Carl Herman

As US “leaders” threaten more unlawful war on Iran, the following three points document that the ongoing “reasons” to war-murder Iranians are known lies as they are being told. In context, we know now from official US government reports that all “reasons” for war on Iraq were known to be lies as they were told:

(Clockwise from top left) French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius,
US Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

1. President Obama lied to Israeli media a week before his March 2013 visit: “We think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” This repeated claim is a lie because it opposes all 16 US intelligence agencies’ most current official National Intelligence Estimate (NIE – these are updated when intelligence suggests status change), all IAEA official reports from their full-time monitoring of all Iran’s nuclear material and plants, and several definitive official US reports, all while Mr. Obama and other war-mongering liars provide zero evidence to support this claim. This follows a long history of such lies. When a person makes a claim in defiance of all known objective evidence, and without any evidence of his own, any rational person conservatively concludes the claim is a known lie.

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Gilad Atzmon

Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is a good read: A personal journey of a young American righteous Jew who finds plenty of faults in other Jews in general and in The Jewish State in particular.

Blumenthal is a very good writer, his flow is fantastic. His delivery is overwhelmingly juicy on the verge of gossipy. He doesn’t pretend to be objective, precise or accurate. In the Kindle version I couldn’t find a single reference for any of the many quotes in the book. But who cares - precision and accuracy are not well appreciated within the contemporary progressive milieu. But this lack is far from posing a problem. It actually contributes to chronicle the journalistic account of contemporary Israel.

Blumenthal’s book is a powerful expose of Israeli exceptionalism, deep and sinister Goy hatred, Judeo-centric bigotry, supremacy and a vast collective lack of ethical awareness. But Blumenthal fails to ask the most important question: why is the Jewish State so bad? Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel suffers from an acute deficiency of theoretical and ideological depth or understanding. Through the entire book Blumenthal fails to present a single valid argument that explains why the Jewish State is such a horrid place. And if Zionism and the Jewish State are as bad as Blumenthal suggests, how is it possible that Zionism has become the political voice for the vast majority of world Jewry?

Blumenthal is entrenched within a restricted cliched progressive terminological trap. His universe is split by a set of binary oppositions: Zionist is bad / the ‘anti’ is good, ‘Right’ is vile / ‘Left’ is kosher. Colonialism is there to tag everything in a horrid light. When he runs out of superlatives, he pulls ‘Fascism’ out of the box.

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Ellen Brown

In Costa Rica, publicly-owned banks have been available for so long and work so well that people take for granted that any country that knows how to run an economy has a public banking option. Costa Ricans are amazed to hear there is only one public depository bank in the United States (the Bank of North Dakota), and few people have private access to it. - So says political activist Scott Bidstrup, who writes:

For the last decade, I have resided in Costa Rica, where we have had a “Public Option” for the last 64 years.

There are 29 licensed banks, mutual associations and credit unions in Costa Rica, of which four were established as national, publicly-owned banks in 1949. They have remained open and in public hands ever since—in spite of enormous pressure by the I.M.F. [International Monetary Fund] and the U.S. to privatize them along with other public assets. The Costa Ricans have resisted that pressure—because the value of a public banking option has become abundantly clear to everyone in this country.

During the last three decades, countless private banks, mutual associations (a kind of Savings and Loan) and credit unions have come and gone, and depositors in them have inevitably lost most of the value of their accounts.

But the four state banks, which compete fiercely with each other, just go on and on. Because they are stable and none have failed in 31 years, most Costa Ricans have moved the bulk of their money into them. Those four banks now account for fully 80% of all retail deposits in Costa Rica, and the 25 private institutions share among themselves the rest.


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