Glenn Greenwald – Two Short Paragraphs That Summarize the US Approach to Human Rights Advocacy

n his excellent article on the unique guilt-by-association standard being imposed on newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, my colleague Jon Schwarz references a passage from a 2013 Washington Post article that I want to highlight because of how illuminating it is. That Post article describes the Obama administration’s growing alliance with human-rights-abusing regimes in Africa, which allow the U.S. …

Alan Hart – Palestine: The End or A New Beginning?

There is a strong case for saying that Palestine is a lost cause. And it, the case, can be summarised as follows. * The nuclear-armed Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel is the regional superpower and not remotely interested in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. The vast majority of its Jews have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda and …

Peter Koenig & The Saker – Western Sanctions on Russia, Russia-China Cooperation: A Tectonic Shift of the Global Economy?

Peter Koenig: Let’s begin with what are ‘sanctions’? – Sanctions are (economic) punishments by the self-proclaimed empire in Washington and its European minions on any country that does not follow the dictate of the empire. Actually, it’s worse. The European spineless puppets participate despite their own losses, lest they may be sanctioned themselves by the empire. In some cases, they are …

Ramzy Baroud – ‘Islamic State’ Pretence and the Upcoming Wars in Libya

Another war is in the making in Libya: the questions are ‘how’ and ‘when’? While the prospect of another military showdown is unlikely to deliver Libya from its current security upheaval and political conflict, it is likely to change the very nature of conflict in that rich, but divided, Arab country. An important pre-requisite to war is to locate an …

US has 5 percent of world’s population, but had 31 percent of its public mass shooters from 1966-2012

CHICAGO — Despite having only about 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States was the attack site for a disproportionate 31 percent of public mass shooters globally from 1966-2012, according to new research that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). “The United States, Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, and Serbia are ranked …

Prof. James Petras – Pillage and Class Polarization: The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”

About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea.  In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours.  With the longest work day, US workers score …

Mike Whitney – The Brookings Institute Plan to Liquidate Syria

Here’s your US foreign policy puzzler for the day:  When is regime change not regime change? When the regime stays in power but loses its ability to rule. This is the current objective of US policy in Syria, to undermine Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s ability to govern the country without physically removing him from office. The idea is simple: …

At Wall Street Journal, Government-Enforced Monopolies = ‘Free Market’ By Dean Baker

Those folks at the Wall Street Journal are really turning reality on its head. Today it ran a column by Robert Ingram, a former CEO of Glaxo Wellcome, complaining about efforts to pass “transparency” legislation in Massachusetts, New York and a number of other states. This legislation would require drug companies to report their profits on certain expensive drugs, as well as government funding …

The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global Ecosystem in the Early Anthropocene – Robert Jacobs

On March 1st 1954 the United States tested its first deliverable hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The weapon yielded a force three times as large as its designers had planned or anticipated.1 The radioactive fallout cloud that resulted from the weapon would kill a fisherman located 100 km away, cause illness in hundreds and perhaps thousands of …

Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War By Jonathan Marshall

Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, nearly a quarter million people have perished and fullyhalf of the country’s inhabitants have been forced from their homes, creating the worst refugee crisis in the past quarter century. Meanwhile, the continuing advance of brutal Islamist factions — which a leading CIA officer in 2013 termed the “top current threat to U.S. national security” — makes the …