Longtime critic of the Eurozone’s destructive commitment to austerity, Italian comedian-turned-political activist Beppe Grillo has launched what one news outlet called a “full-throated attack” on the single currency, saying his country should throw off that “anti-democratic straitjacket” by nationalizing its banks and taking a stronger stance against the demands of elite financial interests.
The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, writes Nafeez Ahmed. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself. Since then, the country’s water infrastructure – and the suffering of its people – has only deteriorated further.
The documents lay out a military operation against cross-Mediterranean refugee transport networks and infrastructure. It details plans to conduct military operations to destroy boats used for transporting migrants and refugees in Libyan territory, thereby preventing them from reaching Europe
The six-month humanitarian bombing of Libya engineered to prevent a highly hypothetical “atrocity crime” ended up “liberating” at least 10 times more people from their lives than the previous skirmishes between Col. Gaddafi’s troops and weaponized “rebels”, most of them hardcore Islamist militias, now free to wreak jihadi havoc from eastern Libya to northern Syria.
When the banking system becomes too big to bail, the moral hazard trade that started it all becomes systemic “immoral hazard”—an extortion racket aided and abetted by the very politicians elected to serve our interests. When that trade takes place in a set of institutions that is incapable of resolving the crisis it faces, the result is permanent austerity.
Some officers in the Canadian Forces tried to raise concerns early on in the war that removing Gaddafi would play into the hands of Islamic extremists. Later, they would privately joke about Canada’s CF-18s being part of “Al-Qaeda’s air force,” since their bombing runs helped to pave the way for rebel groups aligned with the terrorist group.
The main culprit in the debt crisis was a fall in tax revenues resulting from massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. According to Razmig Keucheyan, sociologist and author of “The Left Hemisphere,” this “neoliberal mantra” that was supposed to increase investment and employment did the opposite.
The United States, too, took the opportunity to effect a silent coup at home, starting with the Patriot Act, and moving gradually forward to change the US from a democracy to a security state and to destroy, unopposed by a frightened domestic population, pieces of the world, one inconvenient country at a time. It’s a way of doing WW III without anybody but the victims noticing.
while NATO claimed to be protecting human rights, it bombed Libyan civilians and enabled the Libyan opposition to persecute black African migrant workers and ethnically cleanse the black Libyan town of Tawergha. Less than four years after NATO attacked Libya, Bernadino Leon, the United Nation’s special envoy to Libya, says the country is “close to the point of no return.”
Misinformation and propaganda used as a pretext for war. A war that plays a significant role in destroying an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. Sound familiar? Like Iraq, we should demand a public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in this duplicitous aggression. At the very least all those journalists who backed the intervention need to start asking the searching questions they should have asked back in 2011.
So the ball is in your court, Europe: will it be a triple-dip (and soon thereafter quadruple: see Japan) recession as your Goldman-controlled central bank plunders ever more of what little is left of middle-class wealth with promises that this year – for real – is when it all turns around, or will Europe acknowledge it has had enough and shifts its strategic, and trade, focus from west (speaking of the TTIP, Germany’s agriculture minister just said “We can’t protect every sausage” referring to the TTIP) to east?
We denounce the myth propagated by Israel that the aggression is done caring about saving civilian lives and children’s wellbeing.
Israel’s behaviour has insulted our humanity, intelligence, and dignity as well as our professional ethics and efforts. Even those of us who want to go and help are unable to reach Gaza due to the blockade.
This “defensive aggression” of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity must be stopped.
