Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State, did not spend much time and energy with Christmas and New Year celebrations this year. She has another very urgent and pressing problem to solve, before leaving the State Department, and this is the “Cyprus conflict”. The way she wants to solve this conflict is by transforming a second member of the …
Putin’s Real Long Game
A little over a year ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was smoking a cigarette while we watched Southeast DC hipsters bustle by and talked about ‘the war’ — the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us, which …
Ellen Brown – The Italian Banking Crisis: No Free Lunch – Or Is There?
It has been called “a bigger risk than Brexit”– the Italian banking crisis that could take down the eurozone. Handwringing officials say “there is no free lunch” and “no magic bullet.” But UK Prof. Richard Werner says the magic bullet is just being ignored. On December 4, 2016, Italian voters rejected a referendum to amend their constitution to give the …
Nafeez Ahmed – The UK’s ‘national security’ plan? It’s a blueprint for a police state
In early December, the British government released its first annual report on the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review. Despite the total media blackout, the document reveals in stark detail the Conservative government’s plans to expand Britain’s military activities around the world. In the name of defending “national security”, Britain is building a “permanent” military presence in …
SMALL IS STILL BEAUTIFUL
Paul Kingsnorth argues that ‘progressive’ green thinkers have been seduced by the EU and bypassed by a modern-day Peasants’ Revolt. In his introduction to the 1979 edition of his novel Pig Earth – the first in a trilogy chronicling the decline of peasant life in Europe in the 20th century – John Berger makes a distinction between what he calls …
Normalizing fascists
How to report on a fascist? How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” …
PATRICIA MILLER – MEET THE NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT, SAME AS THE OLD CHRISTIAN RIGHT
Much has been made of Donald Trump as “post-ideological,” with claims that his incoherent, and often incompatible, mix of domestic and international policies and priorities somehow transcends ideology and points to a new way of governing that is neither left or right. Much has also been made of growing fault lines within the evangelical community, with suggestions that the evangelicalism of …
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY – The Decline and Fall of Britain
It is sad to have to have to acknowledge that the country of one’s birth is in decline, but there are signs that Great Britain has fallen on the slippery slope of moral deterioration. The recent surge in nationalistic jingoism and xenophobia in Britain is lamentable and obnoxious. In October the British Home Office reported that the number of racist …
Africa’s crackdown on tax avoidance nets £204m to boost development
A team of tax experts from Kenya will be deployed to Botswana early next year in the latest round of an initiative that seeks to boost domestic revenue collection to fund national development plans. The move was announced last week at the second global partnership for effective development cooperation meeting in Nairobi, which brought together representatives of governments, civil society, …
Vandana Shiva – People’s Economies vs Corporate Control: First Commodification, Then Financialization, Now Demonetization
Ever since the Corporate Form was “invented” – in its earliest avatar as the collective East India Companies – those who have ruled via corporation have found innovative “means” new to extract wealth from the earth and people, leaving both poorer in a zero-sum “game”. During The Raj – Company Raj – extraction was carried out through Lagaan – taxation …