes on within the vast facilities where animals are fattened for slaughter, as Ted Genoways showed in a Mother Jones feature last year (which he expanded into an excellent full-length book). So the glimpses we get of these fecal-laden dungeons tend to be in the form of grainy videos, shot by undercover animal-welfare activists posing as workers
All this fancy footwork is to prevent a run on the TBTF banks, in order to keep their derivatives casino going with our money. Warren Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction,” and many commentators warn that they are a time bomb waiting to explode. When that happens, our deposits, our pensions, and our public investment funds will all be subject to confiscation in a “bail in.” Perhaps it is time to pull our money out of Wall Street and set up our own banks – banks that will serve the people because they are owned by the people.
His record speaks for itself. Ideologically over-the-top. Lawless. Reckless. Ruthless by any standard. Reflecting the worst of rogue leadership.
Mocking democratic values. Breaching rule of law principles. Riding roughshod over responsible governance. Serving monied interests exclusively. They never had it so good.
The U.S. establishment is used to bullying around anyone it wants and getting its way. This will not happen with Putin. It appears that the U.S. is attempting to put so much pressure on Putin that he does something reckless and loses all support on the world stage. I can’t stress enough how important, and dangerous, the current situation is.
When the young computer staffers at the Mercury News’s fledgling Mercury Center division posted the story on the paper’s new Internet site, they also removed the hocus pocus mystery of “journalism” that the major media had long fed the public.
Does it mean that, since the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) investigation is taking place in Ukraine, it is ruled by Ukrainian law and that Ukraine, one of the suspects, is leading the investigation? If so, this JIT investigation has no credibility whatsoever and is absolutely not independent. It is a parody of justice.
Shock waves from last Thursday’s decision by the Saudi-led oil cartel, OPEC, not to cut production in the face of an oversupply on world markets have reverberated throughout the global economy, hitting energy and mining companies as well as financial markets, and threatening whole economies with bankruptcy.
through the deals it has made this year with China, Turkey and Iran, Russia has dealt a devastating blow to the energy future of the EU. A few years down the line Europeans will start to discover that moralising and bluff comes with a price. Regardless, by cancelling South Stream, Russia has imposed upon Europe the most effective of the sanctions we have seen this year.
