Victoria Stilwell

Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts: The American economic crisis of the 21st century is becoming worse. Wall Street and the multinational US corporations have offshored millions of US jobs that provided middle class incomes. Americans who lost these jobs have experienced dramatic reductions in their incomes and access to medical care. They have used up their savings and now have to sell parts of their bodies for money. This crisis will worsen as the American economic collapse proceeds. Income and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, with 400 families having as much wealth as 150,000,000 Americans. Bloomberg is wrong about “the four-year-old economic expansion.” The alleged recovery is a product of statistical manipulation, as John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear.

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Pascal Bruckner

Ulpiano Checa (1860–1916), Horseman of the Apocalypse

Secular elites prophesy a doomsday without redemption.

As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: “This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!”

We smile at the silliness of this scene from the Tintin comic strip L’Étoile Mystérieuse, published in Belgium in 1941. Yet it is also familiar, since so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. This depressing conviction may seem surprising, given that the West continues to enjoy an unparalleled standard of living. But Professor Philippulus has nevertheless managed to achieve power in governments, the media, and high places generally. Constantly, he spreads fear: of progress, of science, of demographics, of global warming, of technology, of food. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode. Man has committed the sin of pride; he has destroyed his habitat and ravaged the planet; he must atone.

My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies.

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Chris Marsden

[The] implications for democratic rights are chilling

Britain’s Guardian newspaper is facing an investigation by at least one parliamentary committee, in line with demands made by Prime Minister David Cameron, concerning the exposures of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower from America’s National Security Agency (NSA).

Accompanied with calls for criminal prosecutions and assertions of the newspaper’s having compromised national security, the move is a major escalation in the witch-hunt and clampdown launched in response to Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance programmes operated by the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). On Wednesday, Cameron told parliament,

“I think the plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security, and in many ways the Guardian themselves admitted that when they agreed, when asked politely by my national security adviser and Cabinet Secretary [Sir Jeremy Heywood] to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files. “So they know that what they are dealing with is dangerous for national security.”

The prime minister supported calls for a full parliamentary inquiry to determine whether the Guardian broke the law by printing Snowden’s revelations. Cameron’s claim is as barefaced a lie as it is a reactionary move.

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William Blum

I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media.

A case in point is a New York Times article of October 5 on the Greek financial crisis and the Greeks’ claim for World War Two reparations from Germany.

“Germany may be Greece’s stern banker now, say those who are seeking reparations,” writes the Times, but Germany “should pay off its own debts to Greece. … It is not just aging victims of the Nazi occupation who are demanding a full accounting. Prime Minister Antonis Samarass government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945. … The call for reparations has elicited an emotional outpouring in Greece, where six years of brutal recession and harsh austerity measures have left many Greeks hostile toward Germany. Rarely does a week go by without another report in the news about, as one newspaper put it in a headline, ‘What Germany Owes Us’.”

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Stephen Lendman

No one represents Main Street. Ordinary Americans are increasingly on their own sink or swim. Harder than ever hard times loom.

Beltway theatrics don't surprise. Ordinary people lose out most often. For sure this time. More on that below.

Late Wednesday, 16 days of government shutdown ended. Denouement came with a whimper, not a bang. The Senate approved reopening government 81 - 18. The House followed suit 285 - 144. Obama signed the measure shortly after midnight.

HR 2775: Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014 authorizes funding through January 15. It raises the debt ceiling through February 7. It maintains $986.3 billion for five appropriation bills. It includes other unreported provisions. It's standard Washington sausage-making. It makes the real thing look good by comparison.

Section 122 "(e)xtends authority for activities to counter Lord's Resistance Army" activities. It's a Ugandan guerrilla force. It's waging low intensity war against repressive governance.

Section 123 "Extends authorization for construction of Olmsted Locks and Dams included within the President’s FY 14 budget request, FY 14 House-passed and Senate-reported Energy and Water Appropriations bills and similar to language included in the Water Resources Development Act." Doing so earmarks about $3 billion for Kentucky. It's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's home state. Critics call it the "McConnell Kickback." They do so for good reason. He and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D. NV) agreed on legislative terms. A few billion for constituents is common Capitol Hill practice. Doing so reflects business as usual.

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John W. Whitehead

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”
— Charles de Montesquieu

Red Light Cameras, Drones and Surveillance: Fleecing the Taxpayer in the Age of Petty Tyrannies

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate. We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.

As I point out in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the NSA; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

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Finian Cunningham

They say an expert liar needs to have a good memory to succeed in maintaining deceptions. This is because sooner or later the liar is liable to trip himself up with his own previous lies.

Only weeks after the deadly chemical weapons incident near the Syrian capital Damascus on 21 August, the Western narrative is coming apart at the seams from its own lies.

Recall that this was the “horrific” incident that nearly resulted in the US and its allies launching an all-out war on Syria. “The US doesn’t do pin-pricks,” said President Barack Obama sinisterly as American warships armed with hundreds of Tomahawk Cruise missiles suddenly honed in on the Mediterranean country.

Western turgid claims that Syria’s government forces had carried out an atrocity against civilians with deadly Sarin nerve gas were always tenuous from the outset.

Where are the names and graves of the more than 1,400 people that Washington so adamantly claims “beyond doubt” were killed by Syria’s army? What about the alleged intercepts that the US said it had obtained between Syrian army commanders? Where is the “conclusive intel” that Washington, London and Paris all said they had to justify punitive military attacks on the sovereign government of President Bashar al-Assad?

There is a growing host of evidence that soundly negates the Western claims, and indeed supports an altogether more credible and disturbing narrative. Namely, that a large-scale killing took place near Damascus on 21 August involving Saudi and Western military intelligence in collusion with the foreign-backed anti-government mercenaries. Civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood, perhaps by lethal injection, in order to stage a provocation that was aimed as a pretext for a US-led military assault on Syria.

That all-out attack on Syria was all the more pressing because of the floundering regime-change objective of the Axis of Evil comprising Washington, London, Paris, Riyadh, Doha, Tel Aviv, Amman and Ankara.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 has come to
symbolize the French Revolution, when a people rose up to
exercise their right of revolution. (Wikipedia)

"The American people need to stand up to the executive branch, take back their civil liberties, close down the police state, break up the media conglomerates and reestablish an independent press."

In less than 2 days, if the Treasury secretary can be believed, the Treasury will not have enough money to pay all its bills and will have to prioritize. This doesn’t mean default, as interest on Treasury bonds, notes, and bills will be right up there with the military and NSA. If Washington defaults on its bonds, Washington’s power will be gone with the wind regardless of whether the Treasury pays the military.

Whatever the outcome, Washington has already cooked its goose. Washington’s prestige and credibility have been hammered.

China, Washington’s largest foreign creditor, has responded to Washington’s inability to govern itself with a call for a de-Americanized world. The state news agency, speaking for the Chinese government, said that the “days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated, and a new world order should be put in place.” China does not mean by “a new world order” the conspiratorial concept popular on the American right-wing. What the Chinese government means is a departure from the American world order based on the US dollar as world reserve currency and US financial imperialism.

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William T. Hathaway

Terrorists, serial killers, domestic murderers — their ghoulish deeds fill our news and popular entertainment, interspersed with wars, riots, and brutal repressions. Violence surrounds us.

Where does it come from?

The answer propagated by the mass media is that violence is human nature. It's just the way people are.

This view ignores anthropological evidence about societies that have lived in relative peace, and it also contradicts our knowledge of ourselves as human beings. In certain situations we may feel violent impulses, but we can control them; we know they are only a small part of our make-up.

The Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung denies that human nature condemns us to violence; instead he gives another explanation of its etiology based on three interacting forces: structural, cultural, and direct.

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Gilad Atzmon

In the last few days blogger M. Jay Rosenberg came to the conclusion that Electronic Ali Abunimah is an anti-semite. Rosenberg's accusation is clearly unsubstantiated. Ali Abunimah is not an anti-semite. Dishonest? More likely.

Rosenberg writes, “let me explain why I consider Ali Abunimah to be anti-semitic…Ali Abunimah refers to Israelis as Zionists,.. but then he makes clear, over and over again, that Zionists are all bad people. Just go to his twitter feed and read the labels he uses for Zionists..’

Rosenberg is obviously uninformed. More and more commentators and scholars accept that Israelis are not Zionists, they are actually the product of the Zionist project. Most Israelis do not even understand what Zionism stands for. Zionism is the promise to bring about a Jewish national home. Once the Jewish State was founded (1948) Zionism finished its role as far as Israeli Jews are concerned. Thus, Zionism is now largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse. Accordingly, the debate between Zionists and the so-called ‘anti-’ has little relevance to Israeli politics or practice. In short, Rosenberg is wrong, yet why Abunimah misleads his readers, referring to Israelis as Zionists, remains unclear.

Abunimah may not be the most sophisticated theoretical commentator around, but he certainly monitors Israeli society and understands its politics. Abunimah refers to ‘Israelis’ as ‘Zionists’ only because his operation is sustained financially and politically by Jewish ‘anti-Zionists’ and the Jewish Left. Abunimah refers to Israelis as ‘Zionists’ only because he knows that telling the truth, uttering the ‘J’ word, may cost him dearly.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Not that long ago government and free market proponents were at sword’s point, but no more. With little left in the private sector to rip off, the financial gangsters have turned to the public sector and put to work for them the free market economists’ advocacy of privatization. Governments themselves became part of the conspiracy once the politicians realized that looting public assets was an efficient way to reward their private benefactors.

We can see the entire picture in the David Cameron government’s privatization of the British Royal Mail. The prime minister has described the looting as “popular capitalism” even though the British public overwhelmingly opposes turning over the mail service to a profit-making enterprise.

The British government’s pursuit of policies opposed by the public shows the absence in Britain of the very democracy that British prime ministers, such as Blair and Cameron, are so anxious to help Washington spread with invasions, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran.

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Wayne Madsen

When information began to surface in the post-Cold War years of the early 1990s that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), responding to changes in the global politico-military realities, was re-focusing some of its signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities to the gathering of economic intelligence, a number of NSA senior officials stated that such notions were ridiculous. They maintained that NSA’s goals were purely based on national security concerns, not giving U.S. corporations a leg up on their international competition.

The NSA documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has finally put to rest NSA’s long-held public policy that it does not engage in massive economic intelligence gathering. In fact, NSA, along with its global SIGINT partners, known as «Five Eyes» or FVEY, are targeting communications in order to amass economic intelligence that benefits large multinational corporations that are based in, but owe no real loyalty to, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

After the end of the Cold War, there was no «peace dividend» in the world of Western intelligence agencies. The threat of «amorphous» terrorism simply replaced the so-called threat of «communism». In the eyes of the Western national security planners, a bogeyman is always required to maintain bloated budgets and privacy-invasive surveillance systems. Almost overnight, the «bogeymen» of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were replaced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Mullah Omar. Rather than scale back their massive intelligence infrastructures in the absence of an overly-hyped Cold War threat, the five power UK-USA SIGINT alliance began to modernize its intelligence network and expanding its coverage to include the burgeoning Internet.

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John Pilger

Africa is China's success story. Where the Americans bring
drones, the Chinese build roads, bridges and dams...

Countries are "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world," wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in Nairobi was a bloody façade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa and a war in Asia are the great game.

The al-Shabaab shopping mall killers came from Somalia. If any country is an imperial metaphor, it is Somalia. Sharing a common language and religion, Somalis have been divided between the British, French, Italians and Ethiopians. Tens of thousands of people have been handed from one power to another. "When they are made to hate each other," wrote a British colonial official, "good governance is assured."

Today, Somalia is a theme park of brutal, artificial divisions, long impoverished by World Bank and IMF "structural adjustment" programmes, and saturated with modern weapons, notably President Obama's personal favourite, the drone. The one stable Somali government, the Islamic Courts, was "well received by the people in the areas it controlled," reported the US Congressional Research Service, "[but] received negative press coverage, especially in the West." Obama crushed it; and in January, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, presented her man to the world. "Somalia will remain grateful to the unwavering support from the United States government," effused President Hassan Mohamud, "thank you, America."

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Philip Jones

"Communitarianism is a collectivist philosophy that explicitly rejects individualism. It does not merely relegate individualism to a subordinate position, but is openly hostile to it. It is an ideology of 'civic society' which is nothing less than one version of Post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for certain wealthy and influential organized groups, and in consequence, a renewed feudalization of society." - Václav Klaus.

Communitarianist Ideology

The European Union is a major aspect of the `New World Order` and the so called `sustainable development` movement. The main objective of the Federal European State to be, is absolute social, personal and economic control in a collectivist and corporatist society. The philosophy behind the EU is a strange mixture of Capitalism and Communism - a form of Euro Marxism which owes much of its dogma to the Pre World War II Italian Marxist Philosopher, Antonio Gramsci.. The nearest ideology to that practiced by the EU is something called `Communitarianism`, or what Tony Blair called the 'Third Way'..

We are talking of a dialectical trap here, with Corporate money funding Socialism as Thesis, ideological Socialism as Antithesis and Communitarianism or the `new imperium` as Synthesis. Money grabs and concentrates power, whilst State Socialism promises the total redistribution of ownership and wealth. This contradiction provides an almost irresistible dynamic.

Communitarians want to create a post-modern, post-democratic feudal society run by a small number of rich and powerful people with everyone else working as peasants. In order to achieve their objectives they must destroy the middle class and the nation state. Can anyone deny that their goals are firmly on course?

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Gilad Atzmon

Ralph Miliband and David, with young Ed (in front)

Last week, The Daily Mail’s exposé of "Ralph Militant"’s political views provoked strong reactions from the Miliband family, the Labour Party, The Guardian and the BBC.

The Mail article included a few quotes by Ralph Miliband, showing Miliband to be a radical cosmopolitan Marxist. So what else is new? Throughout his entire adult life Ralph had indeed been a radical cosmopolitan devoted to ‘progressive’ international working class politics and naturally opposed to any nationalism and local patriotism. However The Daily Mail was soon to learn, at its cost, that elaborating on the non-patriotic nature intrinsic to cosmopolitanism is practically forbidden in 2013 ‘free’ Britain.

The Mail revealed that in 1940, when Ralph was 17-year-old he wrote in his diary:

“The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world…you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent…To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.”

Well, I’d guess that many 17 year old Marxists at that time could have expressed such views. But Miliband remained a devoted Marxist into adulthood and indeed for his whole life and maintained this cosmopolitan ideology into old age right up to his death. This may be unusual but it is not a crime.

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