Let’s say China is now in the stage of creating facts on the sea. For the moment, a kind of uneasy accommodation seems to prevail involving the Americans and also the Japanese. Beijing knows that the US Navy and the Japanese navy have better training – and more experience – than the Chinese navy. Once again, for now.
Net investment is down because there’s no demand. And there’s no demand because unemployment is high, wages are flat, incomes are falling, and households are still digging out from the Crash of ’08. At the same time, the US Congress and Team Obama continue to slash public spending wherever possible which is further dampening activity and perpetuating the low-growth, weak demand, perma-slump.
The mass incarceration of primarily poor people of color, people who seldom have access to adequate legal defense and who are often kept behind bars for years for nonviolent crimes or for crimes they did not commit, is one of the most shameful mass injustices committed in the United States.
Twelve years on, it is more clear than ever we were right to oppose those war policies. The vote in the British parliament on 30 August was a reflection that our political leaders can — by the force of majority public opinion, which opposes any more western intervention in other people’s countries — be made to end this era of perpetual war.
The American president that we now have—a guy I voted for, – was willing to go to war, wanted to throw missiles at Syria, without really having a case and knowing he didn’t have much of a case. And that, to me, is very troubling
The West abandoned its plans for military intervention in Syria because the world rejected its narrative, and despite assurances that the West had air tight intelligence, after many months still, the lid is tightly closed. It is clear that the West desired military intervention in the worst way, and had it possessed real intelligence linking the attacks to the Syrian government, it surely would have revealed it. As Hersh points out, they never had such evidence to begin with and depended entirely on their ability to sell yet another pack of lies to the public.
The American media has blacked out an account by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh demonstrating that President Barack Obama and the US government lied when they claimed to have proof that the Syrian government carried out a sarin gas attack last August on areas near Damascus held by US-backed “rebels.”
The labelling of the Bedouin as “squatters” and “trespassers” reveals much about the intractability of the wider conflict – and why the Americans have no hope of ending it as long as they seek solutions that address only the injustices caused by the occupation that began in 1967.
In truth, both Israel and the Palestinians understand that the war of 1948 never really finished.
Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight “the war on terror”, they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.
Congress has the power to amend the Fed – just as it did in 1934, 1958 and 2010. For the central bank to satisfy its mandate to promote full employment and to become an institution that serves all the people, not just the 1%, the Fed needs fundamental reform.
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
The “Paypal 14″ are back in court. They are accused of participating in DDoS attacks on Paypal when Paypal – in conjunction with Visa and Mastercard – cut off financial services to Wikileaks.
The eventual outcome of the trial will define not just how we see DDoS but the larger question of the right to protest online.
