With the US Federal Trade Commission set to broke Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and with Mark Zuckerberg facing calls to testify before the British Parliament, it would seem that as the elites begin fighting among themselves, the truth of their appalling treatment of the ordinary people across the world will become increasingly apparent.
The week that has just ended was exceptionally rich in events. But no media were able to report it, because they had all deliberately masked certain of their number in order to protect the story that was being woven by their government. London had attempted to provoke a major conflict, but lost to Russia, President Trump and Syria.
Open a corporate media website on any given day and you will find someone, somewhere blaming social media for something. No claim is too absurd.
Turkey’s attack on US-backed Kurds this week comes as a new set of economic relationships emerges to bankroll Ankara’s regional ambitions
Whether it is the Riyadh or Tel Aviv leading Washington by the nose is somehow irrelevant as the blame for what is taking place is squarely on the White House. The United States has no coherent policy, nor any actual national interest in remaining in Syria, but the strange political alignments that appear to be playing out in and around the Oval Office have generated a desire to destroy a country and people that in no way threaten the U.S. Someone should remind the president that similar scenarios did not turn out very well in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. No one should expect that Syria will be any different.
The art of the non-deal might be the only way out of the stand-off between the US and North Korea
We’ve seen it over and over again. In Libya, western interventionism was justified under the pretense of defending human rights when the goal was actually regime change. In Ukraine, empire loyalists played cheerleader for the protests in Kiev when the goal was actually regime change. And who could ever forget the poor oppressed people of Iraq who will surely greet the invaders as liberators?
It’s been noted that America has proven itself capable of provoking malice and disgust, of sowing the seeds of hatred and dispute in every Arab state, affecting society at every level: family, tribe, religious group, and political party. In particular, best exemplified by the so-called “Arab Spring.” As all plans and conspiracies against the governments of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq led back to Washington and Israel.
About three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships currently receive military assistance from the United States. This is a strange record for a nation that consistently justifies its sweeping foreign interventions as aimed at “promoting democracy” and “thwarting evil dictatorships.”
Italy’s non-performing loans (NPLs) then stood at €210bn, at a time when the ECB was buying €120bn per year of outstanding Italian government bonds as part of its QE program. The July 2016 Financial Times quoted Goldman’s Francesco Garzarelli, who said, “by the time QE is over – not sooner than end 2017, on our baseline scenario – around a fifth of Italy’s public debt will be sitting on the Bank of Italy’s balance sheet.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is preparing a new round of sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program. The Senate unanimously passed a Hezbollah sanctions bill less than two weeks ago. Earlier this year the House voted 419-3 and the Senate 98-2 to pass the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, post-JCPOA, also including North Korea and Russia (much to the ire of EU companies doing business with Russia).
As the saying goes, the corporate media would have had to invent Donald Trump if he didn’t already exist. He has become the perfect foil to allow the system to relegitimise itself.
