Politics

Intel union: Spy agency heads won’t roll with US and UK allied

As we have seen through history, the only protection against a slide towards totalitarianism is a free media that allows a free transfer of ideas between people without the need to self-censor. The global US military-security complex is embedded into the DNA of the internet. We cannot rely on the USA to voluntarily hand back the powers it has grabbed, we can only work around them as Brazil has suggested it will do, and as the EU is contemplating.

Other than that, responsibility for our privacy rests in our own hands.

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At the Escuelita Zapatista, Students Learn Community Organizing and Civil Resistance as a Way of Life

From August 11-17, the Zapatistas brought more than 1,500 people into their communities to attend the Escuelita Zapatista, the Little Zapatista School. According to a February comunicado by the EZLN, in a class entitled Liberty According to the Zapatistas: Autonomous Government I, “our compas from the Zapatista bases of support are going to share the little we have learned about the struggle for freedom, and the [the students] can see what is useful or not for their own struggles.”

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More Tory stripping of the welfare tree

Autumn can be so lovely. The turn to crisp, sunny mornings, goldening leaves and wrap-up nights. One gets used to the familiarity of seasonal sights and sounds, pleasing and not so, like the autumnfest of party conferences with their turgid speeches and ritual pledges. And no October would be complete without another Tory rallying call to purge the poor.

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The Green Party takes on the banks

Other party conference season: the Green Party of England and Wales made history[1] by joining the United States Green Party[2] in calling for an end to the private creation of money by banks. After a debate on the motion at the Autumn Conference in Brighton, the Green Party has collectively decided to instead place this power with a democratically accountable National Monetary Authority at the Bank of England. This represents a huge change in Green Party policy, as we are now calling for full reserve banking, alongside other radical policies such as a citizen’s income, land value tax and of course the decarbonisation of the entire economy as we move to a post carbon and equitable world.

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Obamacare Is Another Private Sector Rip-Off Of Americans

In 21st century America, the few people who have experienced income gains are the executives and shareholders of firms who offshored their production for US markets, Wall Street which makes bets covered by the Federal Reserve, and the military-security complex which has been enriched by the neoconservatives’ wars.

Every other American has lost.

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The United States Feared No More

While the General Assembly was discussing the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is another matter altogether that concerned the diplomats: are the United States still the superpower they have claimed to be since the demise of the Soviet Union or has the time come to break free of their tutelage?

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Save the Nobel Peace Prize from Itself

It is not supposed to be awarded to good humanitarians whose work has little or nothing to do with peace, such as most other recent recipients. As with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace which works for almost anything but, in violation of its creator’s will, and as with many a “peace and justice” group focused on all sorts of good causes that aren’t the elimination of militarism, the Nobel has become a “peace” prize, rather than a peace prize.

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“Collapse” Author, Michael Ruppert on Dorner, Peak Oil and more

Michael Ruppert is an investigative journalist and author of two books, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World. In the 1970s, Ruppert was a narcotics officer for the LAPD. While there, he discovered evidence that the CIA was complicit in the illegal drug trade. He alerted his superiors with this information and soon found himself dismissed even though he had an honorable record. These events spurred Ruppert to begin a new career for himself as an investigative journalist. He was the publisher/editor of the From The Wilderness newsletter which, until its closure in 2006, examined government corruption and complicity in such areas as the CIA’s involvement in the war on drugs, the Pat Tillman scandal, the 2008 economic collapse and issues surrounding Peak Oil.

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This Continual Hounding of the Unemployed Reveals that Britain Is Governed by a Gang of Rich Sociopaths

The economic logic behind austerity remains as flawed now as it was when first announced by the coalition. Rather than understand the deficit as a consequence of a global recession decimating demand in the economy, with a sharp fall in tax revenues due to a sharp rise in unemployment, the government is intent on deepening the same cycle by introducing drastic cuts in spending in the forlorn hope that the private sector will invest and create new jobs to replace those lost. But with a lack of demand for goods and services, the private sector is still refusing to invest, despite sitting on a huge cash surplus. The most obvious example of this is the banking sector’s continuing refusal to lend, despite repeated pleas by the government, and despite being bailed out by the UK taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of pounds over the past four years.

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Manchester’s biggest march – 50,000 rally to save the NHS

“In the last three months alone 21,000 NHS employees have lost their jobs, and those nurses, doctors and other health professionals that remain feel that no-one is listening to them and that they are being asked to achieve more with less. As a result morale is at rock bottom.

“This is no way to run our most important, most cherished national institution. Those who sacrificed so much during World War Two to build a better future for themselves and their families didn’t want this.

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The Sparks of Rebellion

Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.

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Miliband and mesmerised media – no energy for real change

The actual crisis of ‘confidence’ here lies not with the energy companies or any other money-driven corporation. Their primary motivation and function -greed and profit – is already established.

The real crisis of confidence, massively hidden by such diversionary speeches and reportage, lies in the complicit actions of a political class who allow, promote and excuse such market greed, and with a functionary media which says almost nothing to expose or challenge such manipulation and deceit.

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