Greece’s former representative to the IMF, Panagiotis Roumeliotis, in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Greek debt, said that several Greek journalists were “trained” in Washington D.C. in order to support the positions of the IMF and the European Commission in Greek media.
It takes a special level of indoctrination to report with a straight face righteous accusations by British government officials that anyone at all has blood on their hands.
The deal is that Greece gets new loans with which to repay existing loans in exchange for selling municipal water companies to private investors (water rates will go up on the Greek people), for selling the state lottery to private investors (Greek government revenues drop, thus making debt repayment more difficult), and for other such “privatizations” such as selling the protected Greek islands to real estate developers.
HJS has turned to demonising Edward Snowden supporters and privacy advocates as accomplices with al-Qaeda and the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) — as is also being done by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, with its hole-ridden story claiming Snowden’s revelations’ had allowed Russia and China to identify active MI6 agents.
Far from being victims of social exclusion who have to be raised out of their shit, slum-dwellers are fully part of the class that will communize society.
The “public” interest has been made synonymous with economic growth and international competitiveness. Police, surveillance and military budgets are, as Nina Power notes, being increased in order to defend the “public” from vague racist threats like ISIS and “terrorism,” but in fact these weapons will be wielded against those of us committed to causing “economic disruptions” to challenge the order of extractive austerity.
When they went on strike on March 28 this year, they rejected not only the company’s meager offer but also that of the two largest Spanish trade unions — the CC.OO and the UGT — which, as one striker put, “sold us” for a small rise on the previous drastic reductions and to put an end to the strike
These are the corporate workfare schemes which have already seen almost half a million young people bullied into working for the pittance of benefits often for large national employers. This huge extension of the two schemes is being carried out at a time when unemployment is allegedly falling and this shows the real motivation for the extension of unpaid work.
Decry Hamas, if you wish. But don’t say that Israel has the right to deny Palestinians their rightsbecause they elected a government you don’t like. That’s been Israel’s and its allies’ convenient and complicit excuse in the whole, posturing ‘peace process’. Stephen Fry’s words only give sustenance to that duplicitous pretext.
Monbiot, a journalist for whom I have much respect, couldn’t bring himself to say a word in public after news of how my contract was unilaterally terminated by The Guardian for writing on my environment blog about the role of Gaza’s gas in motivating Israel’s military offensives.
But an attack on my critique of Iraq Body Count was enough to break the silence.
Wall Street banks, including JP Morgan, are accused of massive, systematic rigging of gold price markets all in a shady bid to shield the US dollar value. That criminality, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, is estimated to be in the order of trillions of dollars – or a thousand, thousand-fold the FIFA debacle.
Noting the sanctions were causing the deaths of up to 5,000 children a month, Halliday bluntly stated: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.”
