Glencore’s mines in Zambia don’t generate much wealth for Zambians. But they do make some people in Switzerland very rich. How do multinationals work the tax system and operate in Africa?
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What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known — repeatedly — and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.
What are the chances that Al Qaeda is armed and funded by the US from Afghanistan in the 1980′s, to Libya in 2011, and now Syria to undermine enemies of Wall Street and London, but not in Somalia to undermine neighboring Kenya whose new president won partly due to a popular backlash against the West’s discredited International Criminal Court (ICC)?
The attack on the Westgate Mall is being portrayed by the corporate and capitalist government-controlled media in the U.S. and Europe as a new episode in the so-called “war on terrorism.” Yet the role of the White House through the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) goes without mention.
Corporate media coverage of atrocities in Egypt, Libya and Syria has closely matched US-UK government interpretations and priorities.
While the US government has refused to describe what was very obviously a military coup in Egypt on July 3 as a coup, many media have also tended to shy away from the term, referring instead to the ‘ousting’ and ‘removal’ of the elected government.
In reporting atrocities in Libya and Syria, the BBC focuses heavily on the word ‘crime’, but described the mass murder in Egypt on August 14 as a ‘tragedy’. Killing in Syria is routinely described as a ‘massacre’, but in Egypt often as the less pejorative ‘crackdown’.
With Israel possibly mulling another invasion of Lebanon; the Kerry “peace process” an excuse for more settlements in Palestine; Bandar Bush back practicing the dark arts; the pre-empting of any possible solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier; Egypt in civil war; Syria and also Iraq bleeding to death, what’s left is the certified proliferation of all kinds of axes, and all kinds of evil.
The Obama administration has subcontracted its Middle East policy to the House of Saud at its own peril. Whatever King “Return of the Living Dead” Abdullah says, goes. Actually, not; whatever Return of the Invisible Spy, the spectacular resurfaced Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush, does, holds. The beauty of the coup that is not a coup, and Sisi’s acceptance speech, is that Bandar, eminent practitioner of dark arts, is not even mentioned.
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair.
The Egyptian crucible has broken. The “unity” of Egypt – that all-embracing, patriotic, essential glue that has bound the nation together since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the rule of Nasser – has melted amid the massacres, gun battles and fury of yesterday’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. A hundred dead – 200, 300 “martyrs” – makes no difference to the outcome: for millions of Egyptians, the path of democracy has been torn up amid live fire and brutality. What Muslim seeking a state based on his or her religion will ever trust the ballot box again?
In a rare moment of candor, the paper exposes U.S. involvement in the coup — and then seems to promptly forget it by Patrick L. Smith (Salon) Have you noticed the silence, the casual indifference, of the Obama administration since the Egyptian army shoved President Mohamed Morsi from office in a military coup that gets bloodier by the day? Well, […]
Convincing evidence suggests that Egypt’s President Mohammad Morsi was ousted from power in a military coup in part because the Egyptian army feared he was plotting to order them to invade Syria in support of the embattled death squad insurgency against the Assad government there by Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley (PressTV) The combination of Morsi’s aggressive designs against Syria, together […]
The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite.
