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.”
The row over Harvey’s edition of Today is likely, of course, to be little more than a brief storm in a media teacup. Yet it comes as a sharp reminder that what was once a normal left-of-centre agenda in Britain has now become so exotic that people react to its presence on Radio 4 with various degrees of shock. Most of the points made by Harvey’s contributors may have been accurate, truthful and based on fact. But, in terms of contemporary British political debate, they nonetheless remain marginal, because they are not part of the dominant grand narrative of our time, which requires constant deference to the priorities of rich so-called “wealth creators”, and a rapid refocusing of any popular anger towards other vulnerable groups, such as this New Year’s imaginary tidal wave of new migrants from Romania and Bulgaria.
A war of words has broken out over the veteran journalist John Pilger’s allegation that scientific research put the Iraqi civilian death toll at “up to a million.”
Pilger was commenting recently on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme following polling finding most Britons believe only a few thousand died violently in the US and British-led invasion, and the years since.
We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power.
