The Gary Null Show – 10.23.15

Prof. James Kilgore is an author, community activist and a popular adjunct professor and a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. Last year Prof Kilgore was expelled from the university, under the weight of right wing media attacks. Following a campus-wide campaign by faculty, students and supporters, his teaching position was reinstated. James writes extensively on mass incarceration in the US; his articles appear regularly in Counterpunch and Truth Out. He has published three novels, all written during his six and half years in prison for political offenses committed in the 1970s. Earlier he lived as a fugitive in South Africa from 1991-2002. James recently released a comprehensive exploration of the US’ mass incarceration apparatus — “Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Right Struggle of Our Time.” His website is FreedomNeverRests.com

Graham VanBergen – Financial Meltdown and the Confiscation of Bank Savings: The UK-EU Bank Depositor “Bail-In” Scheme

Shares and stocks are tumbling around the world, with investors worried that the next global crisis has already begun. There is considerable uncertainty and nervousness amongst economists and trend forecasters. Government’s sooth jittery markets with misinformation in the hope that confidence does not evaporate and their legitimacy with it. If another crisis gets underway – do you think that the money you …

John P. Thomas – Artificial Clouds and Geoengineering: Public Exposed to Toxic Chemicals

What color is the daytime sky over your home? Is it a deep clear blue that seems to extend to eternity, or is it a milky blue or a thick hazy white soup that obscures the pristine blue of the heavens? Does it start out blue in the morning and then end up as a complete haze later in the …

Sarah Lazare – Cover Up? TTIP Negotiators Outed for Secret Talks With Big Tobacco About [Redacted]

Screen shot from heavily redacted correspondence between European Commission and British American Tobacco, dated 15 May, 2014. (Document provided by Corporate Europe Observatory) European Union officials face charges of evasion and cover up after concealing basic information about their negotiations with tobacco companies over a pair of pending “trade” deals, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), in response to a …

Pepe Escobar – Brave (miserable) new normal world

Shares in the Shanghai/Shenzhen soared a whopping 150 percent in the 12 months up to mid-June. Small investors – almost 80 percent of the market – believed in a never-ending party, and often borrowed heavily to be part of the “get rich is glorious” bonanza. There had to be a correction. Those shares – which had hit a 7-year peak …

Summarizing The “Black Monday” Carnage So Far

It’s officially Black Monday, if only in China for now. We warned on Friday, after last week’s China rout, that the market is getting ahead of itself with its expectation of a RRR-cut by China as large as 100 bps. “The risk is that there isn’t one.” We were spot on, because not only was there no RRR cut, but …

William Hawes – The Myth of Modernity: Contemporary Prophets, Ecosystem Degradation, And The Looming Global Depression

“Did you hear it? It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is that of ours resurging. The day that was the day, was night. And night will be the day that will be the day.” –Zapatista communiqué, Dec. 21st, 2012. The summer of 2015 is turning more and more into a chaotic environment around the globe. In the …

Tom Engelhardt – Where Did the Antiwar Movement Go?

Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy.  It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer as time passed. My best guess: it was the summer of …

Susan Southard – Entering the Nuclear Age, Body by Body

[This essay has been adapted from chapters 1 and 2 of Susan Southard’s new book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, with the kind permission of Viking.] Korean and Chinese workers, prisoners of war, and mobilized adults and students had returned to their work sites; some dug or repaired shelters, others piled sandbags against the windows of City Hall for protection against machine-gun …

“If You Are Not Building a Nation, Then What the Fuck Are You Doing?” by Yves Smith

Yves here. Earlier this week, we features a post from TomDispatch, The Geopolitics of American Global Decline: Washington Versus China in the Twenty-First Century, which elicited a lot of thoughtful reader comments. I’m hoisting a particularly insightful, broad ranging response from Tony Wikrent, who has sometimes posted on Corrente. Wikrent took aim at the post’s reliance on the geographical theory of …