What lies ahead is not pretty. There is an element of The Sleepwalkers – Christopher Clark’s masterful account of how Europe marched to war in 1914. But mostly, a low-budget American show gave away the game. This is Walking Dead Europe.
Class Struggle
What in the World is Going on with Banks this Week?
Emergency meetings, banker summits, crashing European banks, and the worst bank reports since the Great Recession.
Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, DC, this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down.
Panama Papers: Bear in the Woods
If the auspiciously named ICIJ and their partner journalists were actually interested in excising this offshore cancer for want of a better world, they would be demanding that all corporations and officials in positions of significant influence publish their tax affairs for ICIJ or public examination. It would be releasing all the Panama Papers: at the very least to independent journalists for them to report on or at best in a public database.
Venezuela: Regime Change On The Agenda?
It is true that Venezuela faces many problems, not least in terms of its economic difficulties. These are being exacerbated both by a conscious economic war — with echoes of the situation in Chile prior to the 1973 coup that brought General Pinochet to power — and the plunge in world oil prices.
But the right’s programme of vicious neoliberalism — illustrated by its proposals for the mass sell-off of housing — will only make these worse, while reversing the gains in reduced poverty and inequality, plus increased labour rights, in recent years.
Hillary Clinton and Haiti
The idea was to transform Haiti into a Taiwan of the Caribbean, with maquiladoras, an apparel industry, tourism, and call centers. These would be the niche sectors that would guide the new cooperation framework.
In this plan, the particularities of Haiti itself didn’t matter much.
Dance to the Panama Papers ‘Limited Hangout’ Leak
Even without a smoking gun, a case can be made this alleged most massive leak ever was obtained by — what else — U.S. intel. This is the kind of stuff the NSA excels at. The NSA is able to break into virtually any database and/or archives anywhere; they steal “secrets”; and then selectively destroy/blackmail/protect assets and “enemies,” according to USG interests.
Fisking Robert Peston on tax avoidance
I stress, I am suggesting nothing illegal happened. But to say that Ian Cameron did not gain from tax avoidance when running such a structure is absurd and Robert Peston has a duty to do better than that if he is to be taken seriously.
The Panama Papers
Did the corporate media vilify David Cameron for some serious high-ranking connections to this mother of all leaks? No, it did not. Did the same media publish any damning report that featured Cameron airbrushed alongside global ‘baddies,’ like former Iranian leader Ahmadinejad? No. But it seems as far as Putin and Russia is concerned, anything the media dishes out is regarded by the elites as fair game.
The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview.
Clinton is uniquely unsuited to the epic task of confronting the fossil-fuel companies that profit from climate change.
A Chink of Aussie Light
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation shamed the BBC by putting out a Four Corners documentary on the Panama leak that had real balls. In stark contrast to the BBC, the Australians named and shamed Australia’s biggest company and Australia’s biggest foreign investor. BBC Panorama by contrast found a guy who sold one house in Islington. The Australians also, unlike the BBC […]
Buying a House: Debt
Whatever the ideas you have about what your politics are, you are captured by bourgeois interests that keep your actual interests in maintaining the status quo–more so for housing than for student debt, I’d say. So, yeah, debt is the price you have to pay to be in the middle class. It’s also the price you pay to be invested in a system you don’t want.
Is This Class Warfare?
Did you know that 85 percent of Americans say that it’s harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago? (Pew Research Center) Or that “77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time”, or that “one of every four workers in the US brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level”, or that “47 million Americans are on food stamps, or that “40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers,” mainly temps, contract workers and part-time labor?
Recent
Revealed: The internal police guidance on chanting ‘death to the IDF’
Media Exposed: Abby Martin Interview
Iran: A Warning to Washington
Marandi Exposes Times Radio Propaganda on Iran
Iran: War Updates and False Flags
‘Operation Epic Fury’ – Anatomy Of A War Of Aggression
Iran: Losses They’re Not Telling You About
US and Israel Attack Iran
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