People often talk about the Nazis or Stalin or Mao as the worst mass murderers: their victims can be counted in the millions or tens of millions. The victims of empire and predatory capitalism number literally in the billions: these are the two greatest evils, made even deadlier as they flourish within illusory systems of democracy, in which people are relentlessly taught that they are free.
The fact that the City financiers who had caused the crisis were given almost monopoly status to frame debate again demonstrates the prominence of pro-business perspectives.
So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.
Over the past 25 years, the NHS has been insidiously converted into a market-based healthcare system. This process is accelerating under the Coalition government and the very existence of a National Health Service is in danger. How did it ever come to this for Great Britain’s most cherished institution?
Unemployment now affects 27 percent of the working population. A report by the Catholic Church charity Caritas said that there are now 3 million people living in severe poverty (defined as having less than €300 a month to live on) in Spain, double the 2008 figure.
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.
The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is Our Inability to Understand the Exponential Function
A lecture by Dr. Albert Bartlett
Stephen Sackur, presenter of BBC World News’ flagship current affairs interview programme, defends government line against Glenn Greenwald
This was the nod-and-wink arrangement between Labour and Tory governments and the five per cent who owned half the wealth of all of the United Kingdom. The Labour MP turned media man, Brian Walden, described how it worked. “The two front benches [in Parliament] liked each other and disliked their back benches,” he wrote. “We were children of the famous consensus … turning the opposition into government made little difference, for we believed much the same things.”
The conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel is the cancer at the heart of international affairs, and I know from long personal experience how costly and even dangerous it can be to tell the truth about the making and sustaining of it when powerful vested interests do not want the truth to be told. As I think some of you know, I have been committed for the past 30 years to telling this truth.
the determination of corporate commentators to ignore the importance and truth of Brand’s arguments, and to focus instead on his ‘sexism’, ‘narcissism’, and his relationship with Jemima Khan, are classic examples of group narcissism; of journalists prioritising their careers, their corporations, their class, ‘not on the basis of an objective value judgement, but because it is me or mine’.
Nothing must interfere with the depressive psychosis of modern Britain, which has become a most violent and melancholic country, with no space for measured debate. Like Russell, I believe that the most powerful vote you can give is No Vote; for the days of Prime Ministers have gone, and it’s time for a form of change that is far more meaningful than simply switching blue to red.
The Metropolitan Police Service is significantly under-recording rape offences according to new evidence presented to MPs.
The public administration select committee has been told that a large number of rape and other sexual offences are being wrongly categorised, and therefore not included in official crime statistics.
